Great Momentum
Wow. What a summer! It’s hard to believe that our season is leaning toward fall, but it sure feels like that’s where we’re headed. The temperature’s dropping. I can see the leaves just beginning to show some different color, and our kiddos are headed back to school. What a summer!
You’ve done some great work over the course of the last three months. You’ve been dreaming Big Dreams—together and on your own. Let me give you a little update there. Those Big Dreams and Great Ideas have been cataloged. The vestry and the staff have had a chance to look them over as separate groups and have had an opportunity to organize them in various ways. Over the course of the next six weeks, we’ll be looking at them again and again—reading, discerning, and praying about direction. Both the vestry and the staff will have a chance to meet with a consultant, as we begin to build a plan for making our dreams come true. That work should be near completion following a staff-vestry retreat at the end of October. This kind of work is both exciting AND slow!
You’ve also kicked off our 2019 Stewardship Campaign with great momentum. Last Sunday, our Consecration Sunday, many of you placed your 2019 pledges in the offering plates, and they were blessed on the altar at our Eucharist. I’m grateful for your generosity and commitment to our church and the community our church serves. We do have “Deep Roots and a Wide Embrace!” I don’t think it takes a very long time for those new to our valley to come to see St. John’s Episcopal Church as a leading force for Love in our valley and beyond. Of course, there are others, but you have made a name for yourself here, and I’m proud of how you so faithfully and generously serve God. Thank you, thank you.
Soon our church will recede from four to two as St. Hubert’s and the Chapel the Transfiguration finish for the season, and our town population will do the same. However the momentum for mission and care of this community will not! I’m looking to a busy, love-soaked fall at St. John’s. I hope you are, too!
Love,
Jimmy