VARITA MICHELL, DIRECTOR
Summer in the City (SITC) is an urban ministry experience hosted by St. Matthew’s Cathedral, 5100 Ross Ave., Dallas, Texas 75206. Each year St. Matthew’s Cathedral hosts youth groups from around the diocese to come and experience an inner city youth mission. The Summer in the City youth volunteer with Bishop’s camp and work in various outreach ministries in the area.
We are excited for another great summer city mission at the Cathedral. A week at SITC begins at 4 p.m. on Sunday and ends at 1:30 p.m. on Friday. The dates for the 2015 sessions are:
June 14-19- Holy Cross – Paris- Pending
June 21-26- St. Nicholas- Matt Stroud; matts@stnicksonline.org
June 28-July 3- NO SITC
July 5-10
July 12-17- Epiphany- Audrey Sutton- audreyjsutton@gmail.com; frbill@epiphany-richardson.org
July 19-24- Holy Trinity Rockwall
J
uly 26-31- St. Peter’s McKinney; Kathy Garrett
The SITC groups volunteered at C.C.Young Retirement Home, and Our Savior Community Gardens.
We continued a very special program on Tuesday afternoons for area homeless families. We are indebted to Captain Hope’s Kids for connecting us with these families. Participants enjoyed a Splash Party with water activities, ice cream, board games and singing, sharing and prayer.
VBS Wed Outreach
This summer the Summer in the City (SITC) youth as well as families from the 10:30(Birchum’s, Kidane’s, Lambert’s) and 12:30 (5 adults and 5 youth)congregations led a VBS on 5 Wed. nights at the Casa Buena Apartments across the street from the Cathedral during June and July.
We had permission from the owner to use the vacant lot on San Jacinto and Bennett for our outreach. There were large trees and plenty of grass for the games. The group went door to door an invited children to come for games, music , Bible skits and story, prayer, crafts and snacks. The popsicles were wonderful!
Over the summer the group grew from 25 to 140 on the last night! On Wed. July 30th we hosted the neighborhood children and families for a cook-out and water slide fun on our front side lawn.
God is building trust and relationships with our neighbors in an amazing way! Watch for more opportunities to reach out in the future.
Many thanks to those who brought ice cream for the Shelter family outreaches that we had this summer- Libby, Alaine and Laura.
Also, a big thank you to those who contributed money for ice cream and a few meals for SITC- Carole, Alice, Judith and Jody.
As usual the meals that the congregation provided for the SITC were amazing and much appreciated! Thanks goes to Valerie, Kathy, Lucy, Helen, Joan, Diane, Kim, Ron and Wendy, Andrea, Jody, Phillip, Lauren, Kenny, Roxan, Alicia, Janis and Mildred and Diana.
Another activity that we added last summer was spending time with the older Bishop’s camp students several times a week with our SITC youth. We played games, did ice breaker activities together and some sharing. We will continue all of these programs this coming summer.
We will hire several college interns to help run the program and will be looking for volunteers from the Cathedral to read with students and help with the outreaches in the neighborhood.
Let’s continue to MOVE FORWARD AND REACH OUT THIS SUMMER 2015!
