These programs have now become Our Saviour’s Community Services, a non-profit that is separate from the church but that we regularly partner with and financially support.

We are exploring ways to build new relationships and to do community engagement in fresh ways – to listen again to the hopes and dreams, fears and troubles of our neighborhood and see how the Spirit might be inviting us to respond. 

Some of our current outreach activities include a community garden, a neighborhood quilting group, and our neighborhood oven. 

At our garden, we seek to grow in kinship to all creation and feed our neighbors facing food insecurity. This garden is on Dakota land. We honor with gratitude the original inhabitants of this land and those who have been caretakers of it throughout the generations as we work together to tend to creation on this site. We are animated by a vision of being in kinship with all of creation – people, water, soil, creatures, plants – and we are seeking to deepen our kinship through how we relate to land on this site and beyond as we seek healing and repair for ourselves and our broken world. As Martin Luther King said, we are all tied together in ‘a single garment of destiny.’

Currently, our garden is tended by a committed group of volunteers from Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church and the Ventura Village neighborhood. We donate produce to the food pantry at Waite House and we hope to host more neighborhood produce and seed give-aways in the summer of 2023. We are always looking for more volunteers as we seek to expand our circle of kinship in the neighborhood. All are welcome!

We have a dedicated team of volunteers who make quilts from donated fabric. These quilts have been sent around the world through Lutheran World Relief. We have also made special quilts to give away, such as a quilt we gave to All Nations Indian Church in the neighborhood when their long-time pastor Marlene Whiterabbit Helgemo died in 2022.

Before the pandemic, we had a vibrant multicultural Wednesday afternoon quilting ministry in the church building. Now, the quilting ministry is more dispersed in members’ homes, with members occasionally meeting on Saturday mornings to tie quilts together. We periodically bless quilts to send out in Sunday morning worship. 

In 2012, we built an outdoor, wood-fired neighborhood oven in our backyard. We started hosting bread-baking and pizza-making events and parties for the congregation and our neighbors. The pizza is delicious! We are still exploring ways that the oven can truly become a neighborhood asset.  And, we are careful to use the oven only when the air quality in Minneapolis is at a good level.