Welcome

Dear Friends of St. Mark’s,

St. Mark’s is known in the community as a place of welcome and hospitality because of your generous spirit. Hospitality is a core value of our church community. When we began exploring the need for a capital campaign at St. Mark’s, a theme that came up again and again is that St. Mark’s is a place where meaningful connections are made—connections within the parish and beyond our walls into the surrounding community. In my nearly 10 years as your rector, I have seen this value in action whenever we gather for worship or fellowship, for formation or outreach. Special relationships that span generations and that endure the passage of time are present in this place.

Beyond our walls, we make meaningful connections through our Wednesday lunch program, which was begun in 2015. This program serves lunch to nearly 50 people each week. Since 1986, we have partnered with Interfaith Action of Evanston to run a hospitality center, open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. for warmth, breakfast, job coaching and computer training. In 2019, the Center offered hospitality to 1369 guests for 8481 visits.

While Covid-19 has certainly turned the world as we know it on its head, one thing remains constant and that is St. Mark’s commitment to each other and to our community. Even while our church building was closed for worship, our outreach ministries—the hospitality center and the Wednesday lunch program—continued to operate out of St. Mark’s—still making a difference even in the midst of this pandemic. While our in-person gatherings for worship and fellowship were suspended, we continued to meet weekly over Zoom for prayer and conversation. And, when so many other businesses were closed to even the most vulnerable among us, our ministries to the homeless and the hungry continued to operate within our doors.

I invite each of you to join with me and the members of our capital campaign team as we pray and pledge to continue our generosity of spirit though a gift to the Creating Meaningful Connections capital campaign. I’m very excited about moving forward on these campaign projects as we continue to grow into our future together!

The Rev. Dr. Debra K. Bullock
Rector

Make a Pledge

Campaign Prayer

Gracious God, we give you thanks for establishing your Church as a place of holy hospitality for all who seek you, for welcoming us so that we might welcome others in your name. We offer our prayers of gratitude for our forbearers in Christ who came before us to help make St. Mark’s Episcopal Church the place of prayer, fellowship and outreach that it is today. Help us as we work together to create meaningful connections in this place for generations to come through the renovation of our space. May we be generous as we look to our future together. We humbly ask you to send your Holy Spirit upon us to guide our parish throughout this capital campaign that we might be ever mindful that all that we are and all that we have are gifts from you. Lead us to sacrificial levels of generosity as we work to advance the life and ministry of St. Mark’s. All this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.