Service
“To serve Christ” is part of the St. Francis mission. Using our gifts for service is interwoven into almost every part of the church’s life.
Serving Our Communities
The Outreach Committee raises funds and mobilizes parishioners to serve the people in need in our local and global communities.
Backpack Buddies, for example, partners with local schools to provide food for the weekend to families receiving free school meals. Members of the congregation shop for and assemble the food.
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Every week the congregation supports the Wilsonville Community Sharing Food Bank with donations of groceries and other items. St. Francis purchased shopping carts to allow guests of the food bank to shop.
In partnership with local schools, at Thanksgiving and Christmas we assemble and deliver boxes of food and (at Christmas) gifts for families who struggle to afford holiday meals and gifts. |
Motivated by personal experience
Some of our outreach efforts are motivated by personal experience. A volunteer from St. Francis at the Food Bank has written movingly about how she is motivated to help by remembering when her family depended on help. Another has shared about a family member with mental illness, who is living on the streets. We support a ministry that provides free counseling.
Some of the outreach activities result from partnership with other Episcopal churches. In the fall, for example, St. Francis contributes winter clothes for the use of people served by St. Timothy’s in Brookings. Before the delivery, boxes in the hall are piled high with coats, pants, and boots, many of them newly purchased.
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Besides Outreach, other ministries at St. Francis involve service.
Many of the beautiful furnishings of St. Francis have been designed and crafted by parishioners, using their gifts to serve the community. The annual Stewardship campaign is made unique each year by a creative way of recording pledges. 
Threads of Love uses parishioners’ love of sewing to serve needs both internal and external. They sew Caring Quilts, which are blessed and given to members of the congregation who are ill or grieving. In partnership with knitters in the congregation, they create layette kits for babies born at the Salud Medical Center in Woodburn.
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Wisdom HouseSt. Francis is a place of healing for the broader community. Wisdom House hosts several AA meetings. It is also the home of Coffee Creek Quilters, a ministry to incarcerated women.
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