What Her Heart Was Singing

There is a moment Sarah Manche describes that stays with you. A room full of people singing happy birthday for a grown adult sitting at the table, eyes wide. People have told her, she says, that it was the first time in their life anyone had ever sung happy birthday to them. 

This is how Sarah personally measures the difference being made. Not in meal numbers or hampers given out, though those matter too and she will tell you the figures are growing. It is in what people choose to share with her on their way out the door. In the person who arrives in tears and says, "I know I can always come here. There's always people here that love me." She knows not everyone hears these moments. But she is in a position where people share them with her, and she takes that seriously. Loneliness, she says, is an epidemic, and what keeps her going is the quiet evidence that something here is meeting people in it. 

Sarah is the Community Development Program Coordinator at Newtown Mission, but that title only tells part of the story. She came to this work the long way around. For years, life had pulled her in a different direction, through corporate jobs that paid the bills but left something unnamed unsatisfied. A friend had once used a phrase she had never forgotten, and somewhere in that period it became her own. “It just wasn’t making her heart sing.” What she had always been drawn to, she realised, was people. Sitting with them, learning from them, being useful to them in ways that actually mattered. Newtown Mission was where that finally had a home. 

“When I saw this role, I was like, I just wanted to be a part of it,” she says. “It’s people that have their heart in the same sort of place. It’s all about actions, not words.” 

That gap between words and actions is something Sarah thinks about a great deal, particularly when it comes to church. She grew up attending various congregations and was often left wanting more, restless at the distance between what was preached and what was practised. She is quick to turn the mirror on herself, acknowledging that she was often the one sitting back asking why rather than stepping forward. But she credits that restlessness with eventually leading her somewhere that operates differently. 

For Sarah, the anchor is simple, even if living it out is not. It comes back to two things, she says, loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself. “There’s no point me believing something and it’s just in my head and it’s just for me to benefit,” she says. “That’s not real faith. Faith has to include living it out, living it in community, sharing meals with people.” 

At Newtown Mission, the doors open for community lunches on Wednesdays and Fridays, and for dinner on Thursday evenings. Those meals are the highlight of Sarah’s week. She will tell you that is down to her volunteers, and she means it genuinely. Volunteers bring their own plate out and sit down beside someone. They stay. They listen. 

“Being acknowledged as a human being,” Sarah says, “and having someone take the time to sit and chat and laugh, make jokes, tell you their stories. That’s what it’s all about.” 

The community that gathers at Newtown Mission is as varied as the city itself. There are elderly regulars who have been coming for years. There are people who are unhoused, people in boarding houses, people from various communities. Lately there have been more new faces, and Sarah suspects the cost of living has something to do with that. Learning people’s names, she says, is one of the most quietly powerful things anyone can do. 

“It’s very hard to maintain that black and white distinction when you actually know a person’s name and you’ve spoken to them. They’re not just a number or a statistic. They’re a person. They’ve got a past. They’ve got lived experiences that we all have. Any one of us can find ourselves needing a place like this." 

That spirit extends to who shows up to serve. Sarah’s volunteer team includes people from all walks of life and all kinds of faith backgrounds, and some with none at all. The only requirement is a desire to love and serve the community. “It’s not just for people who are like us,” she says. “It’s for anybody, for everybody.” 

What Sarah is building at Newtown Mission is something harder to define than a program or a service. It is closer to a safe space, she says, a place where people can simply be. Where you do not have to explain yourself. Where you can sit quietly in a room full of people and feel, for an hour or two, that you are not alone.