St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Sebastopol, California, opened its Playground Cafe on June 7 and it has quickly become a popular destination for families and neighbors. Photo courtesy of Christy Laborda Harris
[Episcopal News Service] The Playground Café is first a playground – slide, tunnel, a kids’ playhouse and games for young and old – on the 4-acre campus of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Sebastopol, California. And after nearly eight years of planning, it now is also a cafe with a full menu of food from breakfast burritos to peanut butter and banana sandwiches and drinks from coffee and juice to beer and wine.
Clergy and lay leaders at this enterprising Northern California congregation said they decided to dream big with the Playground Café, but it was a dream they almost lost, while their focus shifted to keeping the congregation running during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The extended wait and perseverance is paying off. St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church officially opened the outdoor play cafe and its multigenerational community space to the public this month to large crowds and much local fanfare and support, made possible with financial assistance from the churchwide United Thank Offering and the Diocese of Northern California.
It helps that families and neighbors love the concept.
“There’s a lot of buy-in with the community,” the Rev. Christy Laborda Harris, St. Stephen’s rector, told Episcopal News Service by phone this week after describing the grand opening on June 7. She estimated a first-day turnout of as many as 500 people, a mix of children playing and adults conversing over food at picnic tables and other outdoor seating.
The cafe sold out nearly its entire menu when it opened, and interest has remained strong since then. “I think it’s going to be life-giving for the community,” Laborda Harris said.
The Playground Cafe offers a full menu of food and drinks, which can be enjoyed in the outdoor seating area while children enjoy the playground. Photo courtesy of Christy Laborda Harris
Sebastopol is a city of about 7,000 people just west of Santa Rosa and a little more than an hour north of San Francisco. There aren’t many places in Sebastopol where young families can gather to eat and play in a safe and inviting space, Christina Toms told ENS.
“You can’t let your toddler wander around Starbucks,” Toms said.
She and her husband began attending St. Stephens in 2023, and they have become regulars this month at the Playground Café with their 5-year-old daughter, Sierra. The food is great, Sierra has fun with other kids, and the natural setting is beautiful, Toms said. And while St. Stephen’s opens the doors of its worship space to any cafe patron interested in joining services on Sunday, the community outreach isn’t intended to fill the pews.
“That’s not a prerequisite for community engagement and community building,” said Toms, who also serves on the church’s vestry. “We want [the Playground Café] to be a gathering place for everyone, and we mean everyone.”
Laborda Harris, who has served at St. Stephen’s since 2011, began developing the idea with other church leaders in 2017 around the time her second child was born. Their family and others with small children talked about the need for more family-friendly places to gather for socialization and play. Being a new parent can feel isolating and lonely, she told ENS, even with existing options like library story hour and child music classes.
Some parents mentioned that bigger cities like San Francisco have play cafes, combining recreational opportunities with a restaurant. At the time, St. Stephen’s had been gradually opening and expanding its facilities to accommodate a seed garden, a memorial garden, a food pantry, music classes for toddlers and an outdoor worship space for the summer months. Laborda Harris pitched the idea to the vestry of adding an outdoor play cafe, and by early 2020, the congregation appeared ready to bring the concept into reality.
Then in March 2020, the pandemic hit. Although St. Stephen’s was awarded a $145,000 United Thank Offering grant that year, the café project was moved to the back burner as church leaders navigated the disruptions of moving all worship online and later implementing public health precautions to limit the virus’ spread when resuming in-person worship.
Like many congregations churchwide early in the pandemic, St. Stephen’s saw a plunge in attendance, which fell to an average of 38 people in 2021. Gradually, though, more and more worshipers have returned to in-person worship, and last year, St. Stephen’s recorded an average Sunday attendance of 80. This year, some services have topped 100.
As the congregation rebounded from the pandemic, it also began returning to development of a play cafe. It was able to draw on the UTO grant and several additional grants from the diocese for a project that would cost about $300,000.
“One of the founding principles of UTO is that grants fund innovative mission and ministry projects,” the Rev. Heather Melton, UTO staff officer, said in a written statement for this story. “This means that some grant sites run into unforeseen issues as they figure out their project.” In the case of the Playground Café, St. Stephen’s leaders “had to overcome so much to bring this dream to reality.”
“Rev. Christy and the whole community at St. Stephen’s showed incredible determination, resilience, hope and faith as they followed God’s call to respond to their community in new ways, to meet people where they are, and to be a sign of God’s love and welcome to all people.”
The Playground Cafe includes a slide, a tunnel through an earthen mound, a playhouse and other games and attractions for young visitors. Photo courtesy of Christy Laborda Harris
The congregation first built the playground in 2022, figuring that even if it couldn’t get a cafe up and running, families would be able to use the play space. Securing permits for the cafe took more time. The congregation also debated whether to draw some money from its investment accounts to fill gaps in the project’s budget. Church leaders decided to move forward, concluding it was important “to use some of these funds to dream big in how we engage with our community,” Laborda Harris said.
The site plans included a cafe building of about 700 square feet to include a commercial kitchen and restrooms. Church leaders also developed an operations plan and hired a full-time cafe manager, as well as two hourly employees.
After launching on June 7, the cafe is now open five days a week, Wednesdays through Sundays. The congregation expects to continuing fine-tuning the operation over time and hopes it grows.
“We’ve watched it go from vision to reality, which has just been terrifically rewarding,” Toms said.
When her daughter had a day off from summer camp recently, they stopped by the Playground Café for brunch, and Toms is planning to meet a friend there for lunch next week. It is surrounded by trees, birds, a garden and other wildlife, she said, and “I think people just really dig the atmosphere.”
Laborda Harris underscored that the goal has never been to convert people to the faith. The cafe and playground are open to everyone, and connecting neighbors is the purpose, while also aligning with the church’s mission.
“The goal is to build relationships, with the belief that we don’t have to be on the same spiritual journey to journey together,” she said.
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.