On behalf of your Parish Board and the Stewardship Team, I want to thank everyone who participated in our Annual Pledge Drive. As of last Monday we have received pledges totaling $406,764 from 166 households, including 16 households that pledged for the first time.

We exceeded our goal of $393,000 — and we should celebrate that. However, as I stated in church on March 26th, this goal represented what the Stewardship Team hoped we could achieve. The goal did not represent the amount that the church needed in order to fund all the programs and activities that I believe should be funded — to achieve that goal we would have needed to raise roughly $435,000 from the Pledge Drive.  In all likelihood, this means that we will miss for the third year in a row a $25,000 loan payment to the First Parish Trustees, from whom we borrowed money to pay for the steeple 15 years ago.

I mention this in the spirit of trying to educate parishioners on the church’s financial condition and what it takes to operate the church. I will speak more about this on April 30th, when we present the draft 2017/2018 church budget at a congregational conversation following the Sunday service.

In the spirit of community,

Tom Rich

Board Chair