Category: With Love, Flyover

Canon Peggy Bean and leaders from the Diocese of Milwaukee talk about the exciting parish redevelopment going on in Flyover country.

This article orginally appeared on Episcopal News Service. For some, deciding to start a campus ministry from scratch may not seem like the most logical step to grow their church community. After all, college students are by nature transient and unlikely to become sustaining members of the parishes they attend while in college. But for St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on the east side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it seemed the right choice because of its location just a few blocks south of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, or UWM. “I thought it would be irresponsible not to develop a ministry for our closest neighbors,” said the Rev. Ian Burch, St. Mark’s rector. “These students are in our mission field.” Burch began serving at St. Mark’s in January 2016, so he was relatively…

We sat down with the Rev. Canon Liz Easton, Canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska, to talk about life in the middle - how did a young Seattle priest end up in the flyover states? Learn more about Flyover Church: www.flyoverchurch.org www.facebook.com/flyoverchurch

When I survey all the places where my priestly experiences and education might take me, I see that the world is my proverbial oyster. It seems there are always opportunities on both coasts of the U.S. as well as in Europe, Taiwan, the Caribbean, or plenty of other locales. Even so, to this point in my ministry I have felt the strongest call to the Midwest. And it is in this part of the country that my family and I have genuinely thrived. I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to explain why, but here’s the bottom line: It’s not what you think, and you’ll never know until you come see for yourself. Instead of racing past it all at impossible speed from 35,000 feet, you should…

It was the summer of 1993 when I first experienced church camp.   I had grown up camping with my family on the shores of Lake Leelanau in northern Michigan and had camped with my Boy Scout troop in central Ohio, but never before had I attended church camp. To be honest, I had always thought that church camp was for church nerds; for those who did not fit in elsewhere, so needed a place to go and a camp to call their own.  I never thought the day would come when I would consider myself a part of that group.  I never thought that church camp would become such an integral part of my identity and sense of call. [caption id="attachment_236" align="aligncenter" width="604"] The Rev. Ken Hitch and a…

When I lived in Grand Rapids, a folk artist named Reb hung a primitive paint and particle-board sign in his neighborhood that said “East Hills – the Center of the Universe.” It seems the center has shifted a hundred miles east of Michigan’s second city to Flint, my home for the past year and a half.  Flint, once known as the birthplace and hospice bed of General Motors, is now known by the hashtag, #FlintWaterCrisis. The story of the Flint Water Crisis is well-known: the cash-strapped rust belt city came under state-appointed emergency management and, to save money, switched its water source from Lake Huron by way of Detroit to the Flint River. To save more money, the corrosive river water flowed through the taps less than fully treated, which…