![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Our minister had asked, via e-mail, for people in the congregation to join her after this morning's service to distribute some leaflets around the neighborhood. This coming week, our church is hosting two evening meetings that are open to the public, and the minister wanted our neighbors to know about them. One concerns truancy issues at the local public high school. The other is being held by Equality Maryland to kick off its 2011 campaign for same-sex marriage and transgender rights. Since "membership and outreach" falls in my portfolio as a trustee, so to speak, I figured I'd better help out. Besides, I get my share of leaflets from evangelical churches that are closer to my house, and I've often wondered whether we could do some mass distribution of literature somehow.
Today was sunny but also cold and windy, so D. (the minister) got only two takers: me and one of the co-chairs of the Social Action Committee. I was the youngest of the three by several years, so I couldn't really bow out. We divided up the neighborhood and set out.
I started along the road that dead-ends at the back of the church's property. It's a neighborhood of mostly large 1960s ramblers on large lots. A few of these houses even have little Asian-style architectural and landscaping details that would have fit right into Palo Alto -- except the houses would have been closer together there. In the church's neighborhood, it took longer to walk around than I had anticipated.
I found an awful lot of people not home. Where do all these people go on a Sunday afternoon? One person told D. that there were several "For Sale" signs up because of the burglaries. One elderly woman who was home when I called told me that her house had been broken into a couple of months ago and the cops think that students from the neighborhood high school did it. She might come to the meeting on Tuesday, but she is having an alarm system installed in her house on Wednesday.
Only one person didn't open the door and instead shouted through the door, "Not interested, thank you!" One chatty woman in her 60s (I suppose) invited me in to sit at the kitchen table and pet her cats. Turns out she inherited that house from her late parents, so she lives part-time in that house while figuring out what to do with it. She is as involved with her Methodist church in College Park as our congregational leaders are with our church, but she seemed interested in the anti-truancy meeting. She also had a lot of complaints about the traffic and the development just over the Montgomery County line. Geez, like I can fix that.
Yep, it was a very interesting afternoon!
Today was sunny but also cold and windy, so D. (the minister) got only two takers: me and one of the co-chairs of the Social Action Committee. I was the youngest of the three by several years, so I couldn't really bow out. We divided up the neighborhood and set out.
I started along the road that dead-ends at the back of the church's property. It's a neighborhood of mostly large 1960s ramblers on large lots. A few of these houses even have little Asian-style architectural and landscaping details that would have fit right into Palo Alto -- except the houses would have been closer together there. In the church's neighborhood, it took longer to walk around than I had anticipated.
I found an awful lot of people not home. Where do all these people go on a Sunday afternoon? One person told D. that there were several "For Sale" signs up because of the burglaries. One elderly woman who was home when I called told me that her house had been broken into a couple of months ago and the cops think that students from the neighborhood high school did it. She might come to the meeting on Tuesday, but she is having an alarm system installed in her house on Wednesday.
Only one person didn't open the door and instead shouted through the door, "Not interested, thank you!" One chatty woman in her 60s (I suppose) invited me in to sit at the kitchen table and pet her cats. Turns out she inherited that house from her late parents, so she lives part-time in that house while figuring out what to do with it. She is as involved with her Methodist church in College Park as our congregational leaders are with our church, but she seemed interested in the anti-truancy meeting. She also had a lot of complaints about the traffic and the development just over the Montgomery County line. Geez, like I can fix that.
Yep, it was a very interesting afternoon!
