History
Oral History
To listen to an oral history of St. Anne's offered by two founding members, Woody Clinard and Keith Sharpe, click here.
Below is a written history by Suzanne Reynolds.
The Early 1960s
In 1964, Bishop Fraser of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina believed that committed people in Winston-Salem shared his dream to create a more racially diverse church. Bishop Fraser chose wisely, asking Harold Kennedy to leave St. Stephen's, the church that his grandfather had founded, and Woody and Helen Clinard to leave St. Timothy’s. These founders – and others - inspired thirty-three members to leave their home churches to be part of the Bishop’s dream. The new mission chose the name “St. Anne’s,” in part to honor women, who had only recently been granted the right to serve on vestries, and St. Anne’s became the small church with a big heart and a progressive mission.
Founded for positive change, the new church was barely organized when the spirit of St. Anne’s became manifest. In 1966, the mission committee spawned the idea for the Winston-Salem Episcopal churches to organize a Downtown Ministry. Each of the Episcopal priests staffed a downtown office one day each weekday to try to address the needs of the downtown workers. Later, other denominations joined the efforts, and the ministry became what is now the county-wide Contact telephone ministry.
The Late 1960s
After two years of meeting in the Old Town Civic Club building, the congregation built the original parish building and dedicated it in April, 1967. The dust had barely settled when St. Anne’s took the lead in starting the Experiment for Self Reliance. Helen and Woody Clinard and others in the new congregation helped bring together seven churches, one civic club, and one business to battle the effects of poverty and to try to educate Winston Salem citizens about poverty’s devastating impact.
The work with the Experiment for Self Reliance inspired St. Anne’s to initiate the Lowrance School Tutoring Project. Trained tutors from St. Anne’s worked at Lowrance, which was at that time an all-black school. The program became a model for the city-county school system’s volunteer tutoring system.
The experience of working with children led the congregation in 1968 to establish a child care center. What started as a babysitting service for women involved in their lay ministries became a full-time center for children throughout the city, with Helen Clinard as one of the early directors. Today St. Anne’s Child Care Center remains a mission of the church. The Center has a perennial waiting list for its coveted infant room and has a budget of over $300,000.
The 1970s
While assassinations and Vietnam wracked the country, St. Anne’s and its ministries grew. In 1970, St. Anne’s supplied the momentum for the Association for the Benefit of Child Development – the ABCD organization – a nursery school for low income children. In 1974, St. Anne’s became a founding church in the Northwest Ministry for Child Development, serving infants to kindergarteners, many of whom suffered from developmental disabilities.
The 1980s
In 1981, while Bill Wells was vicar, the congregation worshipped in the round in interesting but cramped space. The congregation extended the facilities to add the sanctuary area, sacristy, and columbarium. With the expansion, however, the congregation very intentionally began to sponsor a Vietnamese refugee family to make sure that the construction of the addition did not distract us from our outreach ministries.
The character of the worship at St. Anne’s took shape during this period. The congregation tried out a number of liturgies but adopted the 1979 BCP immediately upon its publication. The congregation welcomed children to receive communion and involved lay people in the service and used Communion bread baked by parishioners.
The 1990s
When Virginia Herring joined us in 1992, she helped us become aware of our need to minister to each other. In 1993, an EfM, Education for Ministry, program began at St. Anne’s. EfM remains a vibrant part of our life as a parish, and an inordinately high percentage of our members graduate from the program.
Our congregation has always enjoyed music, and in 1996 we attracted an organist and choir master who made us the envy of the church music world. Not long after John Mueller brought his gifts to St. Anne’s, we acquired the lovely Bedient organ which remains a centerpiece of our music ministry.
A number of important ministries also became staples of life at St. Anne’s. The lay healing ministry became a feature with the sacrament of unction offered monthly. As our child care suggests, St. Anne’s celebrates its young people, and we adopted the Journey to Adulthood program, also in the mid-90’s. In 1999, our first J2A class took the first pilgrimage to the Southwest to explore Native American spirituality with Ginny Herring and the Rev. Bob McGee, the Episcopal chaplain at Wake Forest University. Since them, St. Anne’s has sponsored youth pilgrimages to Ireland, Montana, Costa Rica, and Vermont.
While we paid more attention to ministering to each other, our ministries to the community continued to grow. In 1993, the adult Sunday school class focused on race relations, and out of those discussions came Crossing 52, a city-wide organization devoted to dialogue across racial divides. Also in 1993 we sent a team to Florida to help with disaster relief after Hurricane Andrew and took a youth group to march in Washington to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dr. King’s Poor People’s March. With 4 other churches, we established NIM, the Neighbors in Ministries, an ecumenical, multi-program ministry that included an AIDS ministry, a Thrift Shop, and a program of Hispanic leadership development. We joined the NC PRIDE Parade in 1996 in support of gay and lesbian rights and won a trophy for the best marching unit. And we began to be involved in hunger ministries, the annual Crop Walk and the Amy Jaffe Fund for addressing world hunger. Each Thanksgiving we volunteered at the Samaritan Inn, which provides food and housing for homeless men. During the holidays the Angel Tree supported Group Homes and families in need. Our tiny space gave meeting shelter for Alcoholics Anonymous, Codependence Anonymous, PFLAG, and other organizations that occasionally had trouble finding welcoming places.
2000 to the Present
Hal Hayek became our rector in 2002, and we saw in him a life of deep, personal spirituality. Hal encouraged us to live into our baptismal covenants and provided leadership in critical social justice issues. But he also helped us address the needs of inadequate physical space. We increased our pledges and raised money for a capital building fund. We never let the building distract us from our ministries, however. During the building campaign, we began our work with C.H.A.N.G.E. (Communities Helping All Neighbors Gain Empowerment), and led the city in a Global Candlelight Peace Vigil prior to the war in Iraq. We dedicated a Peace Pole to the Winston-Salem community in observance of the International Day of Peace, challenged the school board to address the bullying of gay and lesbian students, joined the Faith in Action committee of the WS/Forsyth County Domestic Violence Community, raised money for African orphans in our Lenten project, focused the congregation on the moratorium on the death penalty, supported the Millennium Development Goals through a project in Chiapas, Mexico, and rode bicycles for MS – to name but a few.
In 2006, we dedicated the Harold L. Kennedy, Jr. Parish Center, the much-anticipated addition to the physical plant, which we named for one of our most beloved founders. The Kennedy Center, which doubled our space, houses a magnificent kitchen that has enabled the Child Care Center to offer hot lunches to its children and has expanded the opportunities for the parish to share food and fellowship. With a spacious fellowship hall, offices, classrooms, and meeting spaces, the Kennedy Center added new dimensions to the life of St. Anne’s.
When Hal accepted the call in 2009 to become the Dean of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Baltimore, MD, we had matured under his watch. Hal had nurtured our committee structure, and Jerry Fisher, our interim, marveled at the depth and breadth of the lay leadership of a parish our size.
In March 2011, the Rev. Lawrence Womack began his ministry with us as Rector. True to the founders' Spirit-led call in the 1960s, we at St. Anne's continue to live into and share the church's mission “to manifest the love of Christ through worship, justice, and community.”
