The Outdoor Church is an outdoor ministry to homeless men and women in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers prayer and communion services and pastoral assistance outdoors in all seasons and all weather in order to be accessible to men and women who, because of shame or embarrassment, hostility or illness, cannot or will not enter conventional churches. It takes the church to those who cannot or will not reach it on their own. "Cambridge's newest church ministers to this flock in their own space, with only the sky for a roof."[1]
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It is the mission of The Outdoor Church to reach most of the homeless men and women in Cambridge who live outdoors – approximately 100 people – and to provide them with spiritual and material sustenance. Like conventional churches, The Outdoor Church offers a broad array of pastoral services to its congregants, including prison and hospital visits, memorial and other services and pastoral counseling. "The Outdoor Church is mobile. It goes to the congregants."[2]
The Outdoor Church holds prayer and communion services every Sunday--at 9:00 AM in Porter Square, under the mobile sculpture near the T station, and at 1:00 PM on the Cambridge Common, near the tall Civil War monument and directly across from Christ Church Cambridge on Garden Street. Following the 1:00pm service, its lay and ordained ministers carry sandwiches, pastry, juice and clean white socks through Harvard Square and Central Square, where a meal and communion are offered to any homeless people they encounter.
The ministry of the Outdoor Church occurs year round, in all seasons and weather. Cambridge is home to many extraordinary church communities and public and private efforts to provide material assistance to homeless peoples; even so, many chronically homeless men and women cannot or will not avail themselves of more conventional forms of church and social service. The Outdoor Church was established to bring the spiritual and material care of our supporting churches to the homeless where they are. By holding services in public spaces and walking throughout neighborhoods where many homeless people live, the ministers are able to encounter those who cannot or will not avail themselves of services that require they go into more conventional church spaces.
The education and training of students and seminarians is an important part of the work of The Outdoor Church. The church is a field education site for the Harvard Divinity School. Students and seminarians from schools within the Boston Theological Institute as well as area school undergraduates regularly accompany and assist its clergy and lay volunteers.
Churches and individuals throughout the Greater Boston area support the Outdoor Church. Indoor churches contribute the sandwiches that are distributed every Sunday. In 2010, the Church expanded its meals program into Saturday; recruiting churches and student groups to prepare and distribute a meal outdoors each Saturday. Many of the supporting churches invite Rev. Mannis to preach and share stories and updates from the Outdoor Church. In conjunction with City Mission Society of Boston, the Outdoor Church regularly hosts visiting youth groups as part of Boston Urban Outreach.
The Outdoor Church is modeled on Ecclesia Ministries’ Common Cathedral,[3] an outdoor church for homeless men and women in Boston that has held services since 1998 each Sunday afternoon on the Boston Common. Rev. Jed Mannis was a lawyer in downtown Boston when he began offering pro bono legal services to homeless congregants at Common Cathedral. In 2003, he enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. Within a year, he and Rev. Pat Zifcak started the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, supported initially by the Harvard Square Clergy Association. In 2005, Rev. Jean Chapman joined the ministry team.
The Outdoor Church is non-denominational and ecumenical, using an accessible but recognizable liturgy that is based on the Book of Common Prayer.
A fuller history of the Outdoor Church, Joseph Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church by Jedediah Mannis, examines the Outdoor Church and the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman, a Unitarian minister who created and led a street ministry in Boston, Massachusetts, between 1826 and 1839 at the behest of his friend and college roommate, William Ellery Channing. Because of Tuckerman's innovative approach to encountering and helping the poor people he met near the Boston wharves, he is considered the father of American social work as well as a prescient, dedicated, and socially active minister whose work led directly to the Social Gospel Movement. The book examines and interprets Tuckerman's theology and ministry of outreach in light of the ministries of the Outdoor Church. Joseph Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church is a unique look at a radically innovative nineteenth-century minister through the prism of the actual application of his thinking and his example to an ongoing ministry to the chronically homeless men and women of Cambridge.
The Rev. Jedediah Mannis,[4] a minister of the United Church of Christ, the Rev. Pat Zifcak, a vocational deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and the Rev. Jean Chapman, a minister in the American Baptist Churches USA, are the ordained staff of The Outdoor Church. Clergy from churches throughout Cambridge regularly preside at its services on a rotating basis.