Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

Bloomington’s local paper, The Herald-Times, ran a piece on All Saints for their religion page in today’s edition. If you’re a subscriber, you can find it here; otherwise, it’s posted over at Orthodox Hoosiers.

The story here is this — last weekend was our annual pastoral visit from His Grace Bp. MARK (about which more a bit later), and we realized somewhat at the last minute that it might be a good event to try to publicize to the greater community, particularly since he was giving a post-Vespers talk about ministry in a college town. Parish council chair Jeff Weber had called the paper, and they told him they’d be happy to run whatever we sent them as long as it was 400 words or less and we got it to them by noon Wednesday. Somebody had taken a shot at writing a really short press release, and while it wasn’t bad as an event announcement, I knew from my own experience getting press releases to the Herald-Times that what had been written wasn’t going to fly. So, Tuesday night, in consultation with Fr. Peter and parish council chair Jeff Weber, I wrote a press release for Bp. MARK’s visit as well as a short, rather general feature article about All Saints and Orthodoxy in Bloomington. With Fr. Peter’s and Jeff’s suggestions and tweaks, we got them over to the paper at 11:59am Wednesday.

And on Saturday, we opened the paper and saw nary a word of what we had sent them.

This last Thursday, Fr. Peter left me a voicemail, saying that he had talked to the appropriate editor at the Herald-Times, and they had been very apologetic, saying that somebody had been out of town, wires got crossed, etc., they would run what we sent them this weekend modifying for past tense, and that they looked forward to covering All Saints more in the future.

So, today, the feature article was there, and true to their word, they printed the whole thing, changing only the applicable verb tenses relating to the episcopal visit.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well; we’re hoping that cultivating a bit more of a relationship with the Herald-Times will help raise awareness of All Saints in the community, so there will hopefully be more of these in the near future.