The Lazarus Centre provides an important ministry to people experiencing homelessness.

The Lazarus Centre

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The Lazarus Centre operates onsite at St Peter’s in East Melbourne, provideing food, pastoral care and essential support to people experiencing homelessness. It provides people a warm and secure place to eat breakfast seven days a week, every day of the year. The Foundation is the Lazarus Centre’s primary benefactor.

It all began with breakfast

The Lazarus Centre began in the1990s. It started with conversations between people experiencing homelessness, who found refuge in the church grounds, and worshippers at early morning Mass.

After Mass, people would often have breakfast together in the church hall. One worshipper remembered asking one of the homeless people where he slept the night before. He replied ‘The Star Hotel,’ in other words, under the stars. The parishioner offered him a cup of tea. Parishioners began sharing breakfast with people experiencing homelessness and numbers steadily grew over time.

The Lazarus centre grew to take in two sites, one at St Peter’s and another at St Paul’s cathedral. In addition to meals, the Cathedral site and St Mark’s Community Centre offered facilities for showering and washing clothes.

To cope with the growing numbers, St Peter’s entered into a partnership with Anglicare Victoria, St Paul’s Cathedral and St Peter’s Charitable Foundation.

The Cathedral provided drop-in facilities. Anglicare provided the professional personnel, infrastructure and networks needed including connections with health care, housing, and personal support. Due to restricted space and aging facilities management decided to close the site at the Cathedral.

Supporting clients seven days a week

Over thirty years later, the Lazarus Centre programme continues to provide an important ministry to people experiencing homelessness and Melbourne’s most vulnerable communities.

The Lazarus Centre breakfast programme operates seven days a week between the hours of 7:30am and 9:00am. Small food parcels and clothing are also distributed during this time. Breakfast is the first available meal for people after a long night sleeping rough; it is an opportunity to meet with friends, social workers and healthcare professionals.

The Lazarus Centre breakfast programme operates seven days a week between the hours of 7:30am and 9:00am. Small food parcels and clothing are also distributed during this time.

Since 2013, the Foundation has also supported the programme with its own Chaplain, Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock..

Lazarus Centre Staff

Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock: Lazarus Centre Chaplain

Mthr Cara was born in Perth (in the same year and city in which Australian women were first ordained to the sacred priesthood) to a radio producer and an academic playwright who had recently arrived from England. Each of her parents, in their different ways, taught her sister and herself to cherish the power and value of communication. Though they did not know it at the time, they were giving her a great gift for her future ministry.

Mthr Cara was formed in the Christian faith in the parish of St Cuthbert’s Darlington, where she was baptised and confirmed. The clergy and community of that parish imparted to her a truth which has shaped her since childhood: that the sacramental encounter we have with the Lord during corporate worship is the pinnacle of our life, and that it makes moral and ethical claims on how we are to lead our entire lives, calling us to find ways of being agents of God’s love and justice within the larger family of humanity, something she lives out in her role as chaplain to the Lazarus Centre.

After finishing her schooling, Mthr Cara moved to Melbourne, eager to experience the life of a larger and livelier city, and began to discern what God’s claim on her own life might be. This bore fruit in her entrance into an order of contemplative Anglican nuns in the south of Wales, the Society of the Sacred Cross. Mthr Cara belonged to the order for two and a half years, and the gifts she received through that life of prayer, work, and the bonds of common love go beyond what she can easily express. However, the love for parish ministry which Mthr Cara discovered back in Melbourne had a claim on her heart, so with the support and guidance of the Sisters, she was sent forth to share the gifts she had gained while a nun with the church more broadly, as she offered herself for ordination and returned to theological studies at Trinity. Mthr Cara completed a Master of Divinity and undertook the various processes of selection and formation, while working as the Pastoral Assistant at Christ Church Brunswick.

In February 2024 Mthr Cara was ordained to the diaconate, and then that November, to the priesthood. She served her first curacy at the parish of St Stephen and St Mary Mount Waverley, which has affirmed her love for parochial ministry: offering the daily and weekly pattern of worship; sharing the beauty of the faith through preaching, teaching, and prayer; and being present to God’s people in times of crisis and celebration alike.

Mthr Cara is delighted to have been nominated to serve her second curacy at St Peter’s, and has served the Lazarus Centre as its chaplain since commencing at St Peter’s in 2025. .