Wayside Chapel
The Wayside Chapel is a charity and Parish Mission of the Uniting Church in Australia in the Potts Point area of Sydney. Situated near Sydney's most prominent red-light district in Kings Cross, the Wayside Chapel offers programs and services which attempt to ensure access to health, welfare, social and recreation services.
Description
The Wayside Chapel's mission is described as 'creating a community with no 'us' and 'them'. Their motto, developed during the leadership of Rev Graham Long is that of 'Love Over Hate'.
Rev. Graham Long described The Wayside Chapel's approach in a 2014 interview as not having "any interest at all in solving problems". Rather, The Wayside Chapel characterises its approach in the following way:
History
The Wayside Chapel was established in the Kings Cross area of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1964.Ted Noffs was the founder of the Wayside Chapel, which was at the time a Methodist ministry (Uniting Church from 1977). At that time, it was only a single room with a dozen chairs in a block of flats at 29 Hughes Street, Potts Point. Within twelve months of his arrival, Noffs had transformed it into a chapel, coffee shop drop-in and community resource centre. The expectations of the church hierarchy—that Noffs's experiment would fail and become obscure and irrelevant—were not realised.
