God is GOOD. All the time. All the time. God is good.
God got us through 2020. (I think maybe we should put that on a T-shirt?) God got us through 2020 WELL (all things considered). In this report, I will review worship, finances, and make some comments about plans for 2021.
Worship
1. In-person worship was able to operate indoors from July to November and outdoors from July through Christmas Eve. From the beginning of the pandemic on March 13 though today, we not missed a Sunday either with our streamed worship or in-person. (Sunday, December 27, the Diocese offered a streamed service for all parishes.) Our worship team and tech team immediately began learning new skills to assure we could offer our best to keep the congregation connected and worshiping regardless of the circumstances. Ben Urquidi deserves special recognition for continually learning new techniques with audio / visual and streaming production.
2. We had many special offerings throughout the year. Particularly well done were Holy Week through Easter Sunday, Pentecost, Mothers’ Day, July 4th, St. Francis Sunday, Parish Feast Sunday, and All Saints. Our various worship teams including our streaming guru, Ben Urquidi, made it so our Advent and Christmas worship was extraordinary. Ben and Ashley Urquidi designed and produced a wonderful Longest Night service and the Christmas Pageant. Both were challenges that needed a different approach. Both ended up being creatively thought through and wonderful produced to be blessings we couldn’t have imagined.
3. One of the highlights of the year is always Christmas Eve. With the horrible weather expected and rising COVID rates, we worried about how to have in-person worship which we’d all dreamed of experiencing. We could not be outside in driving wind and rain. GREAT THANKS to Scott Crumley who got the Great Hall shell cleaned and powered up so we could have worship that evening. David Beach, Gretchen Hood, the Urquidis, Leslie Fenter, Altar Guild, Genevieve Nelson, Mal Higgins and his merry band of ushers, and the St. Cecilia Choir came together to make it a night to remember.
4. Gretchen Hood managed our “hospitality” and administration of our worship so well, while also making our streamed services much more interactive by her role as an online commentator and welcomer. She is part of the behind the scenes for every service inside or out. Paige Martin, Sharon Payne, Peter Hood (on the streaming system), and many others (including a host of ushers) have helped out. The core of our Sunday organizational team has been Gretchen, Mal Higgins, Leslie Fenter, Paul Hudgins, and Cheryl Sutherland (who gets all the bulletins ready).
5. Leslie Fenter has been the literal “backbone” of our outdoor worship, setting up and managing the new sound board. Unless you are around early and late, you wouldn’t realize she has been coming 90 minutes before the services to set up, in addition to Saturday efforts to stage equipment to make Sunday morning flow more easily. In the cold mornings of December, she earned extra stars. Paul Hudgins has supplied steady faithful hands (literally) and direction that made beautiful singing come alive (even when I thought it was too cold for his fingers to move). He has bent over backwards to be sure we had whatever we needed musically.
6. The Gathering Band and St. Cecilia choir led us with wonderful music for our outdoor worship. They also recorded hymns and anthems feeding our streamed worship. A quartet of the choir recorded many pieces that we are still using. Random Acts has done several recordings as well.
7. Mal Higgins is always doing what he can to organize us and with good humor keep everyone “ushered” into the right places. I am regularly heartened by his observations and ability to connect and guide, and always by his faithfulness.
8. Our Altar Guild members have “rolled with the punches” whether it was worship in the church, parish hall, graveyard, drive-by, funerals and weddings, or last minute changes. Flower Guild has done likewise with special arrangements even when no one was inside the church so the streamed worship still seemed beautiful and worthy of our offering to God.
9. FaceBook and YouTube have been our partners this year. While we cannot measure our actual effectiveness, numbers of views and people attracted to our “channels” are witness to the Gospel work. We grew from 773 members (likes) on our Facebook page to 1,015 in this year. Many of our videos had over 1,000 views. One as high as 11,321. Normally 40-75 ‘screens’ are watching while we are live and there will be many more ‘views’ as the week goes on, plus another 50 or more views on YouTube. We have many new friends all over the country and world. Some never knew us before finding us there. Others are members who are now living in other states or countries, some of whom will return!
Administrative and miscellaneous challenges with some kudos along the way.
1. COVID management… There was a massive effort involving dozens last Spring to develop our guidelines for safe operation. Our “COVID Czar” Nancy Ries has been an almost weekly consultant for advice about current conditions and practices. Wardens Paige Martin and Tony Putzig have been wise counsel all year, and especially as I have been faced with questions about worship and other activity.
2. Administrative work… For safety, we needed to minimize people in the offices including our own staff. Kudos to Gretchen Hood and Cheryl Sutherland for making our operation flexible enough to do the bulk of our work from home. Special thanks to Dave Wilkinson who has been constantly helping us with equipment, networks, and software improvements as needed to accomplish all this.
3. Accounting … All the extra work for the Building project, switching banks to Southern, PPP administration and other issues overloaded our accounting functions. Ned Kuhns has done a fantastic job keeping up with everything and making our operation effective. Diane Miller and Terri Piston have worked hard to keep up with the daily and monthly activity and get caught up with large projects. They has managed to keep overcoming obstacles to keep us operating and informed.
4. Building Project… I cannot say enough about how well this year has gone in our Building Project. There is a full report of all that has been done. But David Beach would get the “Servant of the Year” award if we had such. We give thanks for an enormous amount of work done on the Building project in the past couple months. Thanks are due to many, but especially David Beach, Scott Crumley, Ann Perry and Gretchen Hood. David Burt has continued to oversee the process and call on others as needed, such as Carl Sterzing and John Sherman. Scott Crumley, as reported elsewhere, is doing us such a fabulous job as our General Contractor. We could not be in better hands than the team of Scott and David Beach.
Finances
1. We projected a deficit for the year 2020 of ~$42K. When the pandemic hit us and it became apparent we were not returning for normal worship for a long time, we realized offerings would be lower than normal. Your vestry and staff took important steps to minimize spending while maintaining mission and ministry in all the areas we could.
2. The Payroll Protection Program became a saving grace, allowing us to not lay off staff for the Day School and Church staff for the second quarter of 2020.
3. Several staff salary and benefit reductions and lower spending in most of our activity areas (Parish Life, Formation, and Congregational Care as examples) allowed us to keep spending lower than the reduced revenues. We still spent more outreach money than we did in 2019 and supported our community and assisted many members who were hard hit during this period.
4. We ended 2020 with a positive cash flow of $7K instead of a deficit of $42. With the added benefit of the PPP forgivable loan, our cash reserves are now approximately $90K higher than they were to begin 2020. We have cash reserves sufficient to weather our storm.
5. 2021 pledges are more than $90K lower than pledges for 2020. Some of that, we hope, will be made up as we get back to more normal operation as the year progresses.
6. To assure we don’t overspend in 2021, but still are prepared for as much mission and ministry as we can do, we adopted a 6-month budget. In the June time-frame we will have a clearer picture of an outlook for the second half and will budget the second half. This will allow us to not over-react to the recent troubles, but be flexible enough at mid-year. Mission and ministry will NOT be sacrificed, but we will be prudent about the approach.
Where do we go in 2021? What’s next?
1. I believe we need to now resume parts of our ministry that are possible in safe ways. Waiting is not necessary so long as we do those things that are safe …. and do what our community needs and can do.
- 1. Adult Formation on Sundays with sermon seminars and mid-week lessons for LENT will increase opportunities. Some of our children and family formation resumed this month and it takes another step up in LENT. Ashley and I are creating home children’s chapel videos for use in our families as well as the Day School. We need to find creative ways to help our families with young children in ways that are actually help-full and life-giving.
- 2. Youth formation needs to be active again. I am tasking a couple mentors to gather interested parents and youth to set some activities that will once again support learning to live the faithful Jesus-life, community building with peers, and positive fun. There is much we CAN do, even while much of what we used to do is no longer considered safe.
- 3. Outreach / Mission continued to be active in 2020. We did some fantastic work with feeding, supporting children, and the angel tree programs during 2020 pandemic shutdown. We are exploring opportunities for helping Latino ministries on the Eastern Shore again with Dos Santos, which is being revitalized. I suspect our primary missions at Mission of the Holy Spirit and Feed My Sheep will need more of us in 2021 as the impact of this pandemic is felt. We are blessed in many ways and can share.
- 4. Repairing the Breach: over 25 of us spent significant time in Sacred Ground Circles learning to understand our current problems in race by understanding how we got here. Another equal sized group is in study now. That ‘racial reckoning’ work will move into more education and more action in 2021. We have established a “Repairing the Breach” fund that already has donations of $25,000. We are establishing a college scholarship to support students of color, and hope to do more work as we understand more of what can be our role in making this a more ‘just’ world.
- 5. Our pastoral care teams will be keeping in better touch with members who are isolated and feel disconnected. The staff, clergy, and I have been unable to keep contact with our 800 members when we no longer see most of them on Sunday mornings regularly. It has been one of the worst outcomes. But we can do better by having all of us reaching out to each other. Some of that has happened naturally. We will enable it to be more effective in 2021.
2. Online streamed worship will continue for all of 2021 and probably beyond. We reach people with the Gospel who are beyond our geographical borders in ways we never imagined. Plus there will always be some who cannot get to church and benefit from having us online.
3. In-person worship will resume as soon as possible and safe.
- 1. Outdoor Sunday worship will resume with our safeguards in Lent (February 21)… weather-permitting, as we did in December and earlier.
- 2. Indoor worship will be dependent on the COVID positivity rates and developments in vaccinations and other factors. A medical advisory group continues to meet weekly for our Diocese, reviewing the newest information. It appears that already many of us are getting vaccinated. All these will be factors. In the meantime, we will begin making consecrated communion available for use with streamed worship as we did at Christmas.
- 3. When possible, we will resume worship with multiple indoor services again. This probably isn’t until Fall, but again, time and conditions will dictate what and when. We might continue some outdoor offerings during the year as these have proven to be wonderful during pretty weather. We have learned some good things we should not give up!
4. The new construction areas will be ready for usage sometime this Summer (we believe and pray!). That should coincide with other factors to make this Fall a time of great blessing!
5. With new spaces and new technologies comes new needs! We will train volunteers for a new ministry of TECH ministers. We need adults and mature youth to train and then become part of our “STREAM TEAM” taking turns running camera, sound, and internet streams for worship. We have great trainers. Ben Urquidi and others will get you going well. We need a couple persons to help with web page maintenance. I know we have some gamers and tech folks in our midst who would find these to be natural ministries. Let us know.
