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Finding A Path at St. Paul’s, DeKalb

A pathway has long served as a metaphor for Christian life. Recently at St. Paul’s, DeKalb, leaders seeking a closer connection with the town’s university students have made that image real using a walkway that connects the church and the campus community.

In 2021, vestry member Marilyn Cleland, along with the Rev. Barbara Wilson and program committee members Lynne Jacobson and Sandra Lee, began to imagine how the church, which sits in a natural thoroughfare for Northern Illinois University students, could support and encourage the young adults that walk through its grounds. The committee purchased five sign frames and Cleland and her husband, Cliff, installed them along the path. The congregation rotates signs in the frames regularly, welcoming students in fall and spring, celebrating graduations, noting liturgical seasons, and marking community and global concerns.

“The goal of the ministry as conceived in the summer of 2021 was to communicate to the students our acknowledgement of them and their concerns within the context of academic and church time,” Cleland wrote in a year-end report to the congregation. “A parallel in the Anglican Communion is the devotional path along the way to Canterbury Cathedral, as dramatized in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.”

So far, the sign ministry has developed twelve sets of five signs related to a season or theme. The signs use open-source artwork along with texts and images by local poets and artists, and Susan King, the parish administrator, helps Cleland produce them. Although Cleland and King have so far been “careful to show only that St. Paul’s Episcopal Church is thinking about them rather than overtly seeking them as members of the church,” they are considering extending more explicit invitations to church in this semester’s rotation of messages.

After the semester ends, Cleland and other parish leaders will evaluate the program and consider ways to expand its reach, perhaps by involving artists and writers from the university and town. While disappointed that the signs haven’t yet brought students to church on Sundays, the sign makers hope that the parish has succeeded in its efforts to communicate love and care to NIU students.

“Sometimes you do these things and feel like you’re blowing into the wind, but our rector, who lives near the path, says she sees students stopping and reading the signs,” King says. “You never know how it’s going to hit somebody.”