News and Views

Rev. Angelic Williams only intended to fill in for a sick colleague at St. Luke United Methodist Church in Baltimore in June 2022.

Walking into the church for the first time on “youth Sunday,” only 19 people were in the pews, including just two children. Many of the members were middle-aged or older. Parishioners asked if she’d be back, but she told them that she was just filling in. By September, just three months later, she was appointed to the church, and her past experience as a missionary meant she was eager to build up the congregation.

“I was accustomed to building things, starting from scratch and giving birth to new ideas,” Williams said.

Even as a visiting pastor, before she knew a full appointment to the church was on the horizon, she began taking notes on items that could be improved. That gave her a place to start.

Preparing for God’s Harvest

Some of Williams’ notes included thoughts on creating more youthfulness in the church and growing the flock. But to even begin that process, Williams explained, there needed to be a culture of growth internally among members.

“I could be praying and I could have the congregation praying for our congregation to grow and for us to expand,” she said. “But the first thing to do was to prepare people’s hearts to receive the harvest we were praying for.”

One Sunday, Williams even preached about the Prodigal Son, and how the older brother was not pleased to have his younger brother back in the fold. When the church receives people and God sends people, a church doesn’t always know what the harvest will bring, she said.

According to some studies, the American church should be preparing for a harvest. After decades of declining church attendance, a Gallup poll found one in three people in the U.S. attend a service once a week. That figure has held steady after decades-long drops, foreshadowing a potential revival in churches.

To prepare for the harvest, Williams’ congregation led with a theme of building an inclusive environment where everyone can meet Jesus.

Practicing the Jesus Model

Williams estimates that Jesus spent roughly 80 percent of his ministry outside the walls of religious buildings, among the greater community. That model, she explains, was critical to reaping a harvest at St. Luke.

But it had been a while since the church had been extremely active in the community. So Williams started by listening to the church’s neighbors to understand the issues and needs of its people.

“We don’t want to be the kind of church that just dreams up programming of what we think people might need, but rather ask them what they need,” Williams said. She came to understand the neighborhood had long-standing struggles with poverty, food insecurity, and addiction.

St. Luke UMC is located in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore. Nearly a quarter of all people in the neighborhood live in poverty, which is nearly double the national average and more than double the average in Maryland. The landscape is even worse for children, more than a third of whom live in poverty.

One of Williams’ first priorities was to serve a senior center a half-block away from the church. In the 75 years of the church’s existence, they had never had a relationship with the organization. The congregation ended up making Valentine’s Day baskets for seniors.

Williams’ ministry included leaving the 99 to find the one.

She went through a list of people who had stopped attending church to engage with them again. Many times, it worked. Former congregants who had left as far back as 17 years ago came back.

So far, weekly church attendance hovers around 75 people, and membership roles include some 130 people. The church has opened a food program, and sponsors loads of laundry so children can go to school in clean clothes. A pop-up breakfast is held every Wednesday, and the church hosts a free flea market for parents as they prepare to send their kids back to school.

People from the community began to join the congregation, too. Last year, Williams baptized 28 people, more than the church had done in the last two decades combined.

“Now we have people in our church that walk to church every Sunday because they are from our community,” Williams said. “A lot of them have given their lives to the Lord, become members of the church.”

The next three years

Williams, who has been at St. Luke UMC for three years, has a vision board. In her words, she is “dreaming of some things” down the road for her congregation. Those things relate to affordable housing.

West Baltimore is home to some of the highest concentrations of vacant buildings in the city of Baltimore. Across the whole city, more than 15,000 properties and lots sit vacant. Williams says the church ministers regularly to single moms who are homeless.

But she believes one of the pitfalls in ministry can be when people keep looking toward the “next big thing,” rather than sustaining life-giving ministries in front of them.

“Bigger isn’t always better,” Williams said. “There are families in our community that are dependent on our faithfulness and dependent on our ability to sustain what we have. Our goal this year is to deepen our connection with God in our own stewardship and through lay leadership development.”

For now, Williams wants to focus on creating opportunities to experience life with people in the neighborhood. That is the “magic sauce” of Jesus’ ministry, she believes.

“The church has become an institution that wants to make disciples without doing life with disciples,” she said. “I think the communal piece of ministry is sorely missing. Providing space where we can eat together, we can learn together, we can do life together, is very important. If all we do is worship together, then we’re missing a key part of Jesus’ ministry’s success.”