Community Outreach
At a joint service in the spring of 2008, our three amalgamating congregations identified that God is calling us, above all, to reach out to the community. Since amalgamation, we have been working to put this mission into action.
A large part of Silver Spire's outreach relates to the downtown homeless community. Out of the Cold, a program that provides a hot meal and a place to sleep every night of the week from November through March, runs out of our church on Monday nights. Our morning prayer services (Monday through Saturday, 9-10 a.m.) have also brought together people from the church and from the homeless community. Silver Spire and its We Care Committee work to ease the burdens of poverty in our community, liaising with Community Care St. Catharines (the local food bank), providing emergency food aid, supporting the services offered by Start Me Up Niagara, and advocating on behalf of the economically marginalized. Various teams from our church also work at St. George's Breakfast Club, which provides a hot breakfast at St. George's Anglican Church every morning of the year.
Silver Spire, like its predecessor churches (Memorial, St. Paul Street and Welland Avenue United), supports a number of other locally based projects, including Bethlehem Place, the RAFT teen shelter, Gillian's Place and AIDS Niagara. We also support locally based but internationally focused projects, such as Canada Foodgrains Bank and God's Hope: The Sierra Leone Children's Project.
Our church also reaches out to the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community, participating in the local, largely LGBT-organized solstice services, and offering space for various community groups to meet. We are one of the few churches in the city to offer same-sex marriage services.
Our church's various outreach projects fall under the umbrella of the Outreach Committee (see above).
