In a parish setting, clergy, staff, and leaders are active all the time working on bits and pieces of our mission and ministry. It’s impossible to report on everything that goes on, so from time to time it helps to get a special communication about important things going on in the life of a congregation. As many of you know, the Vestry has continued to work diligently with our master plan. In the time since we presented the Master Plan we have made progress, and it’s time for an update.

Because we have done some things to alleviate our short term problems, like adding another service in the parish hall during the school year, it is easy to forget that things like the new service was intended to be a short term solution. Using this example, we see that after the entire year, the parish hall service attendance was fairly stable, and did what it was intended to do. It gave us a little more breathing room in the church at the 9:15 hour. However, if we were to combine the two together again, we would still be out of space in the church.

We have continued to struggle with classroom, office, and parking space, so the vestry has continued to pursue the long-term goals of the master plan and respond to the mandate we received from our survey work a few years ago, when the majority of the congregation shared that they expected that we would be building something or adding on within five years. We are now two years into that hypothetical five years, and so the work continues as we look down the road.

Here you will find a document we have created in order to share the latest information with the congregation about how we have progressed with our master planning work. You will see reminders of why we started down this path, and how it will benefit us. You will also learn that we have hired an architectural firm to take some of the concepts that are a master plan and turn them into actual plans that we can share and evaluate for cost. Once

we have plans in hand, it will then be time to evaluate how much of our plans we are called to fund through our giving. Our hope is that each of you will take the time to read this document, and reflect on it with prayer for consideration. There will be moments for public feedback and conversation as we move forward, and we continue to want to hear from members of the Parish. We have a lot of information from the survey work and the master planning workshops and the feedback after the master plan was unveiled, all of which is being passed along to the architect and the planners.  

We are taking our time to engage in this process thoroughly and thoughtfully so that we have the information we need to discern together. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me, the warden, or any of our Vestry members, if you have any questions or comments. I hope you enjoy the update. These are exciting times as we listen for God's call and glimpse the vision of how we might continue to build and facilitate the building of God's kingdom for generations to come.

Tom+