Svea Gray With Church's Meal Program From Start

Svea Gray with church's meal program from start

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church serves breakfast to as many as 160 people each morning

BY JUDY MCGOVERN
The Ann Arbor News

Svea Gray remembers that 1982 was another time of economic distress.

“Not as bad as this,” said Gray, a longtime Ann Arbor resident. “But bad, especially for the auto industry. People were coming to church for help.”

Members of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church talked about how to respond and decided on a meal program.

“We all thought it would be temporary,” said Gray of the church’s now 26-year-old breakfast program. “The need has not gone away.”

As many as 160 people eat at the church every morning. And no one is more closely associated with it than Gray, a finalist for The Ann Arbor News’ Citizen of the Year Award.

A parishioner when the program was created, she quickly became a volunteer. In 1985, she was ordained a deacon and became director of the breakfast program.

“She’s a ball of energy and really loves the people who come for breakfast,” said Ellen Schulmeister, director of the Shelter Association of Washtenaw County and former administrator at St. Andrew’s. “It’s the same with the volunteers.... The program is all about relationships.”

A native of Chicago, Gray came to the University of Michigan as a music student in the 1950s. Her circle of friends included Whit Gray, her future husband.

As graduation neared, Gray watched classmates move toward careers in music. She opted instead to enroll at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

“I loved it,” she said. But after a year Whit proposed and her training ended.

They returned to Ann Arbor in 1960 when Whit Gray joined the law school faculty.

Family life ensued. And along the way Gray - raised in a Presbyterian - was attracted to a new liturgy in the Episcopal church.

She ultimately studied to become a deacon, one of three orders of ordained ministry in the Episcopal church. One of her four children, Lisa, has followed her into the ministry.

“Mother Teresa” to many breakfast program regulars, Gray knows her mind.

When the county-owned Delonis Center planned to centralize food programs at its new facility, she resisted - telling St. Andrew’s rector the church’s ministry would be lessened if the breakfast program was moved.

Parish leaders listened and, in a decision that was controversial at the time, St. Andrew’s withdrew from the plan.

“We’ve created a community,” Gray said. “It’s haven for people.”

It’s also a reflection of the woman who runs the program. “She’ll decorate for holidays,” said Schulmeister, “and have hot dogs for breakfast on the Fourth of July. There’s never evangelizing. You just come in and have breakfast. But people respond to a good person doing a good thing.”

Deacon Svea Gray has run the breakfast program at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor for most of its 26 years.
ELIYAHU GURFINKEL, THE ANN ARBOR NEWS.

Svea Gray

Residence: Ann Arbor

Occupation: Deacon, St. Andrews Episcopal Church

The deacon

■ A full-time deacon at St. Andrew's, Svea Gray serves without compensation.
■ She oversees the 365-day-a-year program and helps serve breakfast Monday through Thursday. She also assists priests in the Eucharist and calls on people who are hospitalized or confined to their homes.
■ A deacon, she said, has one foot in the church and one in community.

The program

■ The breakfast program operates with funding from the city of Ann Arbor and individual and businesses donors.
It serves not just the homeless, but working poor and others who need to stretch their food budgets.
■ St. Andrew's is located at 306 N. Division St.
■ Online: www. standrewsaa.org

'She's a ball of energy and really loves the people who come for breakfast.'

Ellen Schulmeister, director of the Shelter Association of Washtenaw County and former administrator at St. Andrew's, speaking about Svea Gray