How to be church for the wrong people: emerging worship with whores, foreigners and the ritually unclean. Paul Fromberg and Sara Miles from St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco on welcoming the stranger.
Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and writer. Then early one morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church.
'I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian,' she writes. 'Or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut.' But she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed....'
Sara Miles, journalist, anthologist and best-selling author of the spiritual memoir Take This Bread is the founder of St Gregory's Food Pantry and lives in San Franciso with her family. This is her first visit to Greenbelt and she is accompanied by Paul Fromberg a priest and artist who works with Sara at St. Gregory's Church, particularly on developing the connections among liturgy, service and art.
Sara is the author of How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley and co-editor of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan and the anthology Opposite Sex.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Out, The Progressive, La Jornada and Salon, among others. She has written extensively on military affairs, politics and culture.
