On any given Tuesday or Thursday, starting around mid-afternoon, the parking lot behind Grace Episcopal Church in Canton hosts a flurry of drop-offs. Cars pull in and children, hauling their backpacks or tote bags or lunchboxes from school, make their way toward the Parish Hall entrance.

Inside, they find some snacks, some juice, plenty of room to spread out at round tables, and a cadre of tutors ready to help them take on the homework in their bags. Whether it’s reading, math, or even, for the youngest pupils, basic skills like identifying numerals or colors—the tutors are standing by. These volunteers spend roughly two hours with the children, most of whose families hail from either Mexico or Guatemala, each session.

Grace’s tutoring ministry has been active now for nearly four years. The Reverend Beth Foose, rector of the parish, had been involved in Hispanic ministry in Canton ever since she arrived at Grace in 2013. After the COVID pandemic, recognizing the need for a place to host tutoring for kids, she opened the church’s doors. It was a natural fit given the trusting relationships the parish had built over the years.

“It took a while for our Hispanic community in Canton to get comfortable with Grace Church, and treat it as one of their ‘safe’ spaces,” says Holly Wallace, one of the volunteer tutors in the program, “but through Beth’s ministering, and that of all our tutors, we are able to share the love of God with one another.”

“Grace Church has become kind of a gathering place for some members of the Hispanic community,” says Foose. “We have, for many years, had the Posada¹. We’ve had a Hispanic Thanksgiving celebration. I mean, it’s just a safe, neutral gathering place for the community. So a lot of people know us and know what we’re about.”

Grace has also co-hosted several health fairs with the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, the most recent of which was in November. As many as 50-75 members of the community attend these fairs, where they can receive preventative care—blood pressure checks, vaccinations, nutritional education, and more.

That reputation has helped the tutoring program succeed by word of mouth. Now, it is typical for a dozen students between three and ten years old to come to each session. While the structure of the program is fairly loose, with students working on their own or pairing up with tutors as needed, the group stays focused on work.

“We pretty much keep our heads down and get this work done,” says Foose, “because there’s a lot of work to do.”

Some of that work involves mild language barriers. While the children all speak English at school, most do not at home. Those are modest hurdles to overcome and Foose communicate with the parents, whose English is typically not as strong as the kids’, enough to convey necessary information.

There are tangible, measurable results to this work. In addition to numbers of math problems solved and pages of workbooks completed, the ministry was recently able to boast of two students, fifth-grader Ana and kindergartener Emerson, making the honor roll.

“I’ve had little Emerson since he was three years old,” says Foose, “and he’s the child who shows up every Tuesday and Thursday with terrible conduct marks—he’s quite a talker—but I mean, he can read and count to 100 and do all sorts of amazing things.”

There’s more to this gathering than academic accomplishments, though. There’s a profound sense of community that has developed between the children and the volunteer tutors—something that Foose sees not merely as a happy offshoot of ministry, but as a vital component of it.

“For ministry to be authentic, it has to be mutual,” she says, “and the tutors get as much from the experience as the children do. Ministry isn’t just handing things out to make us feel good—that’s not what we do at Grace. We’re really about nurturing community and a sense that we’re all in this together.”

¹ The Posada, or Las Posadas, is a festival celebrated throughout Latin America, featuring a reenactment of the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.