LOUISVILLE — Carl Mazza, the founder and leader of “Meeting Ground,” a community-based ministry with the homeless and other marginalized people in Elkton, Md., is the third announced candidate to stand for moderator of the 218th General Assembly (2008), next summer in San Jose, Calif.
Mazza was endorsed on Jan. 18 by New Castle Presbytery, based in Newark, Del.
He joins Bill Teng of National Capital Presbytery and Bruce Reyes-Chow of San Francisco Presbytery as candidates to succeed Joan Gray of Atlanta, moderator of the 217th General Assembly (2006).
Mazza, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, founded Meeting Ground in 1981. It now encompasses two shelters, one for women and one for men; a transitional house; and a rural residential facility for men, women and children. Meeting Ground also operates a care program for children and youth and a church-based winter shelter program that rotates among area churches.
According to Loaves & Fishes, Meeting Ground’s newsletter, in 2007 the ministry provided almost 21,000 bednights of emergency and transitional housing, almost 30,000 meals, and assisted almost 300 persons in the transition from being homeless. Since its inception, Meeting Ground has provided more than 406,000 bednights of emergency and transitional housing.
“The call of my life and my reason for entering the ministry is to be with and among persons who are experiencing homelessness or otherwise struggling to survive at the margins of our society,” Mazza writes on the New Castle Presbytery Web site. “In 26 years several hundred Presbyterian churches, and thousands of mission volunteers, seminarians, interns, and others have been part of our community and ministry,” Mazza says, “including former [General Assembly] moderator Rick Ufford-Chase.”
Mazza, who is joined in the Meeting Ground ministry by his wife of 34 years, Marsha, says his decision to stand for moderator “is based on my love for the church which has done so much for me. In standing for moderator I can offer to the denomination a different level of discussion from the perspective of my quarter century of unique ministry. I want to encourage the kind of radical, energetic dialogue that we need — not just for ourselves, but for a world that needs us to have it.”
Mazza says he also wants to dispel the notion that “non-parish” ministry is not a sidelight of the church. “The province of the Gospel is not the church, but the world — particularly with the persons at its margins, as the Bible teaches,” he writes, “and the call of the church is to continually create new forms of parish in the world.”
