Wayside Chapel
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The Wayside Chapel
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| General information | |
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| Location | Potts Point |
| Address | 29 Hughes Street |
| Coordinates | 33°52′18″S 151°13′28″E / 33.871619°S 151.2244486°E |
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. The centre assists homeless people and others on the margins of society.
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:
"I don’t want you to be a problem that I have to fix. I want you to be a person that I can meet. And I think if we meet you’ll change and so will I. You’ll move towards health and so will I. That’s how it works."
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.
The centre grew until it occupied the entire building at No. 29. Later it grew still further and occupied the block of flats adjacent to the first block. A crisis centre was established in 1971 to handle crises which might arise at any time of day or night, including drug overdoses and possible suicides. More conventional church activities such as weddings were also carried out and the Wayside Chapel became one of the most popular wedding venues in Sydney, along with St Mark's at Darling Point.
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