Jose Grinan reports for FOX 26, Houston:
Barbara Bush, George H.W., and their children have been members of St Martin’s Episcopal Church since the early 1950s, when there were only 250 people in the congregation.
“President Bush was a very active lay leader in his early years here. But it was not uncommon to see him serving coffee on Sunday morning. Both of them taught in our Sunday school program. Both of them been involved in our outreach ministries,” recalls [the] Rev. Dr. Russ [Levenson Jr., rector of] St. Martin’s Episcopal Church.
Since the 1950s, St. Martin’s has grown exponentially, creating a need for more space and other contemporary worship buildings and pastoral sites on campus. and, a much larger sanctuary for members of the congregation who preferred the more traditional church service.
… “There are plenty of times when we were really crowded, which is a great problem as a church. And you would see the president or Mrs. Bush or both of them get up and offer their seat to somebody else or scoot over so that people can squeeze in.”
It seems every week, Mrs. Bush loved talking to other parishioners about all of her children. She shared stories about a son who became president, who much, much earlier had appeared in children’s pageants at church.
Matthew Townsend is a Halifax-based freelance journalist and volunteer advocate for survivors of sexual misconduct in Anglican settings. He served as editor of the Anglican Journal from 2019 to 2021 and communications missioner for the Anglican Diocese of Quebec from 2019 to 2022. He and his wife recently entered catechism class in the Orthodox Church in America.
