Sunday Services for the Marine Corps Boot Camp

Unless you’ve gone through it, it’s hard to imagine the grueling experience of Marine Corps boot camp. Recruits are hundreds of miles away from home, maybe for the first time in their lives, aren’t permitted to speak with any loved one or friends back home, face huge physical, mental, and emotional challenges every day–for thirteen long, demanding weeks-on-end. They emerge proud, prepared, and ready to serve, but the process of getting there is tough. Some of the only ‘downtime’ (other than sleeping) a recruit gets is three hours each Sunday morning to attend worship, if they choose to.

The Marine Corps Recruiting Depot (MCRD) in San Diego (near the airport) is where almost all recruits who live west of the Mississippi—more than 20,000 a year—come for basic training. Currently, there is no Episcopal worship service offered at MCRD. But we have been invited, as a diocese, to change this!

We are putting together a team of priests, deacon and lay people who will offer the Eucharist, a time for group discussion and individual conversation, and the showing of an episode of The Chosen every Sunday morning from 8:00-10:45. Our goal is to recruit enough volunteers so no one needs to serve more than once every couple of months, unless they’d like to. We’re hoping to launch this meaningful new ministry in October.

If you’d like to sign up to help with Sunday services at MCRD, or if you’d like to learn more about this opportunity to serve our neighbors experiencing one of the most vulnerable times in their lives, please contact the Rev Douglas Worthington, the rector of All Souls’ in Point Loma, at dworthington@allsoulspointloma.org.

These brave young women and men have volunteered to serve their country in ways many of us have never contemplated, and they’re going through an unrelenting ordeal to prepare. How comforting and reassuring for them it will be for us to come alongside them, each week, to let them know how deeply they’re loved, carried, and cared for by Christ–and by us in the Episcopal Church.