We detoured North to swing by Williams Park, a city-block sized park that has been used for decades as the main transfer point for all city busses. As a pre-driving teen in the mid-1970s, I frequently rode a bus from my home to Williams Park, then transferred to another bus that took me to the shopping mall on the other side of town. The park looks largely the same although the neighborhood around it has changed. The retail stores that surround the park now include an R-rated nightclub. However First United Methodist Church, where my old Scout Troop has met for years, looks the same (from the outside) as it always has. We stopped to converse with a young man making "roses" by carefully cutting and folding the stem of a palm shrub, which are plentiful in the area. Our group bought a couple of roses from him (see photo).
Our travels ended at the same location as the other 5 "walk about" teams, to a specific address, but none of us were told what we would find there. 620 1st Avenue South is the location of a small independent theater company called The Studio @ 620 (http://www.studio620.org). It is here that a local progressive church group called Missio Dei (http://themissiodei.com/) holds their Sunday worship services (see picture).
Doug McMahon, one of our Missional Discernment class study leaders, is a founding pastor of Missio Dei, and wanted our class to visit their meeting location and meet with some of its other pastors and members. We enjoyed a box lunch (provided by our hotel) and spent two hours in fellowship with each other, asking many questions about how they began, what they expect to do, and what were some of their lessons learned as each of us return to our own congregations to discern how God wants us to expand and grow His church. Since I was staying in town beyond this conference, I was privileged to attend the worship service on the following Sunday (I will soon post a related article). They have between 30 and 90 participants for Sunday morning worship (Doug said their attendance increases greatly when the local college, USF St. Pete Campus, is in session).
As its Latin name implies, Missio Dei (literally, "the Mission of God") is a worship community founded around the principles of reaching out to those in the local community. In addition to the traditional mission elements such as a food pantry and a clothes closet (which they have), they also provide services such as "Laundry Love Project (LLP)", http://themissiodei.com/laundry-love, in which they partner with local laundromats to assist homeless and / or the very poor with the opportunity to wash their clothes. Rather than repeat their many missional elements here, I encourage you to follow the links to their site and see what they do for others in God's name.
Some of the Missio Dei members, unable to find reliable employment individually (for a variety of reasons), have joined together and submitted grant applications to fund a start-up food truck catering business. Several local churches have already pledged partial funds, and they have applied for and are anticipating a PC(USA) grant that would enable them to purchase the food truck and most of the necessary startup costs (including city permits). Some local businesses and churches have offered locations where they can set up and attract their customers. A few of the class members asked Doug if we could get a copy of their submitted grant application to learn about how they intend to start their business, and to see how that process works.
At 3pm, we piled back into our minivans and headed back to the hotel, our heads full of ideas and wonder at the practical ways Missio Dei has found to address their neighborhood.
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