“Do Justice, Love Mercy, and Walk Humbly with God.” St. Francis Episcopal Parish & Community Center, a congregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland in Timonium, draws those words from Micah 6:8 and places them at the heart of the Community Agreements its members drafted together in the fall of 2023. The agreements invite all to gather around tables. Under the call to do justice, they commit the parish to feeding its neighbors and caring for Creation; under the call to walk humbly, they commit to being a bilingual community. The eclectic, intergenerational, and multicultural congregation worships in English at 10 a.m. and in Spanish at 11:30 a.m. each Sunday.
“The focus of our faith is the table,” the parish writes, explaining its commitment to feeding neighbors. In the parish’s telling, each breaking of bread recalls a God who provides for all, and food ties every person to the neighbor and to the land. St. Francis recommends The Just Kitchen, by Derrick Weston and Anna Woofenden, to readers who want to think further about food and justice. The church counts Stories of Food + Faith, the collective Weston founded, among its partners. Weston has visited the parish several times as a guest preacher and teacher.
Photo Courtesy St. Francis Episcopal Parish & Community Center
Through July, neighbors visited the parish’s Indoor Choice Pantry by appointment on Sundays and Mondays, choosing canned fruits and vegetables, rice, beans, pasta, cereal, and other shelf-stable staples. On Wednesday, August 5, St. Francis set the appointments aside and held its first walk-in community pantry, which the parish introduced as a trial run for August.
The Wednesday pantry has continued into the fall, with dates on the parish calendar through November. From 6 to 7 p.m. in the Undercroft of the Community Center, neighbors choose food for their families without an appointment, while sharing coffee and light snacks. Once a month, a drive-thru called Pantry on the Go gives away fresh produce, and one Thursday morning each month a delivery truck from the Maryland Food Bank restocks the pantry shelves. “Our Timonium community is experiencing increased food insecurity,” the parish told supporters this spring. Statewide, the Maryland Food Bank reports that one in three Marylanders faces food insecurity.
Photo Courtesy St. Francis Episcopal Parish & Community Center
The parish’s Green Team tends a community garden and orchard where strawberries, raspberries, tomatoes, beans, peas, garlic, peppers, cucumbers, and herbs grow. The harvest goes to the pantry and to Welcome Table Wednesday, the community dinner the parish hosts at 6 p.m. during the school year. The Rev. Dr. Amy Slaughter, the parish’s rector, counts Welcome Table Wednesday among the places where she meets people one-on-one and in small groups. She sums up her outlook in a single line: “I believe God is up to something beautiful in this world.”
No gardening experience is needed to water, weed, or tend to a plot. With guidance and trees from the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy, the parish has planted native oaks, maples, dogwoods, cedars, and redbuds, along with four young pawpaws. In 2022, Eagle Scout Jacob Towner helped create a no-mow zone of native plants beside a lane of 35 raspberry canes.
Seven rain gardens on the grounds treat stormwater running off the entire campus, according to Interfaith Partners for the Chesapeake, reducing polluted runoff downstream and helping protect the drinking water supply in Loch Raven Reservoir. Loch Raven, the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy notes, is one of the two reservoirs that provide most of the Baltimore area’s drinking water. St. Francis is also a Good News Garden, part of a church-wide movement of congregations, schools, camps, seminaries, and monasteries that the Episcopal Church describes as “transformational agrarian ministry that feeds body, mind, and spirit.” Participants pledge to plant, pray, and proclaim more than they otherwise would, and to share their bounty with their communities.
Photo Courtesy St. Francis Episcopal Parish & Community Center
The parish calendar marked a Season of Creation that ran from September 1 through October 4, with a blessing of the animals scheduled for the Feast of St. Francis at its close. The Orthodox Church set aside September 1 for prayer for Creation in 1989. The World Council of Churches later extended it to October 4, and in 2015 Pope Francis instituted the same day of prayer in the Catholic Church. “Together with all Christians, we celebrate it,” Pope Leo XIV said last year.
The parish is looking for a beekeeper “to resurrect our dormant apiary”; photos on its apiary page show a honey harvest from the fall of 2023, and the Green Team welcomes anyone who would like to help. In Timonium, doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God take the shape of a Wednesday pantry, a raspberry row, a rain garden beside the parking lot, and a hive waiting to hum again.
Photo Courtesy St. Francis Episcopal Parish & Community Center
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