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Dear Ones,
You all are amazing. In the last six weeks, you all have raised over $200,000 to close our gap for this year, and committed almost 1 million dollars for next year’s budget. The last time this congregation leveraged resources in this way was back when we were kicking off the capital campaign, in the “before times,” when we committed ourselves to renovating our building and our community to be not for ourselves alone, but to building an inclusive future.
Having been away for a while this winter and now being back, I can see more clearly how you all are feeling a renewed and renewing sense of energy, power, and purpose, and I am feeling it with you. I see it in….
- Every weekend this spring: overnights with our youth here in the building, growing their relationships with each other and the church;
- Eleven of us - staff and lay leaders and congregants who care, spending all day yesterday at a training on teen suicide prevention;
- The group that is gathering to increase voter engagement and working to impact the upcoming election;
- The ways our memorial service team has shown up to create a space to hold grief;
- Our Habitat for Humanity work days, scheduled for May and June and July.
I’m sure you are feeling this, too. Where do you see our sense of renewed energy and purpose in the church these days?
Later this week, I will be working with the Board to prepare a draft budget for our next fiscal year. I’m working with the Finance Committee and the Board to create a realistic, balanced, and mission-driven budget that we will present to you—the congregation—at our Congregational Budget Meeting on Sunday, April 21 at 1pm. If I were presenting that budget today, based on the amount we have raised to date, I am sorry to say that we would need to reduce our staffing by at least two full-time positions next year. As I have been saying throughout this stewardship season, layoffs would come from leadership positions, meaning from Associate and Assistant ministers—Rev. Ashley and Rev. Arif, Director of Worship Arts, Dr. Glen Thomas Rideout, and Interim Director of Children, Youth & Families Ministry, Allison Connelly-Vetter.
I don’t want to imagine this church without these people and without their incredibly skilled leadership. I love working with each of these people, and together, they are part of facilitating the power, purpose, and energy that is reawakening in this church. We know that we may need to plan for a gradual restructuring of staffing over the next several years. The board and I have already started those conversations. But let’s do that in a gradual and planful way that allows us to build the culture of shared leadership we would need to sustain our ministry and mission, and let’s keep the sense of purpose and power, belonging and connection growing here at church.
This is not a done deal. In order to avoid making these staffing cuts, we need your collective power to manifest in gifts to the church. For some of you, that means adding significantly to your pledge for next year. If you’re already giving automatically, thank you. What can you add? And if you are not giving yet, now is a really good time to start.
My wife and I both work in the helping professions, which are vitally important but don’t always pay the best. We have two teenagers at home and we’re starting to plan for our eldest to go to college in about 18 months. We decided to increase our annual gift to the church for the upcoming fiscal year to $5,000, which comes to a little more than $400 per month. This church matters to us personally, and to our kids, and it matters tremendously to our world and this Minneapolis community. This is where we come to be inspired, encouraged and supported, and this is where we come to imagine and practice another world into being.
A colleague, watching our church from the outside, used to ask me regularly, What impossible thing will you do next? Meeting our giving goals is not impossible, but it will take all of us. I know we can do this. I’ve seen this congregation do amazing things before, and I know that we are people who put their time, energy, attention, care, and resources into action.
Let’s invest together, knowing that in this constant cycle of giving and receiving and growing that our faith calls us into, we can do so much more together than we ever can alone.
Let us give, receive and grow together now. Like our very future depends on it. May it be so. May we make it so.
In Gratitude,
Rev. Jen Crow
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