Love Shows Up
How one church’s long-term relationship with a school is bearing fruit
By Pastor Ayn DuVoisin
Schools faced extraordinary challenges during the height of the pandemic. Some churches helped bridge the educational gap by tutoring students.
One church that serves as a model for helping the local school system is Symphony Church in Allston. Its partnership with Jackson/Mann K-8 School in Allston was marked by a long-term commitment that was highly relational with effective pastoral leadership supporting the initiative.
The Boston Education Collaborative (BEC) at the Emmanuel Gospel Center has been key to the success of church-school partnerships like this.
“There is tremendous opportunity for churches to extend God’s love and care to the community beyond their own congregations through building meaningful relationships with school communities, which includes students, staff, and families,” said Ruth Wong, BEC director. “Through relationships, mutually transformative experiences happen, and volunteers get to experience God more deeply for themselves.”
The BEC sees a need for more churches like Symphony to embrace changing ministry strategies during the pandemic, adopting church-school partnerships as a means to engage the outsized challenges facing schools.
Symphony Church organizing the literacy room at Jackson/Mann K-8 School. [photo credit: Symphony Church]
Pushing through
Despite the uncertainty in March 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit, Symphony Church continued serving at Jackson/Mann. The church had been sending tutors to the school for seven years and had no plans of stopping.
Jackson/Mann had several community partners during the 2019 to 2020 academic year, but school officials told Symphony they were a key partner. That motivated the church to keep showing up and serving despite the challenges when the pandemic hit.
Around that time, Symphony adopted a new microchurch model which helped to galvanize church members to continue serving in the community despite social distancing rules. Throughout the summer and fall of 2020, Symphony Church leaders preached and challenged members to serve. One sermon series focused on BLESS: Begin with prayer, Listen with care, Eat together, Serve in love, and Share your story. This was part of an effort to cast a vision for a missional culture of sending out the microchurches to engage their neighborhoods even in the middle of a pandemic through initiatives such as prayer walks.
That summer, 20 church volunteers spent two hours every day helping with the school’s virtual program. Symphony also gave summer-school teachers a virtual tablet to use as a whiteboard. In the fall, even more people volunteered to tutor.
Symphony Church cleaning out and organizing school closets. [photo credit: Symphony Church]
Showing up
Partnering with local schools to help students is part of Symphony’s DNA.
In 2010, the church started meeting at the Match Charter Public School’s high school campus in Allston. The school had a system of matching volunteers as tutors to each student. Twenty tutors made a full commitment to serve for two years.
This inspired Barry Kang, lead pastor of Symphony Church, to imagine the potential impact of supporting students with additional tutoring and classroom aides in other schools. They decided to encourage the positive momentum by hosting an appreciation dinner for the tutors.
Pastor Kang said he was convicted by seeing how many issues in people’s lives sprang from early challenges, starting with literacy. Third grade, when education shifts from learning to read to reading to learn, is a critical turning point in a child’s life. These are precious years in supporting systemic change, Pastor Kang learned.
Coupled with his conviction that the “bedrock of society is in the development of the future generation,” Pastor Kang felt that a church-school partnership was compelling. The church’s biggest resource, its energetic worshiping community of college and postgraduate students, had little money but some available time. Through prayer, the church’s leadership saw education as a place to leverage their strengths.
Symphony Church hosted a teacher appreciation breakfast in May 2022. [photo credit: Symphony Church]
In 2014, they wondered whether Boston Public Schools could make use of additional tutoring support of one or two hours a week. At a gathering of pastors, Pastor Kang heard BEC Director Ruth Wong give a presentation on the program’s supportive role in assisting partnerships. Wong connected Symphony with Boston Partners in Education as well as the International Community Church in Brighton, which had been volunteering tutoring services at Jackson/Mann.
“Ruth and EGC helped us get started and helped us get better,” Pastor Kang said.
Pastor Kang said Symphony’s relationship with Jackson/Mann began with its conviction that “love shows up.” He was personally committed to the partnership as well as building direct relationships with the building principal, vice-principal, and teachers. Pastor Kang reinforced the vision for outreach to Jackson/Mann from the pulpit, and the school administration saw the fruit of the relationship.
“There is tremendous opportunity for churches to extend God’s love and care to the community beyond their own congregations through building meaningful relationships with school communities, which includes students, staff, and families. Through relationships, mutually transformative experiences happen, and volunteers get to experience God more deeply for themselves.”
Leaning in
During the 2020 to 2021 school year when schools were still grappling with the impact of COVID, 50 Symphony volunteers spent 2,200 hours tutoring at Jackson/Mann.
“That year, we were that school’s only community partner,” Pastor Kang said. “All their other partners weren’t able to pivot out of their established lanes. But we could because of the BEC’s help.”
Boston school officials announced they would close Jackson/Mann at the end of the school year in 2022, but Symphony decided to serve to the very end as it prayerfully discerns which school to partner with next.
Symphony Church cleaning out and organizing school closets. [photo credit: Symphony Church]
Symphony is energized by the multiplication potential of some of its microchurches serving in their own communities.
While many people wonder when things will go back to the way they were, Pastor Kang feels the pandemic forced the church in a new direction that is yielding kingdom fruit. He said one of the microchurch members, who was skeptical of the new model in the beginning, confided that “‘before the changes, my journey in Christ was like sitting in economy class, but now it feels like sitting in first class — no, actually it’s more like being in the copilot seat, and I have a much greater sense of ownership in this journey.’”
Pastor Kang noted a shift in the church from passivism and consumerism to more active participation as an integral part of the body of Christ and the kingdom.
Because multiplication is part of its language, Symphony hopes its relationships will create new frontiers for support in other schools. And they are partnering strategically with the BEC to explore those new connections.
Symphony’s model of community engagement has been a transforming grace for its members. The church is blessed by working with children and seeing them grow so quickly in their understanding and development. There is a gratification of seeing work they’ve been engaged in, that is clearly useful, something bigger than themselves, that glorifies God.
During the pandemic, when there has been such continual uncertainty, this outreach of serving others has been emotionally and mentally encouraging to the church, Pastor Kang said, with all the members getting to “exercise their love muscles!”
Symphony Church’s notes of appreciation for Jackson Mann staff. [photo credit: Symphony Church]
Ayn DuVoisin
About the Author
Pastor Ayn DuVoisin has been a volunteer associate with EGC’s Boston Education Collaborative initiative since 2019. She previously served as Pastor of Children’s Ministries at North River Church in Pembroke, Massachusetts, from 2000 to 2019. Over the past decade, she has been active in building the Church & School Partnership for Boston Public Schools. She is also a former board member of Greater Things for Greater Boston. She and her husband, Jean DuVoisin, have lived in Scituate, Massachusetts, for over 40 years. She is blessed by her three adult children and well-loved Golden Retriever, Sunny.
TAKE ACTION
Can you see your church engaging in a partnership like this? Here are some resources to explore as your church prayerfully discerns a potential partnership with a school in Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, or Brockton.
