Church puts community ahead of growth

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This article was published 27/10/2010 (5518 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes when Pastor Stacy Moroz takes the pulpit at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, he is garbed in traditional vestments.

Other Sundays, he sports a polo shirt. One time, he even showed up in jeans.

His congregation has never batted an eye, Moroz said, which he sees as symbolic of the church’s tolerant environment.

“People seem able to accept you just as you are,” he said. “I find that rare in churches.”

Prince of Peace is a mission church, Moroz said, “a church that would have been planted.”

In 1960, the Lutheran church sent a pastor to Windsor Park who then went door to door in an attempt to build a congregation.
Last weekend, the congregation marked Prince of Peace’s 50th anniversary with three days of celebrations.

 

Reflecting on the milestone, Moroz said he believes those beginnings continue to have a major influence on the church today.
“I think (the congregation) see it as almost a tree. A part of their mandate to grow and multiply,” he said.

But what’s unique about Prince of Peace, according to Moroz, is that the desire to grow doesn’t necessarily translate into a push to recruit new members.

Not only does the Prince of Peace regularly partner with groups like Welcome Place, Siloam Mission and the Lighthouse Mission, it also has close ties with other churches in Windsor Park — particularly Windsor Park United Church and St. Bartholomew Anglican Church.

Moroz said Prince of Peace is also working with another Lutheran church, and two Anglican congregations, to start a church in the new south St. Boniface development of Sage Creek.

“In many congregations people would get their backs up and get competitive,” Moroz said. “Really, we haven’t had much of that.”

Lise Schwark, who has been a member of Prince of Peace since 1999, said she believed the congregation’s tolerant spirit comes from a desire to help the community — and that always takes priority over recruiting new members.

“Church is not between the four walls, it’s what we do in the community,” Schwark said. “That in some ways makes it more difficult to grow the church itself, the membership, but we want to make a difference.”

The congregation’s work not only extends past its walls and into the community, but across borders and oceans too.

The church sponsored a Somalian refugee and her son, and is working to help bring a Sudanese refugee over to Canada, explained Josephine Finnson, who joined the church eight years ago.

Finnson is also proud of Prince of Peace’s ties to other local churches, but acknowledges there’s a bit of a practical aspect to the relationships.
“I think it’s a way of surviving,” she said. “The busy society and the two parents working can make attending church difficult . . . This is just the way of keeping it around.”

There are also a number of people who are active participants in the congregation but are not members of the church, said Schwark, however they are fully accepted as members of the community.

Moroz said with a membership of about 110, a usual Sunday service will have 70 people in attendance — 10 of whom are not technically members.

But in the end, Finnson said, it doesn’t matter why the Prince of Peace congregation reaches out to other places of worship or accepts community members without pushing them to join the church.

What matters, she explained, is that the environment remains tolerant and positive — “compassion and friendliness and the willingness to accept anyone and treat them like human beings”

arielle.godbout@canstarnews.com