Southside Abbey meets Friday nights at Hart Gallery on East Main Street for a meal and discussion.WHY THE NAME?Southside Abbey got its name, according to the Rev. Bob Leopold, when a friend just blurted it out. It fit, he said. In medieval life, Leopold said, the abbey touched everything — including helping shape the surrounding community — in so many positive ways. It also proved to be a vehicle with which to do something new within the patterns of the old. “Some abbeys,” he said, “were pretty radical places.”
The Rev. Bob Leopold believes the centuries-old model for worship does not work for a significant number of people today.
Rather than trying to figure out where “church” went wrong, he feels time would be better spent trying to serve other people.
As such, Leopold, 33, an Episcopal priest, has begun a new worshiping community, Southside Abbey, which meets Friday nights at Hart Gallery on East Main Street for a meal and discussion.
“Church used to mean an assembly of people,” he said. “Eventually, it came to mean a building. We need to reclaim that [definition].”