With clergy from the ELCA and the PC(USA), the church ministers to the city’s chronically homeless
October 7, 2024
The Rev. Schaunel Steinnagel administers Communion during an outdoor service at The Welcome Church in Philadelphia. (All photos courtesy of Schaunel Steinnagel)
The Welcome Church in Philadelphia, a church without walls, is served by an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor and by the Rev. Schaunel Steinnagel, a Minister of Word and Sacrament with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the associate pastor of The Welcome Church. It’s recognized as a community ministry by the Presbytery of Philadelphia and is a congregation under development in the ELCA’s Synod of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
According to Steinnagel, “The Welcome Church is a congregation made up predominantly by people experiencing chronic homelessness” who currently worship at outdoor venues in Center City, the Philadelphia neighborhood in the heart of one of the nation’s historic communities. “We are focused on confronting poverty, and we seek to be conscious of racism and being an antiracist organization.”
Steinnagel, the Presbytery of Philadelphia’s former hunger action enabler, said her colleague in ministry, the Rev. Violet Little, is “a wonderful connector” who founded The Welcome Church in 2007. “She would put on a pot of tea and invite people in to hang out,” Steinnagel said. “From that setting, people began to say to her, ‘We hear you are a Lutheran pastor. Are you going to offer Bible study?’ She started a series one summer, and basically it never ended. It grew into something we recognize today as The Welcome Church.”
With the hunger work Steinnagel was doing at the time, the ministry provided by The Welcome Church “made sense. I would sign up churches to provide coffee and snacks after worship.” When people at The Welcome Church would move from homelessness, the church would supply them with a welcome home kit including things they would need for their new kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.
Each year, The Welcome Church holds a Stations of the Cross service. Pictured is one held at Suburban Station in Philadelphia’s Center City.
In 2012, the presbytery restructured, and Steinnagel found herself looking for her next call. “I was talking to Violet on the phone,” Steinnagel recalled. “She said, ‘I’d hire you anytime.’ That started the conversation of me coming on board to The Welcome Church. For me, it’s something I’d long dreamed of doing. Being a pastor to people on the streets was my vision.”
Both Little and Steinnagel serve The Welcome Church part-time. On Mondays, The Welcome Church meets for Bible study at a Lutheran church. They’d been meeting on Tuesdays at a Methodist church, but a fire last spring “set us to wandering a bit,” Steinnagel said. For the past several months, The Welcome Church has been meeting outside Amtrak’s 30th Street Station seated around “some nice picnic tables” to enjoy coffee and cold drinks together as a friend does recreation and art projects with anyone who wants to.
On two Sundays every month, The Welcome Church holds a worship service with Communion in a park across from The Franklin Institute. “Worship is as simple as you can imagine,” Steinnagel said. “We get churches to do coffee hour with us. The coffee hour host offers people snack bags, and then we have the service.” The Rev. Peter Ahn of Olivet Covenant Presbyterian Church frequently shows up with his guitar. A man from a Seventh-Day Adventist background “who continues to flirt with going to seminary” also helps lead music.
“We encourage people to think about, what of yourself is God calling you to share this week?” Steinnagel said. “It’s a wonderful community. It’s impossible to make it [unhoused] alone, and so people on the streets support one another.”
Two women’s groups from The Welcome Church meet once per month. One gives attendees the chance to chat over pizza and then weave. Another meets in the Comcast Center’s basement food court for coffee and “to hang out and talk,” Steinnagel said.
One thing Steinnagel appreciates about the ministry “is the reminder that lots of people, including me, hide behind the mask of having it all together,” she said. People who attend The Welcome Church “need each other and need to have a spiritual element in their lives. We are all sinners together, and it has a very equalizing effect.”
Learn more about The Welcome Church’s programs here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service
Daily Readings
Today’s Focus: The Welcome Church in Philadelphia
Let us join in prayer for:
PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Teresa Sontarp, Controller, Board of Pensions
Jake Souder, Program Assistant, Educational Resources, Office of the General Assembly
Let us pray
Lord God, we thank you for the many blessings you have so generously bestowed upon us. Open our hearts and minds and sharpen our eyesight so that we might see those places, near and far, where we can be your feet and hands in service to your reconciling love here on earth. Amen.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.