In the season of hope, a story of renewal
Ormewood Park's Church of the Holy Comforter ministers to neighbors
who are mentally ill, developmentally disabled, sick or elderly

By GAYLE WHITE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/08/07

To a flock of the faithful — most crippled in body or mind but not in spirit — the promise of Easter is being fulfilled through an appropriately named little Episcopal church in Ormewood Park: The Church of the Holy Comforter.

More than a century old, it has been transformed more than once by the community it serves. Founded by middle-class whites, it later went through a racial transition and became heavily Jamaican, then dwindled to almost nothing. Now it ministers to neighbors who are mentally ill, developmentally disabled, sick or elderly and living in personal care homes nearby.

Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)

The Rev. Thomas Stubbs, an assisting priest, finds reason to chuckle at the loud, exuberant and heartfelt worship services.

Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)

Parishioner Robert L. Spearman, 90, shows his timeworn Bible. The vicar at Holy Comforter said the array of members has taught him about God and goodness.

Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)

At Palm Sunday services last week, Carlton Rucker (in dark jacket) receives Communion from Janie Garner. The church ministers to many from nearby personal care homes. The singing is often off-key, the members feel free to speak out during services, and the 'disabled' welcome and minister to 'normal' members and guests.

Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)

James Clark (left) and Joseph Farrar listen as the sermon is delivered last week on Palm Sunday.

Joey Ivansco/Staff (ENLARGE)

Acolyte Amazier Ouya looks upward at the wooden cross as he enters the church during a Palm Sunday procession last week. The church serves a diverse neighborhood, and vice versa.

As the church has renewed its parishioners, they have brought new life to it.

Today, along with most of Christendom, Holy Comforter's congregants will raise their voices in triumphal hymns celebrating the holiest day of the Christian calendar.

"I think it will be another fantastic Sunday," says Jack Wieland, 41, a church member since last year. "But in a sense, Holy Comforter celebrates Easter every Sunday. It doesn't wait till Easter to talk about second chances, new life, resurrection."

Some of Holy Comforter's worshippers occasionally sing loudly and off key or speak out at inappropriate times — there is no such thing as a rhetorical question from the pulpit says one preacher — but they are equally unabashed in their expressions of care and friendship. They infuse the church with what other members describe as "honesty" and "sincerity."

Wieland, vice president of sales and marketing for his family's residential development firm, became an Episcopalian while studying at Yale. A resident of Ansley Park, he says he joined Holy Comforter last year because of the sense of "radical welcome" he felt there.

It's the same feeling that Billy Shumate, 37, found during years of off-and-on living on the street.

At Holy Comforter, God "brings me a good preacher to hear the Word preached, and a good choir to sing songs," says Shumate, who has bipolar disorder.

He lives in a personal care home and rides to Holy Comforter in the church's van along with other residents: Vincent Coverson, 49, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic; Carmen Lightfoot, 51, who suffers from clinical depression; and Katherine Street, 31, who describes herself as a "slow learner."

"To me, it's a good church," Street says.

The Rev. Mike Tanner, Holy Comforter's vicar, estimates that three-quarters of the 90 or so worshippers at services every Sunday have some mental illness or disability.

One of Tanner's predecessors, the Rev. Stanley McGraw, is credited with setting Holy Comforter on its present path, and thereby saving it.

McGraw, who now lives in Charleston, S.C., was coordinator of the diocese's work with the poor under the late Bishop Bennett Sims in the early 1980s. By then, Holy Comforter was down to about a dozen regular attendees, and Sims had decided to close it.

McGraw volunteered to be the church's priest if the bishop would reconsider.

"I didn't know what I'd find there," McGraw recalls. "I didn't even realize all those personal care homes were there."

McGraw "just came out and started walking around the neighborhood," recalls Janie Garner, 81, a member since the early 1960s. "If he saw you, he'd stop and talk to you. He started visiting group homes, and all of a sudden these people started coming to church a few at a time. It just started growing and growing."

More joy than dignity

Before the church had vans, members drove by the personal care homes to give residents a ride to church, she says.

Garner and the remnant of the congregation that remained accepted the new people and the changes they brought.

Services "are a little noisier," she says. "It's a not as dignified as it used to be, but I just love the service."

"You know how some people like to go to church and dress up and show off?" asks Holy Comforter senior warden Barbara Jamison, a 25-year member. "We come to church as we are."

Allan McDermott, 85, who is Jamaican, joined in 1979, during the heyday of the church's West Indian influx. The church had a Jamaican priest at the time, and when he went to another church, much of the congregation followed. McDermott and his wife stayed. Now they drive from Fayette County every Sunday.

At times, his violin has been the only musical instrument in service.

Not too long after personal care home residents began attending the church, McDermott played at a funeral the church arranged for a young man who had leapt from the I-20 Moreland Avenue overpass near the church. The man, in his 20s, had occasionally come to church, always barefoot.

After the funeral, the man's mother, who was from a well-to-do family, approached McDermott to thank him for his part in the service and to tell him that the young man had left a message.

Holy Comforter, he said, was the only place he had found any peace.

Other Holy Comforter members have their own stories, some moving, some amusing.

McGraw remembers a personal care resident named Theodocia giving a Christmas present of a fur stole to an older lady, Miss Annie, who lived in a different group home. McGraw asked Theodocia about the gift.

Miss Annie was her friend, she told him, and Miss Annie had always wanted a fur. So, she put one on layaway and paid it off over a year.

"When I first went there, I probably assumed I had something to offer them," McGraw says. "Once I got to know them, I saw that on some level of their being, they're in touch with life on a different level than we are. I felt like I knew God and life on a much deeper level when I left than when I got there."

"There are epiphanies every day at Holy Comforter," says Tanner, its current vicar. Some are small but telling.

Once, he says, he was sitting in the fellowship hall with a man who had recently come out of drug treatment. "He looked completely washed out, tired and exhausted," Tanner says. As the priest struggled with what to say, a longtime mentally ill member of the church got up out of his chair, walked over, and patted the man on the shoulder.

"Here I was, trying to figure out what to do, and he had done it," says Tanner.

Tanner, 58, first came to Holy Comforter in 2003 when he was enrolled in Emory University's Candler School of Theology.

When Holy Comforter's priest left last summer, he became vicar — his third career after years as a telecommunications lawyer and an early-adulthood position as a pastor in the Church of Christ.

Classes secondary

Over the years Holy Comforter has developed its ministry beyond Sunday and Wednesday services to include classes in arts and crafts and gardening, and meals two days a week.

By 2002, the program had outgrown Holy Comforter's space. Nearby Woodland Hills Baptist Church offered its building.

Retired Atlanta Bishop Frank Allan teaches wood-turning on Thursdays.

Although it provides valuable opportunities for education and entertainment, he says, Holy Comforter is first and foremost a worshipping community. "From that came everything else they do."

Some Holy Comforter worshippers don't know what denomination the church is.

"Is it a Catholic church?" asked Deborah McMurray, 48, a group home resident who's been attending for just a month.

But she knows she finds acceptance there.

A church can provide "hope, meaning, support, a sense of purpose, a sense of being loved" for people with mental illness, says Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a Duke University psychiatrist who co-directs the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health. "We don't provide those things in psychiatry, not at that depth or personal level."

"Holy Comforter is filling a huge gap in these people's lives," says Kathryn Bryan, 28, a Candler School of Theology student who regularly visits parishioners in the personal care homes. "Without Holy Comforter they would be incredibly isolated in their communities."

Because many members are in and out of personal care homes — moving from the streets to homes to Grady Memorial or state psychiatric hospitals to jails — the church has trouble keeping up with them, she says.

But those are the people for whom Holy Comforter may be the only constant in life.

Now, as the neighborhoods nearby change again, with gentrification and escalation of real estate prices, Holy Comforter faces another challenge, says vicar Tanner.

"We're a church," he says. "We're not a mission to a specific group of people. There's a whole neighborhood out there. We're asking ourselves, 'How do we make ourselves more welcoming to people in the neighborhood?'"

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