On Thursday evening, Rev. Anne Mason began our first meeting of the new year by serving us all a scrumptious dinner.  We mention this only to elevate your latent urge to join the Board for next year. Talk with any Board member about this exciting opportunity to serve and be served.

As for the meeting itself, we began with important reports and updates from ministry and committees. You can find those in the minutes of the meeting prepared by Dave Juitt. In what follows, we would like to capture one theme that dominated much of the evening’s deliberations.

We were all excited by the early results of the Capital Campaign. To us, those results (and the heartfelt comments and enthusiasm from parishioners that went with them) are a strong indicator of the congregation’s commitment to this church and its future. The funds from that first phase will allow us to do critical repairs and restorations of the building that will help us maintain the legacy that we have been entrusted.

The focus of the Board for this year, as a positive consequence, will be less on restoration of what we have now and more on envisioning and planning for what we want to have in the future. At this time in our history, when most mainline churches are dwindling, it is vital that we reconsider what our mission and our activities should be for the future, re-visioning how we can best serve our congregation and our larger community in a changing time.

The proximal outcome will certainly be a proposal for “Phase Two” of the Capital Campaign. But its focus will be less on repairing the building we have than on re-imagining what we need a building to do. To do that, we must determine what our mission will be, and what role our building (and other assets) will play in serving that mission. What kind of spaces, what kind of facilities, what kinds of media, what kinds of resources, do we need to accomplish the mission we have set out for ourselves.

Needless to say, this is not a discussion for the Board, but for our whole congregation. In the next two months, the Board will be taking steps (more later) to prepare itself to lead those discussions.  We look forward to them, and especially to having them within a building that is greatly improved already.

David Rose, co-chair

Katie O’Hare Gibson, co-chair