Parish Renewal through Hospitality

Our May webinar features an interview with Fr. Nicholas Harrelson of St. Benedict’s Anglican Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The video of the interview is posted to Continuing Forward’s YouTube channel.

Offering Consistency

Since Fr. Nicholas became priest in charge at St. Benedict's in January 2025, he has led a remarkable turnaround. Palm Sunday attendance rose from seven in 2025 to 40 in 2026, and overall membership has increased from 24 to 87.

St. Benedict’s turnaround demonstrates the importance of a disciplined focus on the fundamentals. Based on what he saw as a St. Benedict's parishioner, Fr. Nicholas chose to focus on addressing two basic issues that proved central to that turnaround: consistency and hospitality.

When he took over last year, the parish was doing one thing well: liturgy. Sunday morning worship and a Wednesday low Mass were essentially all that happened. He recognized the need to build what sociologists call organizational legitimacy—the sense that an organization knows what it's doing and can be trusted.

He created a sense of trustworthiness and stability through one simple change: consistency.

Consistency [means] doing what we say we're gonna do, whether it’s a Zoom evening prayer that we’re gonna do weekly, or an evensong monthly. If we say we’re gonna do something, we do it. We start it at the time that it's supposed to start, and we're prepared for it. Maintaining that consistency was a big thing.

Overall, he said delivering such consistency meant “You take all of these steps that you can control, and you control them.” This includes anything a visitor might notice, whether it’s the quality of the bulletin or the condition of the facilities.

Creating a Sense of Hospitality and Community

Once the church had become stable and predictable, Fr. Nicholas turned his attention to the other step necessary for its turnaround: being hospitable.

Hospitality is normally thought of how parish greets visitors. Fr. Nicholas rejected the two extremes often seen in small Anglican churches. One is the insular church, where everyone is fixated on talking to their friends rather than taking the time to talk to strangers. The other is the desperately dogmatic church, which corners newcomers with theological arguments immediately after their first service, offering “10-point bullet list reasons for why they should not be where they are and should be here.”

Instead, Fr. Nicholas focused on making people feel welcome without pressure.

“A person will allow for a lot of things to be subpar, so long as they feel like they have been welcomed into the group,” he said. This meant training parishioners to greet visitors when they arrived and inviting them to coffee hour. It also meant providing a complete Mass booklet so that newcomers—whether from Roman Catholic or evangelical backgrounds—could follow along without confusion.

In his focus on hospitality, Fr. Nicholas intentionally applied one of the four pillars of Bp. Stephen Scarlett’s 2024 Mission Retreat: hospitality as the central mode of mission.

Building an Attractive Community

However, inviting visitors to join your parish community means little if there is no actual community to join.

As a result, Fr. Nicholas turned his attention to building community among existing parishioners. He spent a month teaching people about why community matters, then instituted a mandatory coffee hour after Sunday Mass. The results surprised him:

That 30-minute thing turned into an hour thing. Within a couple of months, there were ladies bringing food for it, and it turned into its own coffee hour/luncheon. And then, you know, it turns out that a lot of these people who thought they knew each other really well really did not know that many people that well in the church.

From that, he created monthly fellowship gatherings, rotating among parishioners’ homes, always beginning with Evening Prayer. Initially attracting 15 to 20, these grew to 30 to 40 people. He followed up this success by launching a men's group that met at different pubs and breweries around Chapel Hill — attracting not only parishioners but men whose sole connection to St. Benedict's was their regular participation in the group.

Such events accomplished two things: strengthening bonds among existing parishioners and creating welcoming entry points for newcomers and friends. “You are furthering the community sense of your own parish by hosting these things and bringing these people together, but you are also working simultaneously to bring new people in to be part of the community,” he explained.

Today’s Need for Community

Continuing Forward has long identified the modern need for community as a crucial opportunity for Anglican churches.

However, many Anglicans will go for years without experiencing such community in their local church. Fr. Nicholas joined St. Benedict’s as a Duke University seminarian in 2018, long before creating this sense of community.

So where did his vision come from? The inspiration came from the year he spent working with Bp. Scarlett’s Colorado Mission Community, applying lessons learned at the latter’s California parishes.

A lot of what I have done at St. Benedict's was already successful in the work that we did in Colorado. That replicated the work that was done at St. Thomas in Fullerton, and the work that was done at St. Matthew’s. And so it really was, in a sense, replicating that, and it beautifully transitioned to the Southeast here in North Carolina. People love to get together and have a good time.

Sharing the Vision

What's next? Recently, St. Benedict has started an advertising campaign targeted to reach new students at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke.

From this, Fr. Nicholas hopes to emulate the success of other Continuing churches that have ministered to colleges and colleges towns — citing Charlottesville (Virginia), Athens (Georgia) and Los Angeles (Biola). (Note: a previous Continuing Forward webinar also discussed successful ministries in Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech.)

Fr. Nicholas is looking forward to the opportunity to introduce St. Benedict’s to new students at both schools. When asked how he might summarize why a student should join St. Benedict’s rather than more evangelical Anglican parishes, he replied

There are many options around town that are Anglican in some sense. But we are truly living the authentic expression of Anglicanism in its Anglo-Catholic form. And that means living a life in community with others in pursuit of Christ.

Fr. Nicholas said he would be glad to talk to other Anglican clergy seeking to build a community in a parish formed by parish and worship.