One ministry leads to another

On a beautiful Wednesday morning in early September, I am dropped off beside the roadside sign at St. John the Evangelist in Port Hope with only a vague idea which of the two old church buildings is the parish hall. Then I catch the smell of something sautéing and decide to follow it.

Downstairs, the source becomes clear.

Young people and adults are moving around an aging church kitchen while frittatas bake and food accumulates on counters and serving tables. Coffee is brewing. Homemade scones, cakes and other delicacies appear on tiered plates and glass stands.

“We do perfume the neighbourhood,” says Penny Nutbrown, St. John’s children’s minister and one of the chief organizers behind much of the activity.

This is Emmaus Café day, a weekly pay-as-you-can lunch that has become one expression of a much wider network of community ministry at St. John’s. Soon after we shake hands, Nutbrown is quick to share the origin story, emphasizing that nobody sat down one day and designed the network. “I’m big into the organic process,” she says. “We never planned to do all of this.”

After retiring from teaching in 2020, Nutbrown helped establish the parish’s Spiritual Park and Community Garden the following year. Produce went to the food bank. Relationships grew. Community dinners returned. Then came Emmaus Café in 2023, inspired by a church café in England created in a village where older residents were losing many of the places where they once gathered socially.

In short, one ministry kept revealing the need for another. Nutbrown compares the process to Russian nesting dolls: open one and another is waiting inside.

At Emmaus Café, parishioners began hearing more about people whose housing was becoming precarious. Nutbrown says, “One older woman regularly came for companionship but never asked for anything and never took food home. Eventually, she quietly arrived with a small container. Her rent was increasing, she explained, and she was worried there might be days when there would not be enough money left for food.” St. John’s responded with a take-home freezer.

The parish keeps discovering its next ministry by paying attention to the people already in front of it – a habit that gives practical shape to St. John’s motto, “Learn, Love, Serve.” That pattern is especially visible among the young people moving confidently through the kitchen during my visit. Nutbrown, who spent the last decade of her teaching career in kindergarten, brings an educator’s instinct to the work: “You put everything out and then you let people discover what they’re going to discover.”

This is a place where children and youth are celebrated. A nearby wall of what Nutbrown calls “firsts” commemorates children and teenagers baking their first cake or pie, running a church coffee hour, helping at Repair Café Port Hope, working in the garden and taking responsibility for community events.

One young volunteer, Samantha, has been Nutbrown’s “right arm” since she was 10. Another teenager recently came into the kitchen after lunch and simply asked what needed doing. More scones were required. He had never made them before. Soon Nutbrown was shouting scone-making instructions across the kitchen while tending to the ailing dishwasher.

The Rev. Deb Chapman, a deacon who oversees much of the food preparation, describes the all-ages kitchen as “controlled chaos” – especially when the young volunteers arrive. “The kids get all excited,” she says, “and we’re happy to have them.” Chapman is a classically trained chef who worked in business before becoming a hospital chaplain, studying theology and eventually being ordained a deacon. Her professional and pastoral lives now meet naturally at St. John’s.

She has always loved food, she says, but equally important is what happens around it. “As a chef, it is all about making it as simple as possible and breaking it down,” she says. “We share and we learn from each other.” The fragrant frittatas being served today come from one of Chapman’s family recipes. So do the scones.

By lunchtime, I have stopped pretending I am there only to observe. One of the young volunteers takes my frittata order, and the scones and jam require very little persuasion.

The kitchen shows its age. The energy around it does not. Most appliances are domestic rather than commercial, and equipment has been donated and adapted over time. There is a strong contrast between ordinary surroundings and extraordinary care. “You don’t need brand new fancy cupboards and all of that,” Chapman says. The kitchen is inspected, functional and busy. St. John’s is a parish using what it has – and using it intensively.

Chapman, together with the Rev. Shane Watson, was ordained a deacon in 2023 after a parish-based discernment process. Watson is away during my visit, but his name comes up repeatedly throughout the day. Where Chapman leads much of the work in the kitchen, Watson builds relationships with people who are unhoused, living in motels or at risk of losing housing. His ministry ranges from food and hygiene support to the kind of practical accompaniment that might find him standing in a grocery store, phone in hand, making sure a family gets what it actually needs.

In the parish, their vocations are different but mutually generative, which the Rev. Canon Jesse Parker, St. John’s incumbent, explains is not accidental. “The church runs on the ministry of all the baptized,” he says as we try to find a quiet space to talk amid the hubbub in the hall. For Canon Parker, ordained ministry is not about concentrating responsibility in clergy. It is about helping people recognize and inhabit their own vocations.

His question to himself as a priest is often: “How am I helping – and not getting in the way of the Holy Spirit?”

Giving people space to explore helps explain why Nutbrown is called the children’s minister rather than simply the Sunday school teacher, why Chapman and Watson’s diaconal vocations were discerned through the parish, and why teenagers here are given meaningful responsibility rather than token jobs.

It also helps explain how a relatively modest parish sustains so much activity. “You get the right people in leadership with you, and you meet together regularly,” Canon Parker says. There is something appealingly unromantic about his answer. Canon Parker explains that those meetings begin with questions that are more pastoral than strategic: How are you? How is your family? Is what you are doing sustainable? “If it is not,” he says, “the next question is what can come off – or who else can help.”

St. John’s is not insulated from the pressures facing many churches. Canon Parker describes its finances as operating on “a bit of a shoestring budget.” The buildings are old. Utility and maintenance costs continue to rise. His response to the temptation to retreat is succinct. “We never grow by shrinking.”

The evidence is all around him.

On a Wednesday morning, a hall that might otherwise be empty is filled with people cooking, serving, eating, talking and volunteering. Some will never become regular Sunday worshippers. Canon Parker still considers them part of the parish. He worries that churches can become too congregational in their understanding of whom they exist to serve – reducing “parish” to the people visible in the pews. For him, the wider community matters too.

While Canon Parker and I talk about baptism, vocation and parish life, parishioners Peter and Janet Lang are quietly gathering food.

The Langs have been married for more than four decades. They came to Canada from South Africa; Peter later taught mathematics for 15 years at an Orthodox Jewish school, teaching grades 9 through 12. Both completed the Education for Ministry course through the Diocese of Toronto.

Their experiences in South Africa and after immigrating to Canada have helped shape their sensitivity toward people who find themselves excluded, underestimated or on the margins. Now they lead the Meals for Motel Residents ministry, the latest expression of love and service at St. John’s.

They know the people they visit by name. They don’t need a spreadsheet to track the day’s deliveries.

Prepared meals come out of the parish freezers, but Peter and Janet add food from Emmaus Café according to the kinds of things the people they serve might enjoy and what they can use.

After lunch, I climb into the back seat of their minivan and accompany them to Cobourg.

The food matters. But once the motel doors open, it becomes obvious that something else is happening too. People want to talk to them. They offer Peter and Janet updates. They explain what has happened since the last visit. They ask questions. At one stop, a woman has a small gift for Janet.

Despite having very little herself, she regularly finds little things she thinks Janet might enjoy – makeup, lotion, something picked up second-hand. Janet describes herself as “the most gifted person in the world.”

At another door, a resident (who preferred to remain anonymous) agrees to talk about what the visits mean to him. “They’ve been a real – I don’t even know how to say how much of a blessing they’ve been,” he says. Cooking facilities in his motel room are extremely limited, making prepared meals especially useful. Peter and Janet have also helped connect him with food bank resources, and they keep coming back.

By the time Peter and Janet drop me back at St. John’s around two o’clock, I am exhausted – and I have mostly just been watching. The lunch crowd is gone. The room is quieter. The commercial dishwasher has given up its ghost for the day, and a volunteer stands at the sink washing dishes by hand.

Nutbrown, who appears to possess a different number of hours in the day from everyone else, is already preparing for another planning commitment. One volunteer says she hopes to have a beer when she gets home. Another is making phone calls for an annual neighbourhood women’s lunch. It is important, she says, for the women to “keep spending time together and helping one another.”

There is nothing particularly grand about the closing scene. Just dishes. Phone calls. Leftovers. Plans for the next gathering.

Just ordinary humans finding extraordinary ways to learn, love, and serve.

Since 2021, and through the generosity of our members, the Anglican Foundation of Canada has awarded three grants to St. John the Evangelist, Port Hope totalling $10,000, supporting the parish’s Spiritual Park and Community Garden/Sustaining Sundays, Emmaus Café and Meals for Motel Residents.