LLOYDMINSTER (S’toon) — Sometimes we don’t have to look for mission or mission opportunities. Sometimes it — or they — find you.
That has been the case for St. John’s Minster in downtown Lloydminster. Being smack dab in the inner city, has created its own mission opportunity. In fact, it has given rise to the church’s motto, “Downtown to Serve.”
Our latest and present endeavour is a two-church partnership with the Lloydminster Men’s Shelter. We, St. John’s Anglican and St. Saviour’s Anglican, decided to field a team together for the Shelter’s annual Coldest Night of the Year fundraising walk, held on Feb. 28.
We recruited 11 walkers and raised $3,060 for this important cause — which was 204 per cent of our stated goal. There is still money coming in, so this total isn’t final.
The Men’s Shelter, which opened in March 2008, is facing some real challenges. First, lack of space. It is located in an overly crowded building, formerly a funeral home and before that, a creamery. It can only accommodate 28 men in a very cramped bunk-bed dormitory. And what is perhaps even worse is that the lack of space limits the programming the Shelter can offer.
The intention of the Shelter is to provide wraparound services to the men so they can move on with their lives. This may include housing, job training, addictions and mental health counselling, and much more.
Our second problem flows from the first; not only that the shelter is limited in the number of men it can accommodate and serve, but also that it cannot offer the same help to women. There is a shelter in the city for women escaping family violence, but its capacity is very limited.
As a result, there are often women as well as men who are out on the street with nowhere to go. By the way, many of them, men and women, “encamp” around St. John’s Church itself, often making for unsafe and unhealthy situations.
St. John’s has a long history of involvement with such causes. We have operated a lunch-hour soup kitchen for over 30 years and hosted a warm-up shelter during the worst of the COVID-19 outbreak.
My own involvement came shortly after my arrival in the city, when I discovered people sleeping rough around the church. Upon inquiring further, I discovered that this was but one instance of a larger and more prevalent problem in our city, and I was soon recruited to serve on the board of the Shelter, where I was president for some 12 to 14 years, and even served as acting executive director during interregnums.
We are proud — the people of St. John’s, Anglican Church of Canada, and St. Saviour’s, Anglican Diocese of Canada — to be able to make up our “AngliCan 2” team and help in this needed work even in such a modest way.
Archdeacon Michael Stonhouse (retired) is the honorary assistant at St. John’s Minster, Lloydminster.
