You’ve heard John McCard talk about Community – Discipleship – Service as the three pillars of St. James’s Ministry. This event is all about Community and enabling our Community to Serve.
A “best-of” fellowship event, Mardi Gras features many of our own providing great food and drink, wonderful live auction choices, and lots of us having a great time together. One of the biggest St. James’s parties of the year, Mardi Gras also is the primary funding source for our St. James’s Mission and Outreach Ministries, vital ministries that enable us to serve in our own city and well beyond. Held each year on Fat Tuesday at 6:00pm in Valentine Hall and Michaux House. Even in COVID times, the 2021 Virtual Mardi Gras for Mission and Outreach event raised more than $30,000 for mission and outreach sponsored by St. James’s.
About our ministries:
Outreach Ministry funding is distributed to 20-some community nonprofits serving our most vulnerable neighbors right here in Richmond. Particular target areas of funds include our city’s homeless population, underserved children, neighbors battling addiction, abuse victims, and a rapidly growing elderly population. The Outreach Committee believes that maintaining these partnerships is a vital way in which we as a faith family fulfill our call to be “Doers of the Word and not Hearers only.”
Our Missions Ministry has a rich history of domestic and international mission trips. Each year we send seven or eight teams out to share God’s love through service. Trip participants contribute a fee to cover their transportation, lodging and food costs while grants from the mission fund are used to purchase material, supplies, equipment rental, specialized local labor, or whatever else is needed to complete the project at hand, which might include building improvement and maintenance for a home for disabled children in Haiti, the Appalachian area of southwest Virginia, and for our poverty-stricken neighbors right here in RVA; land clearing and site prep work for an Episcopal church serving a poor community in Navajo land, Utah; summer camp for 60 at risk girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; and specialized surgeries here in Richmond for needy children through the World Pediatric Project.