New life in old space at St. Stephen’s, Philadelphia

Some months after I was ordained as an Episcopal priest at the age of 70, I was recommended to be vicar of a historic church in the center of Philadelphia—a church that had been closed for a year after a long time on life support and which for years prior to its closing had an ever-dwindling congregation numbering in the low double digits. The bishop had a hunch that this church could become something and asked me to try to make it something, whatever that would turn out to be. Of course, there was no instruction sheet, no set of directions.

I became a step-sitter for a while. I sat on the church steps and tried to read the environment and take the pulse of the neighborhood. It was not an accident that the first person I spoke with almost every day was a neighborhood man who was battling all kinds of demons, including addiction. (Almost three years later, having gotten to know him well, I am helping him navigate a stem-cell transplant.)

Sitting on the steps was a wonderful way to see and be seen. I quickly learned that the neighborhood known as the Tenth Street corridor was busy with pedestrians, cars, trucks, and emergency vehicles, especially Monday through Friday. St. Stephen’s, built in 1823, is in the middle of a block on Tenth Street surrounded by the offices, academic buildings, hospitals, and clinics of a major urban university and medical center. Right next to the church is a methadone clinic. In the vicinity are small restaurants, pharmacies, parking garages, alleys, and the seen and unseen indigent and poor, many of whom have no other place to go.