Photo: Erick Brown The St. Luke's Episcopal Church choir during a recent service. The church is celebrating its 175th year in East Greenwich. St. Luke’s, 175 years young BY ABBY FOX
If you want to know the approach of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, go straight to the altar and look around.
“What I love, is that the essence of who we are is expressed here,” said Father Craig Burlington, standing in the parish’s heart, pointing to the seven windows behind him, featuring gospel writers Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and two windows of St. Cecilia, patron of musicians.
“When you’re celebrating Christ’s death and resurrection, out of that comes light and love, and messengers,” he said. “The purpose is not self-serving, but to manifest that light for the sake of the world.”
This year, the church is celebrating 175 years in East Greenwich. In 1834, St. Luke’s was incorporated as a parish, of 22 people. In 1876, the church building as we know it today on Peirce Street was built.
The 1830s is a long time ago, but if you remember that “our neighbor, St. Paul’s in Wickford, just turned 300,” he said, St. Luke’s suddenly appears quite young.
East Greenwich’s late start, at least as compared with Wickford, as a place for Episcopalians to meet, reflects that “it took awhile for the Episcopalian church to become imbedded in American culture,” Craig said, “even though several of the founders were Episcopalian.”
Well, it’s clear the church has made up for lost time, then now that a Sunday service can attract between 200 and 300 people, many of them young families.
Burlington said he’s reminded of the church’s place in history, not only through the architecture and the lovely, frequently commented-upon stained-glass windows, but also due to the family names that have stayed with the church for decades, such as the Eldredge family. “Henry Eldredge was the last of the Eldredges at St. Luke’s,” he said. “He was a wonderful man, a great inspiration to me, a pillar of the parish, and his ancestors had formed it.” The family remains devoted, he said, giving a donation every year, through Henry’s son, Charles, “which shows something of the power of heritage.”
Bud Cockrell and his wife Natalie, married at St. Luke’s in 1952, are part of that history, too.
“It’s a friendly inviting church to be a member of,” Natalie Cockrell said. “I just love the fact the young people take such a big part of the church services and they get a wonderful background in music.” If anything’s grown or changed over the years, she commented on today’s “warm feeling of informality; which is nice. It used to be more formal. What impresses me most are the young people coming along. They’re following in their parents footsteps.”
To celebrate turning 175, the church is commemorating the old and working on the new, making a DVD of interviews of long-time parishioners, but also planning service trips, such as a youth mission trip to the Dominican Republic, where the church has gone for 10 years; and an interfaith trip to New Orleans with Temple Torat Yisrael. Closer to home, there’s the soup kitchen at St. George’s in Central Falls, as well as several service projects, for Hasbro Children’s Hospital and other groups. For the church’s more studious members, the springtime brings a seven-week Bible study, “Sewing tears, Reaping Joy,” featuring a study of Brahms’ “Requiem” to match each week’s lesson, “bringing people from grief and joy,” Craig said, appropriate for the Lent-Easter season.
Burlington said more than once that a church is only as useful as much as it responds to the real world needs. “In this day and age, there’s a soul hunger for being more involved in meaningful ways,” he said. “People are being brought back to basic values.”
Both the church and President Barack Obama have had a similar message, he said, in that they have said, “Get out, for God’s sake, and do something for other people; claim some place where you can serve.” Burlington said it was a “great coincidence, or ‘God-incidence,’” that Obama’s call for more service in his Inaugural address came at the same time as St. Luke’s launched its anniversary celebration, “where we’re called to pass on the light; all of us have this incredible opportunity to respect one another, and get beyond our denominational affiliations.”
More broadly, Craig reflected on what it means to honor an anniversary in the midst of the country’s deepening economic failure. “I think there’s a blessing in this terrible financial crisis, that all of our commercial values are being tested and questioned,” he said. “People are losing their money and maybe it’s a means to renew basic values, to serve one another.” Like many people and organizations, the church is finding it too must cut back programs and freeze its salaries, coping with its own deficit. “Everyone’s in this deficit reality, and we’re being lead into new, unknown places of light,” he said.
Asked why the church membership is doing so well, Burlington said he surveys every new member and can only pass along what they tell him. “They come for their kids, for the music, youth and service programs we have,” he and more personally, “people feel welcomed. It feels like home.”
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