Outreach
Education
Confirmation classes and other groups of students and their parents and ministers visit us in
Porter Square regularly, some from as far away as New York,
Connecticut and Maine. They join us for our Sunday morning
prayer service and share doughnuts, coffee, sandwiches and juice
with us. For many, it is the first time that they have had the
opportunity to talk to someone who is homeless. It is an opportunity to meet and talk with our
homeless congregants in a safe and yet challenging environment.
Training
The training of seminarians and divinity school students has
always been an important part of the Outdoor Church's mission.
We are a field education site for the Harvard Divinity School and
thus for the Boston Theological Institute. Seminarians and
divinity school students can fulfill one of their Clinical Pastoral Education
requirements by serving with us for an academic year. Other
students - undergraduates and graduate school students alike - joins
us as volunteers for periods of up to two or three years. Many
will go on to ordained ministries as a result of the transformative
experience of serving the poor on the streets of Cambridge with us.
"Come and See"
Every
year, visitors come from all over the
country to meet in Cambridge to see how Common Cathedral in Boston
and the Outdoor Church in Cambridge "work." Many come up
to Porter Square on Sunday morning at nine o'clock A.M. to join the Rev. Jean
Chapman and the Outdoor Church in worship at the Porter Square T Station and share
sandwiches, juice, doughnuts and coffee afterward. There are
now more than thirty outdoor churches, missions and other outreach
programs up and running across
the country modeled on, or inspired by, Common Cathedral
and its founder and missioner, the Rev. Debbie Little Wyman.
