COPA Invites Communities to Lament
This Tuesday Deacon Scott will be the co-chair for the COPA Clergy/Institutional Leaders gathering. We will both celebrate our successes of the past year and discuss the role of lament in addressing power imbalances in the community. The pandemic is not over, and people continue to suffer.
We will be discussing the Walter Brueggemann essay The Costly Loss of Lament and how a community needs to notice that things are not right, that they can be changed, and that it’s God’s obligation to change things. “The lament form,” Brueggemann writes, “concerns a redistribution of power.” If you would like a copy of the essay, please email Deacon Scott: scott@stmarysbythesea.org.
St. Mary’s has been a key member of COPA since the beginning. In the past year St. Mary’s leaders took the initiative in asking the County Supervisors to allocate $4.9 million to fund 100 Community Health Workers. Last month St. Mary’s leaders scheduled meetings with two County Supervisors and obtained their support to extend the program through March 2022. The Community Health Workers have served as a critical link in distributing testing and vaccine information and providing basic services to people in quarantine or infected with the corona virus. If you would like to know more about COPA, please contact Jack or Kathy Herbig or Jackie Frey.