HDS - OMS - Field Education Handbook

Project: The Outdoor Church of Cambridge is a church for homeless men and women in the Cambridge area. The Church meets outdoors in all seasons and weather, where it encounters those members of the homeless community who are unsheltered. The Outdoor Church brings the church to people who cannot, or will not, attend conventional churches.

Every Sunday, regardless of the weather, the Outdoor Church offers a prayer service with communion at 9:00 AM at Porter Square and at 1:00 PM on the Cambridge Common. We share sandwiches, pastry, juice and coffee afterward. Following the afternoon service, we take sandwiches, juice and clean white socks into Harvard Square and Central Square, where we offer a meal, communion or a blessing and a pastoral presence to many other homeless people. The Outdoor Church provides many pastoral services to its parishioners, including memorial services and visits to prisons, hospitals and shelters.

Our supporting churches provide essential volunteer help and much of the sandwiches, juice, socks and other clothes distributed by the Church in the course of its ministry. Staffed by Rev. Pat Zifcak, an Episcopal deacon, Rev. Jean Chapman, an American Baptist minister and Rev. Jedediah Mannis, a UCC minister, the Church has been ministering to sixty to seventy chronically homeless men and women in the Cambridge area for more than four years.

Student Involvement: The student intern will have the opportunity to participate in all aspects of worship at the Outdoor Church, including preparation for worship, leading prayers, preparing and offering exegetical comment on the day's Scripture reading and participating in the administration of the sacraments. S/he will meet and minister to the homeless men and women we encounter in Porter Square, Harvard Square and Central Square, in shelters and at meals programs. The student intern will join our ordained clergy in pastoral visits to the hospitals, jails, DHM facilities, prisons, and other institutions in which our congregants are confined. S/he will help prepare, serve and participate in the meal served at Christ Church on Thursday night. The student intern will work with members of our supporting churches who have volunteered to prepare sandwiches and other food, to make or provide socks, scarves, hats and other articles of clothes or to attend services outdoors. S/he will work with members of the social outreach and public ministry committees of our supporting churches and may have the opportunity to preach at one or more of them.

Arts of Ministry Competencies: Preaching and Worship. Pastoral Care and Counseling. Administration and Program Development. Denominational Polity.

Harvard Divinity School

Ministry Studies

Field Education Handbook