Pastors offer community a place at the table

Co-pastors Jill Beck, center, and Michael Beck, right, talk with Viola Lacey, left, during the Family Table outreach at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church on Northeast 8th Road in Ocala, Fla. on Wednesday, August 11, 2021. The Family Table is held every Wednesday evening at 6:30 p.m. at the church and features a hot meal, live music, story sharing, and activities for kids and youth. All are welcome to attend. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2021.

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Posted August 13, 2021 | By Rosemarie Dowell, Special to The Ocala Gazette

The area around Ocala’s St. Mark’s United Methodist Church is hardscrabble and humble, with many of its blue-collar residents grappling to pay bills and put food on their tables amid a still lingering pandemic and rising inflation.

Now, the church’s co-lead-pastors, the Revs. Michael and Jill Beck have started a free new weekly community outreach in the hopes of easing some of their burdens.

The outreach, dubbed, “The Family Table,” takes place at 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays at the church, 1839 NE 8th Road, and features a hot meal, live music, story sharing and activities for kids and youth. All are welcome to attend.

“The Family Table was born out of a mission that Michael and I saw such a need for especially during this prolonged pandemic,” said the Rev. Jill Beck. “A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck if they have a paycheck coming in at all.”

“It’s a place where they can come and gather around a table and be fed both physically and spiritually,” she said. “Sacred things can happen around a table; the church in the Books of Acts was founded around one.”

The Becks, both natives of Ocala, took over as lead pastors of St. Mark’s in July 2020. The church had been struggling with a serious decline in membership for several years and was facing possible closure. For the ministering duo, who had been lead pastors at Wildwood United Methodist Church for nearly ten years, it was a coming home.

“It was the church where I grew up and was baptized; I was certainly going to do something before I let the church die,” said Michael Beck, who overcame drug and alcohol addiction and incarceration in his teens and twenties before earning a Master of Divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary.

Michael Beck, 40, had previously served at the church as an associate pastor.

“St. Mark’s is in a poor area,” he said. “The neighborhood is on the lower socio-economic rung and most people are experiencing poverty and substance abuse issues.”

“But that’s why I love it,” said Beck, who also serves as director of the Fresh Expressions House of Studies at United Theological Seminary, cultivator of Fresh Expressions for the Florida Conference UMC, and as the director of Re-missioning for Fresh Expressions US.

“It gives us a chance to show and share God’s love with our neighbors,” he said.

The couple, parents to a blended family of eight children, and who still serve as pastors at Wildwood UMC, didn’t waste time implementing changes at the church.

The church already housed the Open Arms Village, which provides shelter for homeless men, and operated a food pantry. The Becks started a drive-through meal distribution program, welcomed pastor Betti Jefferson Gadson and her congregation from A Chance for Hope Outreach Ministries Inc. to share worship space on Saturdays, and turned the church’s parsonage into a residential sober house.

“We didn’t need the parsonage since we already had a home in Ocala,” said Jill Beck. “We are also turning another house located on the church property into an extension of Open Arms.”

Michael Beck said the pandemic prevented the church from having in-person worship services until April, but once it opened worshippers began to fill the pews once more.

“We had our first in-person worship service on Easter in April and that’s when things started to kick off here,” he said.

So far, the Becks are encouraged and feel the church is experiencing a revival. Regular attendance is up to roughly 70 worshippers each week, up from less than 20 a year ago.

“It’s tremendous growth for this church and we are encouraged,” he said. “There’s a resurgence taking place here.”

As for the future, the couple hopes to reach out to other struggling areas of Ocala, especially where gun violence, homelessness and poverty is present.

“We feel that God brought us back to this community that we love so much for a reason,” said Jill Beck. “We’re not sure what the answer is, but we want to be part of the solution.”