The Outdoor Church
Pastoral
Services
The Outdoor Church regularly holds short
prayer services in Porter Square, under the mobile sculpture near
the T station, at 9:00 AM, and on the Cambridge Common, near the
Civil War monument and directly across from Christ Church Cambridge
on Garden Street, at 1:00 PM every Sunday, throughout the year.
Pastoral Visiting
Because many of our congregants are
confined from time to time to
prisons, jails, hospitals and other institutions, we make a special effort to schedule regular pastoral visits to all
of our members who cannot be with us outdoors Sunday morning. We give
out bright red wristbands with our name and number embossed
on them, so that our congregants, or social workers, chaplains and
nurses who care for them, can reach us in the event of an emergency. The staff of
the Outdoor Church regularly appear in court on behalf of
congregants, conduct memorial services for homeless people who have
died on the street or in a hospital and offer pastoral counseling.
Mission
For our Mission Statement, look at the Poster we prepared for a colloquium at Calvin College.
Clergy
The Rev. Jedediah Mannis, an ordained minister
of the United Church of Christ, the Rev. Pat Zifcak, a vocational
deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and the Rev. Jean
Chapman, an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church, are
our staff.
"Joseph Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church"
Joseph
Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church
by Jedediah Mannis
has just been released by Wipf and Stock. It
examines the Outdoor Church and the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman, a
Unitarian minister who created and led a street ministry in Boston,
Massachusetts, between 1826 and 1839 at the behest of his friend and
college roommate, William Ellery Channing. Because of Tuckerman's
innovative approach to encountering and helping the poor people he
met near the Boston wharves, he is considered the father of American
social work as well as a prescient, dedicated, and socially active
minister whose work led directly to the Social Gospel Movement. The
book examines and interprets Tuckerman's theology and ministry of
outreach in light of the ministries of the Outdoor Church.
Joseph Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church is a
unique look at a radically innovative
nineteenth-century minister through the prism of the actual
application of his thinking and his example to an ongoing ministry
to the chronically homeless men and women of Cambridge.