Recently, I have been thinking that everything has been going well. Our community has been meeting our budget, we are getting new people on Sundays, and we are filled with a renewed energy. I was happily going down the path of continuing what we were doing and just improving it with small things like we had listed in our dot discernment. Life was good!
I had a clear awakening recently as we passed our budget and began to encounter bigger maintenance issues on our building as a result of a fire inspection. The reality is that we are not sustainable in our current iteration of ministry. While we have been working hard on our discernment, and creating a future vision for ourselves, the reality is, that vision was not wide enough in its scope, so here we are at a fork in the road.
We can take one path and choose as a community to request less than full-time clergy staffing. We might decide that a quarter time or halftime pastor is all we need. Or we can continue on this path as we are. That would mean spending down our reserves and using up our other funds to pay for the gaps in our budget. While we did this, we could work to reduce some more of our costs and try to do things like getting more building users. We would pretty much keep doing ministry in the same ways. Or in this moment, we could take another fork in the road and do some thing radically different. This might mean looking at our land and building and selling or remodeling. This would mean thinking about what our parish is and how we show up in the world in new ways.
It is clear that we cannot keep doing things the way we are doing them. We simply don’t have the people energy or finances to manage our building and all of its needs and our ministries. While our community gives faithfully and our building is robustly used, the fact that things like gas has nearly doubled in price mean the fiscal landscape is complicated. Over the next few months we will be working as a parish and as a leadership team to figure out which one of these paths we would like to take.
At our leadership team meeting this last Sunday the vast majority of people indicated interest in doing things radically differently. There were some, however, who did not feel like that was the best course of action for our parish. We will continue to talk and listen, pray and discern, as we embrace what God is unfolding here in our community and listen faithfully to how God wants us to live at our faith here and now.
-Eilidh
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