Haitians Find Welcome in Connecticut Parish
Episcopal News Service. August 19, 1992 [92180]
James Thrall, Director of Communitcation in the Diocese of Connecticut
Robert St. Fleur leans back, legs crossed at the ankles, and practices a few riffs on his red and black electric guitar. When he is joined by a clarinetist and a drummer tapping a single tall conga drum with his hands, the combo swings into a familiar jazz tune.
It is time for church.
As with most churches, music marks the worship of L'Eglise de la Epiphanie (The Church of the Epiphany), one of the newest congregations in the Diocese of Connecticut, but it is music with a refreshingly syncopated beat. The 20 to 60 Haitians who gather each Sunday evening at St. John's, Stamford, mingle French and Creole languages and jazz into their own expression of Episcopal worship.
The ministry is at the same time traditional in its focus. "We are very interested in evangelism," said the Rev. Jean-Elie Millien, vicar. "It is my desire to try to go back in a certain way to what the church was when it was born." Millien, who also serves a predominantly Hispanic congregation at the Church of the Ascension in New Haven, started to draw the Haitians together in the spring of 1991 in response to an invitation from the Rev. Leander Harding, St. John's rector. Harding said that his desire to reach out to the different ethnic communities in the Stamford-Norwalk area fit well with Millien's ability to work with his compatriots from Haiti.
"It all started with Richard Tombaugh (diocesan canon to the ordinary)," Harding said. "He gave me a call and made me aware of Father Millien's existence. I told Millien about my vision of the future of this parish as a downtown parish, which is to think of it as a multi-congregational parish with parallel ministries. It quickly became evident that Father Millien was highly thought of in the Haitian community," Harding continued. "There was an enthusiastic response to his ministry, and there quickly emerged a congregation with its own identity."
After a series of discussions, Millien and other priests in the area reached a consensus that the congregation should be developed as a separate indigenous ministry, and not be incorporated into an existing congregation. "There was a sense that in this particular situation, the right strategy for these first-generation immigrants was for them to develop their own congregation," Harding said. "There is a real ministry here of preserving culture and their mother tongue."
In a service on Pentecost Sunday, June 7 of this year, Bishop Arthur E. Walmsley officially recognized L'Eglise de la Epiphanie as the diocese's newest mission station.
Millien said that the congregation is reaching out energetically to the large community of Haitians in the area. A strategy he has tried successfully in other dioceses divides a geographic area into quadrants, with an evangelism leader supervising evangelism teams for each area. "To do evangelism one cannot sit in an office," Millien said. "You have to go out and invite them. A lot of people are waiting for us to invite them to come."
"Evangelism that works means moving out into the street and the places where people buy groceries or catch the bus," Millien said. "I want to take my church to them."
The congregation also has not been slow in developing a social ministry. Even though many of the members have not been settled in the United States for long themselves, the congregation is assisting Interfaith Refugee Ministry, a program of the diocese's Episcopal Social Service, as co-sponsors for Haitian refugees. The members provide fellowship and volunteer help, and gather clothes and furniture for the refugees. "What is not needed by the refugees is offered to others in need, both in the Haitian community and beyond," Millien said. "When Jesus came, he did not only work with the Jews."
Some of the items gathered may eventually be sent to Haiti, but only when the current unrest there has calmed. "The people who are ruling Haiti are the military people. They are killing a lot of people in Haiti," Millien said. "We don't want what we send to fall into the wrong hands."
A hoped-for three-way partnership between the congregations of St. John's and Epiphanie and a congregation in Haiti must also wait. "Maybe in 1993 I will be able to take some of them from both congregations to Haiti," said Millien. "I am hoping that by that time we will have solved all the social and political problems we are facing now."
Millien was born into an Episcopal family in Haiti, attended seminary in Puerto Rico and was ordained a priest in 1964. He served in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, including time as headmaster of a grammar school, before moving to Miami in 1987.
He was helping as a volunteer priest in the Diocese of Southeast Florida when his daughter convinced him to move to Connecticut in 1990.
"Sometimes one has to be responsive to God and follow him to where he wants you to be," Millien said. He is still officially resident in the Diocese of Haiti, though he, his wife Mona and their five children all now live in Connecticut.
Harding said that Epiphanie has been developed as an outreach of the diocese, with St. John's doing everything it can possibly do to support the ministry. The Stamford deanery also has made the congregation a focus of its ministry.
The two congregations have worshiped together whenever possible, Harding said. "When Bishop [Clarence] Coleridge had his visitation to St. John's, both congregations presented candidates for baptism. All of the services of Holy Week were together," he said. "The Maundy Thursday service was especially moving. Father Millien and I washed each other's feet, saying to the congregations what the relationship between them should be."
"I will tell you, it was fun," Millien said of the joint services with their interweaving of French, Creole and English. "Sometimes members of St. John's attend the regular Haitian services as well, to get their French refurbished," he said.
"St. John's outreach committee, in particular, has been involved with the Haitian congregation and its projects, but that kind of partnership is really just beginning to emerge," Harding said. "We're still at the stage of figuring out how two people share the same kitchen. So far, it has worked out very well. Both congregations have been very gracious."
Ironically, the two congregations' strikingly different styles of music offered what may be the best image of how they are learning to fit together, Harding said. Before the special Pentecost service to recognize Epiphanie began, the volunteer organist, a retired church musician from St. John's, was filling time with an extended prelude. The jazz musicians from the Haitian congregation joined in, Harding said, and for about 20 minutes, organ and combo jammed, tossing the melody back and forth between them.
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