24 July 2026 - Friday after the Eighth Sunday of Pentecost

Dear friends,

This Sunday, our Gospel lesson will offer us bunch of Jesus’ parables in quick succession. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, is like yeast, is like a merchant who finds a pearl…

These parables are provocative, even confounding. They won’t be reduced to a simple moral or a straightforward explanation. They push us to think beyond our usual grooves, to imagine something impossible happening in spite of our confidence that such a thing just can’t happen.

We’ll talk more about this on Sunday, but these parables seem to push us to understand the kingdom of God as shocking abundance, and as a process of radical transformation. And often, these themes are paired.

A little thing—a mustard seed, a measure of yeast, a pearl—makes an outsized difference. There’s something wildly, wonderfully disproportionate about the kingdom of God.

This is something that keeps coming up in the partnerships that we’re cultivating with the Sunnyside Literacy Lab, Citation Needed, and Parenting Style playgroups. (Read more below about them below!) We began with little experiments and micro-investments, with conversations over coffee, and now…

We are discovering abundance:

• St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Bridgehampton has pledged $12,000 a year for the next three years to support these partnerships, and this year, that money will fund 5 full scholarships empowering kids to read at the Sunnyside Literacy Lab.

• Just this week we received a $15,000 grant from Episcopal Ministries of Long Island to support our Print + Build art classes, so that we can grow this pilot into a 5-day a week afterschool program in the fall of 2027.

We are being transformed:

• What we’re learning from our partners and with our partners is transforming how we understand what “church” could and should be in this neighborhood, in these times.

• I and the other leaders here at the Episcopal Mission In Sunnyside are being pushed to think outside our usual grooves about the structures and systems we’re called to build—so that we can bear witness to even more wild and wonderfully disproportionate things yet to come.

And so, I want to invite you—will you bring a little to the table here? Can you put on your work clothes and help make the church ready for this new era in the first two weeks of September? Put in some labor on Labor Day Weekend? Sign up here!

And/or, can you give some money to nourish the seeds we’re planting in “the Greenhouse”?? Your gift will not only help pay for spackle and paint, but will nourish this ecosystem so that it can become an incubator where neighbors discover their vocations, and are supported as they pilot and grow new initiatives which will contribute to the flourishing of this neighborhood.

We have our work cut out for us—and I trust that God will do amazing, abundant, transformative things far beyond our efforts…

peace,
carl+

As a community, we take turns giving and receiving—spending time in the spotlight, and doing work behind the scenes.

Can you help out this week? Or in the Sundays to come? Sign up here!

Introducing…a Prayer List for our Mission!

At our Community Check-In in June, we heard that folks would like a chance to add specific concerns to the Prayers of the People each week. Some people will feel comfortable speaking aloud in that moment, but we also wanted to make a space for folks to ask for prayers during the week. How can we pray with you, or for you?

We’ll offer these prayers on Sunday mornings, and may share some of them here in News and Notes. (There is also a space to ask for prayers that won’t be publicized!)

The Burial of Taylor John Michael Borodavka

As I wrote two weeks ago, we are grieving with Yvonne Borodavka: her son Taylor died July 4 after a long struggle with alcohol addiction. We trust that Taylor is at rest in God’s infinite light and love: the prodigal son, embraced with joy by his Father. We trust that Taylor is held in that peace that passes all understanding. And our hearts are broken with Yvonne, and all who love Taylor.

Please join us next Saturday for Taylor’s Burial Service
(Fr. Carl will officiate)
Saturday, August 1st at 11:30am
St. Michael’s Cemetery
Main Office Entrance
24-20 49th Street, Astoria, NY 11103

Everyone is also invited to a Celebration of Taylor’s Life
Sunday, August 16 (Taylor’s Birthday) at 10am
Atonement Lutheran Church
30-61 87th Street, East Elmhurst, NY 11369

We are thrilled to announce three new partnerships that are grounded in our shared values of creativity, solidarity, and integrity. Come September, All Saints Church will become the new home of the Sunnyside Literacy Lab (founded by Anna Young, left), Citation Needed Press (led by Ari Wolff and Cristina Ferrigno, center), and Parenting Style playgroups (led by Janice Chou, on the right). You can learn more about our dream of an emerging ecosystem of mission-aligned initiatives here.

Registration is open for Sunnyside Literacy Labs’ fall programming, and for Print + Build, the Tuesday/Thursday art classes that we will be offering at the church for kids K-5, in partnership with Citation Needed.

If you have questions about these partnerships, or have other ideas about how to use the All Saints building as a blessing to this beautiful and diverse neighborhood, please reach out.

The Peer Support Group, organized through Sunnyside-Woodside Mutual Aid, aims to restore the rightful place of community care. In a culture dominated by the shallow preeminence of self care -- which neglects our responsibilities to each other and frames individual wellbeing as a solitary responsibility & pursuit -- this group insists that that we cannot successfully self care our way out of or through polycrisis, and that healing & care must come from the collective for the collective. Reach out to Zehra for more info!

Looking for ways to protect our neighbors from ICE?

The neighborhood ICE Watch “Office Hours” meets every Saturday from 2-3 pm in the sanctuary. This is a great way to get connected to the work of protecting our neighbors and building power. All are welcome.

Cristina Ferrigno
Tabula Rasa

Cristina Ferrigno is a Colombian-born, Brooklyn-raised artist based in Sunnyside. Her work explores cultural “in-betweenness” as a transnational adoptee through combined-media practices and ongoing community-based projects. She loves all kinds of prints and printmaking, photography and image-making processes, as well as working with personal and visual archives.

This work grew out of experiments using leftover paper pulp from an intergenerational workshop she led in the church garden in August 2025. This lovely, messy, hot event was an epic collaboration between the Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside and Citation Needed, a community-based press and workshop series where Cristina has served as Studio Director since 2025. So this work invites the question…

What's something you’re working on that feels like a soggy, smelly mess?

Here is a response we’ve received this week:

Organizing my apartment after years of accumulating too many things

Let us know what YOU think on the Little Window Gallery website! We’ll anonymously post all the responses there, and on the LWG’s Instagram page. And in a few weeks we’ll randomly select one of the people who responded and they’ll get to keep a print of Cristina’s paper pulp poem—a local work of art for their very own!

Thanks to Cristina for sharing this tender reflection on grief—and for sharing her practice with us in so many ways, and in ways yet to come!

Please—if you're yearning for something that you haven't seen here, reach out start a conversation. This new mission in Sunnyside is made up of...US. So it gets to be what we want it to be...