ARLINGTON, MA (January 2, 2013) – Arlington has an additional part-time social worker to help the community’s neediest residents all because Highrock Covenant Church held a Christmas concert.
The joyous celebration featured a 41-voice chorus accompanied by violins, electric guitars, drums, and keyboards. The $15,000 in proceeds from the mid-December concert will help pay for the position at the Arlington Youth Counseling Center.
“It’s almost like a wish or a prayer come true,” Phyllis Brown, who runs the counseling center, told the Boston Globe. “They’re not just giving kids Christmas presents. They’re providing something very substantial to the town, and to people who need that kind of help.”
The social worker helps connect people with a variety of services. Without the church’s funding, the position would not exist.
Since its founding in 1999 by some two dozen individuals, the church has endeavored to serve the community. When the congregation purchased and moved into a former Greek Orthodox church building, the pastors talked with city leaders to better understand the community’s biggest unmet needs.
“We’re just doing what the church is supposed to do,” said Eugene Kim, Highrock’s executive pastor and director of the Christmas concert. “We’re supposed to be a community that loves each other and loves others and loves God, and that worships and serves. It’s an old-fashioned idea.”
More on the concert is available on the Globe’s website. To view additional photos of the concert, click here.
