The mission of the St Thomas Church Community Outreach Group is to serve our neighbors in need and through doing so “save ourselves by saving others” (Ernest Milmore Stires, Eighth Rector 1901-1925).
Sign up to serve if you are interested in joining us. We look forward to working alongside you. If you’re interested in getting involved, you can also email us.
Our group currently operates an initiative called Neighbor to Neighbor. We meet every Saturday at the cloisters of the church on 53rd Street at 8:30am ET to operate a coffee, tea, pastry and fresh fruit breakfast service for our community, which runs between 9am and 10am ET.
History of Outreach at Saint Thomas
James 1:22
The history of social outreach at St Thomas is as old as the founding of the church itself and has long benefitted from the generosity and activism of its members. After being profoundly moved by the plight of New York’s urban poor, the sixth rector William Ferdinand Morgan (1857-1888) commissioned a survey to determine the conditions and needs of the City’s population. The report revealed “a long succession of such mournful pictures of debased and suffering humanity as might well make angels weep, and Christians tremble under a sense of their responsibility.”
That very sense of responsibility motivated Morgan and the parishioners of St Thomas to dispense food and medicine to those in need and found free chapels for public worship. In an age where admission to services and parish life in the great churches of New York were restricted to those who could afford the substantial annual pew rents, the free chapels were free and open to all.
In Christ’s name, I ask you to recognize, watch over and sustain The Free Chapel of St Thomas’s Church…the question is, can we afford to leave any portion of our vast Metropolis Churchless and Christless?
– Fr Morgan
The vestry and parishioners of St Thomas responded to Morgan’s call to support the Free Chapel with enthusiasm, “even though the parish itself faced a diminishing congregation and a deficit in current accounts.” The chapel was founded at the corner of Prince and Thompson Streets and offered spiritual services, Sunday school education, and an industrial school which taught practical tradework knowledge and “habits of industry” – all at no cost, being funded from the parishioners of St Thomas. The chapel eventually became independent from St Thomas in 1867.
Things are unequally distributed in this world, and it may be that in another world “one star differeth from another star in glory.” At any rate, many suffer here from having too little, and many from having too much. One class is unable to get the relief it needs and the other has not learned to give the relief in its power. All must suffer until the relief is given. The mission of St Thomas’s is to help us to save ourselves by saving others.
-Ernest Milmore Stires, Eighth Rector 1901-1925
Outreach efforts at St Thomas continued throughout the 20th century and into the 21st through the operations of the Soup Kitchen, which prepared approximately 325 bagged lunches for community members in need and distributed them every Saturday on the streets of midtown Manhattan. It is in the spirit of this long line of historical outreach that our own efforts, Neighbor to Neighbor, are rooted!
