Prayer

Prayer plays a key role in the story of Vineyard Central (VC) and St. Elizabeth’s. Prayer has a key role in our ongoing efforts to restore St. E’s as well, although it did not start out that way.

We first started meeting in late spring of 2006. We were scheduled to host an ASG Civic Engagement Series (CES) in St. E’s in October. Our first task was to prepare the community and the space for that event, providing focus for our first meetings. When we met we used the rhythm of the CES: Convening, welcoming those who chose to attend, thanking them for the accepting the invitation, breaking into groups of three and four with instructions engage in one of the six CES conversations around one of the powerful questions.

After the CES, we continued to meet. Often those attending asked questions about why VC owned the building, why it went unused and fell into disrepair, and what VC wanted to do with the building. No one at our meetings had an answer, so we decided to ask the VC leadership. We arranged for a dinner meeting with the Nixons and the Rains, where they told us the story of VC and St. E’s. During the re-telling, Kevin Rains remarked how he was struck by the how much prayer was involved in the process.

“That’s all we had,” he said. And so prayer became the focus of our St. E’s team meetings.

We decided to hold a St. E’s prayer vigil, and we began planning that event. At the urging of Kenny Havens, we agreed on a 24-hour vigil, from 7 p.m. Friday, April 20, to 7 p.m. Saturday, April 21. Lily Lewin joined the planning process to help us think about and develop creative ways of praying. We ended up with a number of different prayer stations that included drawing, asking God to guide our vision, writing answers to questions, sitting in contemplation, listening to a guided prayer, hammering away doubts and fears, and writing our dreams for Sts. E’s on paper leaves and attaching them to a tree.

The result of the vigil was a subtle but powerful change in our focus. Restoring St. E’s had always seemed too big, too daunting, too much. The clear message of the vigil, it seemed to me, was not to worry about tomorrow. Do what was in front of us, give up trying to control the outcomes, trust in God.

Interior Space, St. Elizabeth's

The photos shown here were taken recently by local photographer John Cremons. They show much of the grandeur and some of the vulnerability of the interior space at Saint Elizabeth's. After his visit, he sent us an email with the following message:

Thanks so much for letting me photograph your beautiful church. The character and presence in this sanctuary is powerful. I noticed that you have great respect for the past and your predecessors. This is good.

A Sacred Space of Norwood

Here's a picture of Saint Elizabeth's, home to Vineyard Central(VC) in Norwood, Ohio. My wife and I started attending services in January, 2006. We had been doing some church shopping, but after the first service at VC, we knew we had found a home.

You can't see it in this photo, but St. Es has a fantastic interior space, some exquisite old stained glass windows, and some pretty extensive water damage. (I will be posting pictures of the interior in later posts.) There are several places where the plaster has completely fallen away, revealing the underlying columns of brick, like the underlying bones of the building. For me, it combines a sense of beauty and vulnerability. I think it's one of the reasons Vineyard Central feels like home.

It is a Sacred Space of Norwood. You have to live in Cincinnati to see the humor in that statement. Norwood is often the butt of local Cincinnati jokes, and West Norwood has been considered the arm pit of Norwood. Nonetheless, Saint Elizabeth's is a sacred space, and I have volunteered to help lead the efforts to create a restorative community focused on this beautiful, vulnerable space. Over the next weeks, months and years, I intend to use this blog to explain how I came to become one of the stewards of this sacred space and explore what that means and how it works on me, how I change as a result, and what we do to reach in to the surrounding community. I expect it will be quite a journey.