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Drums bring visitors to Clay Center church

By Melodie Woerman

Editor, The Harvest

It certainly wasn’t your usual outreach effort. In fact, the Rev. Susan Sawyer feared members of her parish might think she had lost her mind when she suggested it.

What if the church — St. Paul’s, Clay Center — offered a drumming workshop and invited the whole town? And what if they told people they didn’t need to bring a drum, that a cardboard box or trash can lid would work just fine?

Those “what-ifs” turned into “wows” when the Sunday evening event on Aug. 21 brought new people to the church’s courtyard garden for an evening of unusual music-making, billed as “junk jam drumming.”

Six of the two dozen people who came had no previous association with the parish, and four of them were teenagers.

Sawyer said her idea was a simple one — to provide an activity that would reach out to the community and to church members, but one that didn’t center on a church service. “I wanted to bring different kinds of people together in celebration,” she said.

St. Paul’s brought in Richard Pitts from Manhattan, who has worked with young people across the region and has offered drumming workshops for all ages, to instruct participants on drumming and musical techniques.

Don’t be afraid to try

Sawyer said she wanted to show the parish that they need not be afraid to try new things. And don’t worry if it’s going to succeed, she said.

“If you are excited about the event,” she said, “and even if there are just a few people who enjoy it, that’s great. If one new person comes because they are interested in an activity, that’s one person we have touched.”

Sawyer said lots of advertising helped make members of the community aware of the workshop. Ads ran on the local radio and cable TV stations, and she put posters around town and placed an ad in the Clay Center Dispatch.

The newspaper ad brought in at least four new people — the woman in the paper’s advertising department who took the order, her husband and teenaged son and the son’s friend. And they want to come back for more drumming events, Sawyer said. Sawyer said she hopes this event will inspire her congregation, and others, to risk new ideas to make the church accessible to others.

“In order to reach folks who will not walk into a church on their own, we need, like Jesus to go to them,” Sawyer wrote in the St. Paul’s newsletter after the event. “We need to embody what we all know — that the church is not a building but the people who are the body of Christ.”

ECS supplies 4,500 students with backpacks

Episcopal Community Services sent more than 4,500 children back to classes this fall with schoolbags filled with pencils, paper and other supplies through its Operation Backpack.

The backpacks and school supplies were distributed throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area by 15 partner agencies, on both sides of the state line, serving children in need.

Marilyn McElliott, Operation Backpack program coordinator for ECS, said the bags will fill a real need for the children who receive them. “Studies show the children have a better chance of succeeding in school if they have the proper supplies,” she said.

About 150 volunteers from area Episcopal churches and the backpack partner agencies came together over two days in August  at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Mo., to load supplies into the backpacks.

Since 1998, Episcopal Community Services has distributed 30,000 stuffed backpacks in the metropolitan Kansas City area.

Annual “backpack Sundays” in Episcopal churches in the dioceses of West Missouri and Kansas have raised $176,000 for the program in the past seven years.

For more information, visit the web site for Kansas City’s Episcopal Community Services, www.episcopalcommunity.org, or call 816-561-8920.