 Recently, Bishop Curry, Diocesan staff, and area clergy were invited to learn more about the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry. Pictured, from left, are Maria Acosta, Communications and Immigration Specialist; Silvia Cendejas, Assistant Director; Bishop Curry, and The Rev. Antonio Rojas, Director of EFWM. |
The Episcopal Farmworker Ministry: A Mission in Our Backyard
By Paul Nelson
from The North Carolina Disciple, December 2009
Just 45 minutes east of Raleigh, 500 people gather each Sunday morning in a church with open sides. The common thread in this community is its present or past involvement in farm work. Members of this La Sagrada Familia Episcopal Church include recent citizens, migrant farm families and men from nearby farm labor camps. This church, with its surrounding recreational fields and attached headquarters building for the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry (EFwM), is the spiritual and social center in the lives of these people. Here they baptize their babies, watch their children receive first communion and their sons and daughters marry, celebrating the important events in their lives at picnics and dinners. Here, they also find assistance with the legal complexities of their lives.
This beautiful testimony to God’s love has a recent history. During the late 1970s, a group of Episcopal Church Women from the Eastern and North Carolina dioceses committed themselves to collecting clothing and delivering it to the American and Haitian migrant farmworker families in the Newton Grove area. To meet growing needs for child care and education during the 1980s, the group – under the support of Bishops Sanders and Fraser – became a ministry of the two dioceses. A coordinator was hired who worked out of the Tri-County Health Clinic facilities, located next to the current church.
With time the two dioceses purchased adjacent land, and the ministry set up a migrant Headstart educational program. As the program flourished, the need for a spiritual minister became apparent. Divine Province answered this need in Father Tony Rojas, formerly a Catholic priest in Colombia, but then a newly ordained Episcopal minister in Puerto Rico, who was seeking a ministry among the migrant farmers. He was hired in the early 1990s.
Father Tony is “the personification of the love of Jesus Christ,” says one of the volunteers who works with the ministry. Fr. Tony and his wife Lucia, an unpaid volunteer, labor from sunrise to sunset seven days a week to meet the spiritual and temporal needs of their flock. Helping them in this work are the tireless Silvia Cendejas, Assistant Director, and Maria Acosta, Communications and Immigration Specialist.
The EFwM is a multifaceted program providing: courses in family planning to teens, English as- a-second-language to over 120 people, AA, youth and adult education; a migrant Headstart program; transportation to Sunday worship for those without a car; emergency medical transportation; clothing and necessities; assistance with filing of legal document forms; annual distribution of Christmas gifts and Easter baskets to over 800 children; an adopt-a-camp program; and a year-end Festival in September to foster unity and support among its 4,000 participants.
This program finds its support among numerous volunteers from Episcopal churches but also from Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Quaker and Jewish churches and temples. The Presbyterian Church recently assigned Rev. Doug Barney to work with our ministry at the EFwM center. St. Michael’s has been involved with the ministry from the beginning. We have had as recently as this past year, two members on the board of directors. Through outreach, Evening in Parish, Gifts of Grace, and EFW we have financially and materially supported the total program; groups have participated in mission weekends, packaging clothing and visiting camps; our youth constructed a volleyball court at the center, and we have adopted labor camps over the past four years, enriching the lives of over 100 men. For more information about Episcopal Farmworker Ministry and how you can help, visit www. efwm.org.