Disciple: Extending the Eucharistic Table

The Advocate, Chapel Hill, keeps finding new ways to share space with the community

By Summerlee Walter

The Church of the Advocate, Chapel Hill, has always been about the creative use of space to serve its community. During its first 10 years, the congregation lived a nomadic existence, learning as they went until they were prepared to buy their current 15-acre plot of land in 2011.The building in which the congregation worships used to be known as St. Philip’s before they transported it more than 80 miles from Germanton to Chapel Hill in 2012. In 2015, the Advocate collaborated with Pee Wee Homes, a local affordable housing nonprofit that builds tiny homes and rents them to people who are currently or chronically homeless. Three such tiny homes now dot the Advocate’s campus. A 2017 Stewardship of Creation grant from The Episcopal Church allowed the Advocate to transform five acres of its campus into a food-producing habitat full of native plants known as the Piedmont Patch Project. Both neighbors and residents of the tiny homes fish in the pond stocked with bass, brim and catfish. A 600-square-foot garden provides vegetables for meals after worship, the Community Market food pantry and neighbors living in the Pee Wee Homes. Residents from nearby developments, where yards are small, visit the campus to walk, picnic or watch their kids play.

[Image: Parishioner Steven Post finishes the brick oven that will complement the outdoor gathering area, The Fold and the Field, at the Advocate, Chapel Hill. Photo by the Rev. Marion Sprott]

The area around the Advocate reflects a cross section of society. Planned developments include $500,000 homes, supportive housing for women escaping abusive situations, townhouses, affordable housing and a new elementary school. The Rev. Marion Sprott, vicar, often engages visitors to learn why they visit the Advocate’s campus. Some come to enjoy the outdoors because they lack yard space. Others simply find the property beautiful.

About a year ago, one neighbor interrupted her conversation with Sprott to run back to her home and retrieve a gift. It was a large framed photograph of the Advocate taken from across the pond at sunset, the church’s reflection hazy in the water. She had given the photograph to her husband for Christmas, but it was too small for its intended display area, so she bought him a bigger one and gifted the original to the church.

“These people do not go to this church, but [the Advocate] meant so much to them that this was a Christmas present,” Sprott explained.

The most recent addition to the Advocate’s campus will extend the congregation’s hospitality to the community even further. A brick pizza and bread oven forms the centerpiece of a newly constructed pavilion known as the Fold. Next to the Fold is an new parking lot, known as the Field, to accommodate the growing Advocate community. Together the Fold and the Field will allow the Advocate to expand its welcome to the community.

“The idea is also to extend this eucharistic table and break bread, recognizing that the bread is for everyone,” Sprott said.

THE FIELD AND THE FOLD

Advocate parishioner Don Rose has been baking sourdough bread for more than 30 years. His children discovered the hobby on Instagram during the COVID-19 pandemic and asked their dad to teach them how to bake during the Christmas holiday. As Rose got back into baking, he started thinking about building a brick oven in his backyard. An internet search led him to discover a cluster of brick ovens located at Methodist churches in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and a TEDTalk by one of the Methodist pastors about a bread-baking ministry.

Rose’s plan shifted. He approached the Rev. Lisa Fischbeck, at the time vicar of the Advocate, with his new plan: a brick oven and accompanying bread ministry at the Advocate. Fischbeck shared that she’s been dreaming of a bread oven at the church for 20 years. And it would fit in well with the Fold project already underway.

There are two types of brick ovens: white and black. In a white oven, the baker builds the fire beneath the hearth, and the oven can be refired in the midst of baking. In the more common black oven, the fire burns in the oven cavity itself, and the baker banks the fire and scrapes out the ashes before cooking the bread using the retained heat. To cook pizza in a black oven, a baker pushes the coals to the back of the oven cavity and bakes the pizza next to them. Rose wanted to build a black oven.

In February, he visited Costa Rica to learn how from Bricks to Bread, a woman-run nonprofit that builds brick ovens for women who want to start their own bakeries. When he returned, the people of the Advocate built the deck, poured concrete, stacked fire brick and slathered cement over the bricks. A mason put the finishing touches on the oven’s facade and built the chimney, and a builder placed the Fold’s steel beams and constructed the roof. While Rose brought the vision and did the research for the brick oven, parishioner Ames Herbert guided the overall construction of the the brick oven, the Fold and the Field.

"It’s going to serve a social function, and I think a little bigger plan to use it as community outreach,” Herbert said.

Future dreams for the Fold include neighborhood pizza nights; bread-baking classes; fresh bread giveaways to neighbors, newcomers and food pantries; and fundraisers for local schools and community groups.

“I feel like we are making a third space here,” Sprott said. “I think our land already has been a third space for people to come together—people who are part of the Advocate and people who are not part of the Advocate—and this is an expansion of that welcome.”

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

The Advocate celebrated its 20th anniversary as a congregation on September 30. To mark this milestone anniversary, the church has applied for admission to Annual Convention as a parish. (The Advocate currently is a mission. Applying for parish status requires a congregation to demonstrate financial independence and gather 100 signatures from regular worshipers.) The 208th Annual Convention will welcome the Advocate to parish status on Saturday, November 18.

“We’re kind of growing up,” Sprott. “We’ve become an adult, and there’s some wonderful milestones here. We’re going to take time to celebrate them, but also we’re looking at the next 20 years of the Advocate. Where is God calling us right now?

“It’s not ours. We get to be stewards of this, but it’s not ours. It’s just this extension and gift into the community that we get to play around with and meet cool people and be a sign of God’s grace and love here.”

Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.