Being the Church in Columbia Heights
A History of the Parish of St. Stephen and the Incarnation, Washington, D. C., 1867 - 1992
By Kim Klein

This history is adapted from a paper written by parishioner Kim Klein for a course in local history at George Washington University. It was edited and updated by Gerald Fitzgerald and William R. MacKaye who are also members of the congregation.
©1992 Kim Klein

The words “St. Stephen and the Incarnation” do not—as one might be tempted to infer—convey any particular theological concept. They simply combine the names of two Episcopal congregations that decided to merge when the present church site on Newton Street Northwest was established in 1926. The older Church of the Incarnation, at Twelfth and N Streets Northwest, was suffering from early suburban flight as the downtown Washington business area encroached into residential areas. Its dwindling congregation elected to join the expanding parish of St. Stephen’s in the booming residential rowhouse areas of Columbia Heights and neighboring Mount Pleasant.

Church of the Incarnation, 1867-1925

Churches, like all other city buildings, need land. Pious and generous women served the congregations of both the Church of the Incarnation and St. Stephen’s well. Mrs. Jane Farnham donated a site at Twelfth and N Streets Northwest for a floating congregation that had come to get her in 1865. The name, “Incarnation,” was chosen because Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, was on the church calendar at the time the donor handed over her family land to the vestry. The design of the building “was generally that of Mr. E. H. Miller,” the son-in-law of Mrs. Farnham, according to vestry minutes of the day. A former U.S. minister to Spain, Caleb Gushing, donated more land, which the vestry promptly sold to raise building money. The congregation’s early register records the names of many persons prominent in national and city affairs at a time when Washington was recovering from the Civil War.”

When the cornerstone was laid, there was no sidewalk on the north side of the church and only three houses on the whole block. “The little grey stone ivy-covered church was considered quite out in the country at that time. Cattle browsed on the commons and brick yards were nearby,” a writer for the old Evening Star newspaper wrote in 1928 in a story reporting the dedication of the chapel of the Incarnation in the new, merged church. Lower E, F and G Streets were noted in 1867 for their fine residences, said the Star reporter. Incarnation opened its doors on Christmas 1868 “in a sparsely built-up locality where there were many commons and occasional brickyards. When it left its old home, it was because the neighborhood was becoming a downtown section and its membership had transferred in great numbers to other parts of the city.” The last service was celebrated at Christmas, 1925.
In its heyday, the congregation of the Incarnation accepted adorn­ments for the church that showed deep respect for European traditions. It was noted for its collection of works, both carvings and paintings, by Bavarian born clergyman-artist Johannes Adam Oertel, whose paintings were displayed not only in churches throughout the United States, but even in the National Gallery. Oertel came to Washington initially to work with Constantine Brumidi ornamenting the walls and ceilings of the Capitol and subsequently entered the Episcopal priesthood. The Vic­torian Gothic altar and reredos he executed for the Church of the Incarnation, now somewhat reduced in size, and three of his paintings today ornament the chapel, which is lighted by six stained glass windows commissioned from Munich and two from England that were also taken from the old Church of the Incarnation when the congregations merged. In fine Anglican tradition, Incarnation also had Washington’s first boy choir. Minus its art, the church building survives, looking not very different from early photographs. Initially sold, in 1926, to Dr. H. W. Mitchell, pastor of the B. T. Roberts Memorial Free Methodist Church, it now houses, according to its notice board, Mount Zion Pentecostal Church, United Holy Church of America, Inc.

St. Stephen’s/St. Stephen and the Incarnation, 1892-1959

In 1879, Florida Avenue was the northern boundary of Washington city. Nestled in Washington County, Mount Pleasant was a small village and “Pleasant Plains”—what became known as Columbia Heights— comprised large, private estates with woods and fields. An Episcopal priest living in Mount Pleasant became anxious for the souls of his neighbors. He began a Sunday school in his home, a program that soon expanded to adult services held in Mount Pleasant Town Hall on Howard Street (now Newton Street) across from where St. Stephen and the Incarnation stands today. When a Mrs. Stone, owner of most of Columbia Heights east of Fourteenth Street, decided to subdivide her land, she presented a plot to the little Episcopal flock; they bought an adjoining lot at 15 cents a square foot and in 1884 laid the foundation for a chapel with stone donated by yet another lady bountiful, Mrs. A. L. Barber.

With subdivision, real estate was quickly developed on “The Hill,” as the local residents called Columbia Heights. Trolley tracks were run up Fourteenth Street paralleling the earlier Thirteenth Street line. Mount Pleasant and Lament Streets became the turnaround for another trolley line and similar streets of sturdy row houses multiplied in that neighborhood. By 1892, the little mission Chapel of the Hallowed Name had a large enough congregation to think of becoming an independent parish. The provisional vestry rode out to St. Paul’s, Rock Creek, their supervising parish church, to make their request and sat around on tombstones in the graveyard while they waited for an answer. The petition was granted and the congregation celebrated with a new name—St. Stephen’s.

A year later, a new minister, the Reverend George Fiske Dudley, took over the young parish just one day after his ordination. He was to remain rector of St. Stephen’s for forty-three years.

Dudley supervised the building of a second, larger church, designed by his brother, William Northrup Dudley, “an artist of distinction and a bass singer of note,” according to one account. Completed in 1911, the edifice was, George Dudley declared, built on ice cream and oyster suppers, the traditional fund-raisers of the time.

By 1923, St. Stephen’s found itself hemmed in by stores and again short of space, with 1,240 communicants on its rolls. Nor had the building proved to be too sturdy. “Architecturally fit for the ages, material parts of the old church were unequal to the wear of years. Ominous cracks in the inner walls and portentous saggings warned of the end,” said one contemporary assessment.

Full of confidence, the congregation planned its move to the present site at 1525 Newton Street, which was then at the corner of Center Street. The land they had bought on Fourteenth Street for 15 cents a square foot they sold at $10 a foot. A New York architect, Robert Tappan of Forest Hills, Long Island, was commissioned to draw up plans for what was claimed to be the first totally planned church complex to be built in Washington. Around a common tower would be erected the church, a late English Gothic style structure then and now the largest parish church building in the Diocese of Washington, together with a rectory and a three-level building to include an auditorium, a dining hall, a large kitchen and offices. The church would seat more than a thousand people and an equal number could meet for Sunday school. One transept would be designated the Incarnation Chapel in honor of the merging parish.

In May of 1928, George Fiske Dudley climbed into the cabin of a steam shovel and operated the levers to turn up the first scoop of earth for the foundations. On Christmas Day, the congregation moved in. The dedication service included the unveiling of a window presented by the building contractor and his workmen. Appropriately, it depicted Jesus as carpenter. That October the stock market crashed.

Numerically, St. Stephen and the Incarnation remained a well-at­tended middle class church into the early 1950s. It had a fine forty-five voice choir, a dramatic society, dances, and bridge luncheons for ladies, as well as religious study groups and the flourishing Sunday school.

For anyone enthralled by the activism of the 1960s, it is only too easy to dismiss these decades as the simple-minded church-going of a denomination that is, by liturgical and social definition, conservative. One can imagine how Sinclair Lewis might have reported the Decem­ber 1936 farewell luncheon at the Willard Hotel for the Rev. George Fiske Dudley and nearly 500 well-wishers. Dudley was not only the rector of a parish of 500 families. He was proud of his military chaplaincies, having served in Cuba in 1898, and in the D. C. National Guard. He was a Mason, chaplain to the Lions Club, and chaplain to a “commandery” of the Knights Templar.

Dudley, however, was a dedicated force in the St. Stephen’s neighborhood. He sat on the Columbia Heights Citizens Association, a kind of role that subsequent rectors, however radical, have con­tinued. St. Stephen’s was also closely linked with the Episcopal House of Mercy, a large, high-walled residence on the edge of Mount Pleasant whose actual activity was only obliquely alluded to in church litera­ture. It was a home for unwed mothers, where they could discreetly wait out their pregnancies before giving up their babies for adoption. Deaconess Mary Yeo, who headed the home, also took part in St. Stephen’s activities. George Dudley was chaplain to the House of Mercy and more than one young woman kept in touch with him after she started out in life again. Dudley was interested in the potential a “healing ministry” might offer his parishioners and worked conscien­tiously with doctors and psychiatrists to explore a another dimension to medicine.
If the women of the congregation seemed mostly confined to activities like the Altar Guild and church suppers, they were nonetheless full members of the first parish in the diocese to enfranchise women to vote in parish meetings, an action taken in 1912, in advance of the full-blown national campaign for women’s suffrage and the adoption of the Constitution’s 19th Amendment (national women’s suffrage) in 1920. Women served on the parish’s vestry as early as 1943.

The Depression made itself felt as the parish tried to pay off the mortgage on the new building, so bravely begun only a year before the Wall Street crash. Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights were areas of modest income earners. Apartment buildings rose on the main streets of the area. In 1937 the church would have defaulted on its loan if a city-wide Diocesan appeal had not rescued it. Even Eleanor Roosevelt was pressed into service and wrote a letter urging Washington Episcopalians not to let the work of such a parish “lapse for material reasons.” The tower was never added, the projected new rectory never built. Finally, thanks to a bequest from the estate of Lynch Luquer, a long-time vestry member and one of the congregation’s few wealthy members, the debt was paid off and the mortgage ceremonially burned in 1952. That permitted the church finally to be consecrated—canon law forbade the formal hallowing of ecclesiastical property encumbered by debt. The Luquer bequest also permitted the creation of a small endowment fund.

In the mid-1950s, the racial makeup of the parish began to change dramatically. Added to black postwar immigration was a series of cases declaring aspects of D.C. segregation illegal. The most far-reaching case, argued before the Supreme Court in 1954, was Boiling versus Sharp. Segregated public schools in D.C. became illegal. The result was a precipitate flight of white families with young children from areas east of Rock Creek Park.

The Episcopal Diocese of Washington had long had black members. They gathered, however, in segregated churches. Boyd’s 1926 Directory for the District of Columbia, for example, under “Episcopal” lists twenty churches, followed by nine “colored.” (The Journal of the Diocese referred to the nine more euphemistically as “separate congregations,” churches that were not parishes and had no assigned geographical areas for which they were spiritually responsible.)

St. Stephen and the Incarnation declared itself an integrated church in 1957, the first Episcopal church in the city to do so. In November of that year, twenty-four black children were baptized. The tall, kindly rector, the Reverend Stuart Gast, a collector and restorer of Currier & Ives prints, the man who rallied the church to pay off its mortgage, watched his congregation begin to become black. Parishioner Kelsey Collie, one of those early black members, recalled that he and his wife Doris received a warm welcome the first Sunday although they noticed there were almost no other black people there. (Subsequently Collie learned that his welcomer was not a member of the congregation but another visitor.) A 1986 parish history sums up the achievement of integration baldly: “This came however, at the cost of many members and the rector, who had a nervous breakdown.”

St. Stephen and the Incarnation, 1960-1978: the Wendt Years

The Reverend William A. Wendt, son of a South Dakota shoe salesman, almost became a diplomat. He graduated from George Washington University, taking advantage of the GI bill after serving in World War II as a fighter pilot over Italy. Instead he entered the General Theological Seminary in New York, and was caught up in the fervor for church and city reform that he shared with Paul Moore, later Suffragan Bishop of Washington and Bishop of New York, and C. Kilmer Myers, a future Bishop of California. He spent twelve years in churches on New York’s Lower East Side before taking up the rectorship of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in I960.

Halfway through his seventeen-year tenure at St. Stephen’s, a long profile of Wendt appeared in the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine. Describing his parish on the “almost invisible, shifting inner city border” the reporter, John Carmody, summed up, “Bill Wendt indirect­ly helped to create one of the few viable political institutions in this politically emasculated Federal city—a militant, hit-the-street-and-demonstrate church of all denominations.” Bill Wendt and St. Stephen’s were an urban phenomenon.

For Wendt and his congregation, there could be no separation between the political and the religious. However, a clustering of some of St. Stephen’s innovations and public commitments between 1960 and 1978 makes it is easier to discern the extent of the church’s involvements in those decades.

Three themes present themselves:
•   The “political,” national church, speaking out and demonstrating on civil rights and foreign policy.
•   The parish church, committed to caring for the bodies as well as the souls of its immediate neighbors.
•   The worshiping church, re-examining doctrine and liturgy to affirm its acceptance on such questions as racial diversity, homosexual relationships and the ecclesiastical role of women.

The political church

The urban site of St. Stephen’s helped greatly in the promotion and focus of its national witness. It was—and still is—in a highly symbolic neighborhood in an internationally symbolic city. Both print and electronic media found good “copy” in the activities of Father Wendt and his colorful congregation. The parish even acquired its own jester, Yale graduate Carlos Van Leer. (After some years as de facto public tease for the congregation, the title was officially bestowed on Van Leer by the vestr; in his mid-eighties, he continued to appear in jester’s cap with his accordion where he thought humor might serve a cause well.)

Just two miles north of the White House, the church was easily accessible for reporters and cameramen. Priest and parish could also quickly reach demonstration points such as the Pentagon steps or Lafayette Park. Writers of Bread, the weekly parish newsletter, regularly carried reports of “St. Stephenites” in the news. With its capacious parish buildings and closeness to downtown and the Mall, the church was well-known as an ideal housing center for out-of-state protesters whenever national demonstrations were organized.

John Carmody wrote of Wendt in 1968: "He and his fellow ministers campaigned for Home Rule and against the war in Vietnam. He marched (looking small and preoccupied and unsmiling and dusty in his clerical blacks) for low-income housing and against landlords. It seemed he was always up there in the front ranks, maybe holding hands, in those semi-posed television shots of protest marches that filled the slow Sunday twilight news hours."

Newspapers reported Wendt with black clergy defying segregated Trailways buses in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961 and marching with Martin Luther King Jr., in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. (The Reverend James Reeb, assistant minister at neighboring All Souls Unitarian Church and a close Wendt colleague, was martyred in Alabama during the Selma March period.)

Street masses were a common form of protest, sometimes leading to arrest. Wendt and others prayed with peace fasters in Lafayette Park, for Vietnam in the Pentagon concourse and on the steps of the Justice Department for slain Black Panthers. Wendt organized the first public reading of the names of the Vietnam war dead during an emergency national convention of the Episcopal Church in 1969, a practice that ultimately might have provided Maya Lin the inspiration for the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall. Wendt and parishioners almost drowned out Richard Nixon at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree in 1969. He and the congregation were frequently joined by Washington’s suffragan bishop, Paul Moore. When King was assassinated, in April of 1968, and riots broke out in downtown Washington, St. Stephen’s within hours became the site for the first requiem eucharist for the slain civil rights leader. In succeeding days the church provided food for thousands of hungry and frightened people. On Palm Sunday he led his singing congregation past charred buildings on Fourteenth Street, only a block away from the church.

Wendt encouraged the use of his church as a public forum. The traditional spot for a sermon was often given to a nonclerical speaker. Gloria Steinem “preached” on Father’s Day, 1972 that “sexism and racism go hand in hand,” and that women and minority males were denigrated by the same myths: “We’re supposed to have smaller brains and childlike natures.”

Wendt’s most notorious speaker was Black Power spokesman, H. Rap Brown. Under a warrant charging him for incitement to riot in Cambridge, Maryland, Brown had been refused permission to speak anywhere in Washington. Wendt, invoking the ancient tradition of the church as political sanctuary, offered Brown his pulpit. He also believed in the defusing effect of free speech. Brown exhorted an overflow crowd of almost 900, “I agree there should be more looting and burning. If you’re going to loot, you’ve got to arm yourselves, brothers... If Washington, D.C., don’t come around, Washington, D.C., should burn down.” But Brown did not understand how to make the difficult acoustics of the church work for him. Few in the audience could understand his inflammatory words. Whatever the reason, no uprising ensued. In the days that followed editorials and the mayor of Washington expressed gratitude at Wendt’s acumen and credited him with avoiding a riot.

The parish church

Wendt calculated he had lost half his white congregation by 1963. “The healthy and happy ones remained.” By the late 1960s, St. Stephen’s appeared to have become a genuinely integrated, largely neighborhood church. Its 700 members were 60 percent black, 40 percent white. Even the Washington Afro-American felt justified in offering its readers a three-page profile of St. Stephen’s, including photographs of young, fashionably dressed black parishioners chat­ting with the white clergy.

St. Stephen’s was also now in an economically mixed neighbor­hood. The church’s buildings were in use seven days a week with activities for the needy, tapping into whatever foundation, or local and federal funds were available. They included a Police Boys’ Club, senior citizens’ meals and recreation, a reverse Peace Corps-style inner-city summer camp, and a home for ten derelict men at 1813 Monroe Street. After 1970, when a burial service committed the ashes of the first parishioner to the church’s grounds, the homeless were also accorded this rite.

The old House of Mercy changed. Now unmarried pregnant women had access to abortion or kept their babies after going about their lives unashamedly pregnant. The new need was day-care. In 1970, the House of Mercy became the Rosemont Center, offering day-care with a sliding scale for payment and a policy of ethnic balance to reflect the neighborhood. The child intake strived to enroll an equal number of blacks, Hispanics and whites.
St. Stephen’s most dramatic offering to its neighbors grew out of an aggressive challenge to white Christian consciences made in several cities by black militants after 1968. In 1969, George Hart, a St. Stephen’s vestryman, who was also a member of the Black United Front, demanded the church make “reparation” for centuries of white oppression by giving the black community $25,000 and 50 percent of future annual income. When the congregation tentatively offered 10 percent of its income for five years, even Wendt cautioned them against it. Instead, the church donated the equity in all the land surrounding its building so that seventy-one low and moderate income apartments could be built there. Today, well-tended “Urban Village,” surrounding St. Stephen’s on three sides, still remains a viable housing complex. For several months one apartment has prominently dis­played in its window a poster supporting Louis Farrakhan.

The worshiping church

Finally, under Wendt’s leadership, St. Stephen’s attempted to carry its desire for revolution back to the heart of the church itself. One issue kept Wendt on the front pages of the city’s newspapers for several days at the beginning of May 1974. Wendt was brought to trial before an ecclesiastical court for permitting a woman to act as a priest in his church.

The ambiance of the proceedings had touches of Martin Luther’s trial for heresy early in the Reformation. It also suggested a classic Washington politicized court scene in the tradition of Oliver North or Marion Barry. Spectators lined up for seats in St. Columba’s Church to be present for the historic moment. Newspapers sent court artists to capture the moment pictorially. An Antioch law student sat through the proceedings for a school paper. One interviewed observer summed it up, “What Father Wendt is doing will not only help women in the church but women everywhere.”

In defiance of Episcopal tradition, three bishops had ordained eleven women to the priesthood in the summer of 1974. Supported by his vestry, Wendt invited one of the women, the Reverend Alison Cheek, to celebrate the eucharist at St. Stephen’s. It is perhaps difficult to capture the depth of feeling inspired by this defiance. One woman for example, wrote “I have saved forever a piece of bread from that service.” The actual charge against Wendt was not so dramatic: a panel of five judges had to decide if he had disobeyed the “godly admoni­tion” of his bishop. He was convicted when the three clergymen-judges found him guilty. The two lay judges, one a woman, voted for acquittal. After the verdict was upheld in a church appeals court, again by a single vote, Wendt was given the lightest permissible punishment, a formal reprimand in the crypt of the Washington Cathedral.

Wendt also challenged tradition in his liturgical experiments. He encouraged his laity to organize services in ways that would introduce contemporary freshness to age-old forms of worship. There were African masses, cast members from “Hair” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” performing from their shows, balloons and cloth banners instead of formal flowers. A timely bequest enabled the vestry to remodel the church extensively, replacing the draped high altar, lovingly donated in the 1930s by a former vestryman from the Church of the Incarnation, with the present “in the round” arrangement. The eucharistic bread—a leavened loaf rather than the once universal wafers—on one occasion was actually made during the service, by the congregation after they dipped their hands in the baptismal font.

At the request of two male members of the congregation, and with the encouragement of congregation leaders, Wendt made preparations to conduct their “holy union,” following a ritual based on the marriage service. But the bishop forbade the conducting of the service in the church, and this time heeding the “godly admonition,” Wendt, flanked by the parish’s senior and junior wardens, officiated at a service conducted in a church of another denomination.

As the Nixon-Ford administrations drew to a close, the tensions between radicals and conservatives and racial polarization began to surface in Washington. As early as 1968, Wendt had felt a gap opening between his ministry and more militant blacks. After the media approval of his offer to H. Rap Brown, he said, “I lost my rapport with a lot of the militants.” He rationalized this as ultimately beneficial because “it’s time the blacks did their own thing.”

Nor did all local Episcopalians support the activities of Wendt or even the diocesan hierarchy. One church, All Souls’ Memorial (not to be confused with All Souls Unitarian), even refused to send the money pledged to general diocesan funds because the rector and congrega­tion believed Suffragan Bishop Paul Moore to have gone too into the political arena when he in chided the Washington Board of Trade for not supporting home rule.
Most St. Stephenites took perverse delight in their media name, “St. Bedlam and the Insurrection.” Other parishioners fled. As recently as 1990, a local Episcopalian was preparing to buy a box of Christmas cards from an office colleague until she learned the cards were made by St. Stephen’s:”... and the Insurrection,” she completed. “That’s the one church I will not give any money to.” Wendt took a Sabbatical leave from St. Stephen’s in 1977 to explore a field very different from street activism. “In the United States, death has replaced sex as the greatest sin,” he explained in an interview.” As many expected, he did not return. He gave his energies to the St. Francis Burial Society, later St. Francis Center, an organization he founded to explore dying and bereavement.

Wendt’s farewell service in 1977 celebrated a high point in the city’s interracial trust and reform. Then-D.C. Councilmember Marion Barry Jr. remembered the voting rights fight. “Bill Wendt is in truth respon­sible for me being here and being able to do the things I’m able to do today.” Washington Post columnist William Raspberry reminded the congregation not to take change for granted. “One of the first things Bill Wendt stuck his neck out for was the [racial] integration of Rock Creek Cemetery. Today it seems such a simple thing, but he had to take on his own church to do it.” In typical Wendt style, the church was decked out with rainbow-hued crepe paper and balloons and a mariachi band provided the music.

Looking to the new millennium: 1977-1992

While William Wendt felt a personal spiritual calling for his change of focus, he was also leaving St. Stephen’s at a time when the city and the national political climate had changed. The Vietnam War was over and with it, fear of the draft. Subsequent Washington demonstrations against U.S. intervention in Central America never aroused the same national fervor as the anti-war movement. Although still without home rule and a voting congressman, the District had won the right to join in presidential elections and elect local officials, including a mayor, city council and school board. Many of the city’s activists who had worked with Wendt were now professional politicians.
Wendt’s successor, the Reverend G. H. “Jack” Woodard, seemed an ideal man to follow in Wendt’s footsteps. Woodard was considered a national expert in urban affairs and had come from a ministry in the Dominican Republic, an excellent background for an area as heavily Latino as the parish had become. Woodard found St. Stephen’s reduced in numbers and energy, the building in need of repair and the church short of funds because the good causes of the 1960s and 1970s had seriously eroded its modest endowment funds.

In spite of these setbacks, Woodard brought energy to the neighbor­hood problems. Programs he set in motion still minister to the city’s marginal populations. The Samaritan Ministry, now an ecumenical, citywide social agency, is still housed in St. Stephen’s, where it ger­minated. A “shower ministry” is available for homeless men, offering bathing and shaving facilities. The Washington Free Clinic gives medical attention to those who cannot even cope with the city clinics. Four hundred people are served free meals each Saturday and Sunday in an arrangement with suburban church participation called “Loaves and Fishes.” Two houses on Newton Street, from the city government’s stock of abandoned houses, were renovated for four low-income families.

After six and a half years, Woodard was pressured to resign—a casualty, in part, of the tradition of lay independence nurtured by Wendt.
In 1987 the parish called the Reverend J. Carlyle Gill as rector. Ordained to the priesthood in 1977, she is among the first women regularly ordained in the Episcopal church. She found a church fractured over the resignation of its previous rector, in fiscal and physical difficulty, and confronted on its very doorstep by one of Washington’s largest open-air drug markets.
In December of 1988 two young men were killed in front of the church steps—two among the hundreds killed in the city’s drug war. The congregation agonized about its response to this war. Some advocated police surveillance from within the sanctuary. Gill and the vestry disagreed with this approach. The parish administrator, a woman with two children who lived in the neighborhood, decided to sit on the front steps of the church every night. Gill would not let her do this alone. Thus grew “the vigil”—a nightly presence on the front steps of the church. Gradually, more parishioners and neighbors joined in.

After choir practice, the choir sang on the front steps. Ideas for neighborhood events were born on those steps. “Community Unity” was a block party held in September 1989. Different neighbors and parishioners prepared food and neighborhood children provided entertainment. The annual Neighborhood Halloween Party was planned on the steps and continues to be a favorite among neighbor­hood children. St. Stephen’s has become known to them the “Hal­loween church” since the party is held in the church’s dark, spooky-to-children sanctuary.

During the vigil, Gill saw the large numbers of children living in the immediate neighborhood of the church. On warm evenings they (including Gill) played kickball on the east lot of the church property.

In June 1990 the vestry resolved to reclaim the second floor of the parish house—which had been rented for some years to outside users—for congregational activities afterschool programs for neigh­borhood children. In December 1991 the congregation moved into its “new space,” which includes parish offices and an auditorium area for parish and community programs. There are currently two tutoring and mentoring programs as well as a dance class for children. The congregation eagerly awaits the completion of this space.

The future poses many questions: How will St. Stephen’s be a neighborhood church? How are black people, brown people, white people, straight people, gay people, old people, and young people brought into living community and nurtured by the same loving God? How is St. Stephen’s the church in this neighborhood? It is already one of the best community centers in town, but how is it the church? And how is God calling you to be a part of St. Stephen’s next 100 years?