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October 2006
Faces of Joining Hearts & Hands: “So Great a Cloud of Witnesses”
The Second in a Series
A Hunger for Mission
Above the strains of church music, the Rev. Phyllis Zoon heard God’s call to feed both bodies and souls.
The Reverend Phyllis Zoon came to believe in mission late in life.
“In the church I grew up in, mission wasn’t a big emphasis,” Zoon said. “Although I did want to be a missionary when I was as a child.”
Eventually following that missionary call, Zoon, while still employed as a systems analyst and project manager for AT&T, decided to study church music — a vocational path that would eventually lead her far from her own roots in rural New Jersey to increasingly diverse, urban settings in her home state. And would also open her eyes, in the process, to the mission at her doorstep.
The Rev. Phyllis Zoon in the sanctuary of Central Presbyterian Church, Montclair, N.J. Zoon wears a stole which was specially made by In Stitches for the Presbyterian Hunger Program. Photo by Barry Kenstler.
After completing her master’s degree in music at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, Zoon became assistant organist at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown, N.J., where she was asked to start a new non-traditional choir.
“St. Peter’s was a downtown church with a busy soup kitchen,” Zoon explained. “One day they came into the choir rehearsal and asked the whole choir to help by taking charge for a Saturday. That experience made me personally aware of the issue of hunger in my community, and later on spurred my involvement with the Presbyterian Hunger Program.”
“After working in the soup kitchen, it was like I had new eyes. I began to notice that the people I had previously passed by on the street without really seeing were the same people I saw in the soup line,” she added.
In 1989, while serving St. Peter’s, Zoon took early retirement from AT&T in order to matriculate full time at the Drew University School of Theology in Madison, N.J., and enter the inquiry phase toward ordination as a minister of the Word and Sacrament.
While working in Monmouth Presbytery, Zoon became Hunger Action Enabler. After returning to Newark, she felt called to start a new Hunger Action Program in Newark Presbytery, where she continues to serve as Hunger Action Enabler. She recently was appointed to serve again in the same role for Monmouth Presbytery.
It was through her staff association with the Rev. Jim Reese, former interim presbytery executive for Newark Presbytery, that Zoon first became aware of the Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands.
“When Jim mentioned Joining Hearts & Hands, I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I could pledge something every month’,” she said. “And so I made my way to the Website and started contributing.”
Zoon said she loves what the Presbyterian Church (USA) is doing with international mission and with new church development and church transformation in the U.S. The latter has been her specialty as an interim minister.
“I think it’s wonderful that Joining Hearts & Hands is going on,” said Zoon. “I’m just grateful to help spread the word.”
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