Annual Report 2016

Annual Report

                                   Nehemiah 8; Psalm 19; 1 Cor 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

Father Adam Trambley

January 24, 2016 St. John’s Sharon

This morning is the parish’s annual meeting, so I want to give you my annual report for this year. Since this is St. John’s 150^th Anniversary year, a part of me feels like this should be not only an annual report, but also a sesquicentennial report.  I also hope it will have elements of a tricentennial report, because we are not just thinking about the past 150 years, but we are also preparing for the mission and ministry of St. John’s for the next 150 years. Someday people are going to remember coming to St. John’s for the Saturday lunches the way today they remember swimming in our pool, some folks on vacation are going to show their children the sights they saw as part of a New York City mission trip they went on as a teenager here, and somebody is going to tell their granddaughter as she prepares for her wedding at St. John’s how they were married way back at the beginning of the twenty-first century by that Father Trambley – and then add wistfully, I think he died a couple years back.  When we think about where we are as a parish, we need a very long-term perspective.

I want to offer two touchstones of that perspective this morning, before talking about some of our current blessings and challenges.  The first touchstone is our purpose statement: Worship God, Care for People, Grow as Christians.  While this particular articulation of St. John’s purpose is relatively new, our parish energies from the beginning, in the more recent past, and continuing today have focused on these three areas.  We have gathered for worship, we have reached out in love to meet the needs of the community, and we have worked to increase our faith and our practice of living out the Christian life.  If we continue focusing on these three areas, our first 150 years will be only the beginning of the blessings that St. John’s will offer our parishioners and our surrounding community.

The second touchstone comes from Psalm 1.  Psalm 1 describes those who delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night as trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither, everything they do shall prosper.  When we want to look for ways to think about being what God has made us to be over a span of hundreds of years, a tree is a great exemplar.  Certainly some trees don’t make it for very long – some meet with dutch elm disease, an emerald ash borer, or an overzealous lumberjack.  Yet some trees are thousands of years old and still vital, whether they are the stately California sequoias or the scrubby olive trees in Jerusalem that were there when Jesus walked by.  Just like people, trees have good years and bad years. Some years are fruitful and some are barely survivable.  But if the tree’s roots are tapped into the necessary source of nourishment and God’s hand is upon it, such a tree will bear fruit in due season, if not in every season, and its leaves will not wither, even when other, less rooted plants around it are withering.  This Biblical analogy helps us see St. John’s as a parish that has borne amazing fruit at certain times, that has almost, but not quite withered in the midst of enormous challenges at other times, and that has continued forward as we have remained grounded in our deep, abiding relationship with God, a relationship we live out corporately as we worship God, care for people and grow as Christians.

Keeping this long view helps us while we look at where we are. I would characterize our current situation as very hopeful, with a number of exciting opportunities and as well as some challenges.  Many of you here remember times when life in the parish and in the Shenango Valley seemed much more fruitful – more people, more children, more activities.  Yet we as a parish have also faced some enormous threats in the past, including times when weekly Sunday worship was suspended and times when all our facilities were mortgaged and we had a hard time paying the bills.  The tree of Psalm 1 reminds us that we don’t have to run around like Chicken Little crying that the sky is falling because of the population decrease in the Shenango Valley, or the rise of Sunday morning sporting events, or changes in the culture that mean less people in church.  Instead, we are reminded that we meet crises by delving deeper into the waters of God that we are planted by -- saying our prayers, building relationships with each other, using our gifts as part of the Body of Christ, and offering the good news to those in the community around us.  During the dry times we worship God, care for people and grow as Christians so we don’t wither while we wait for God’s next season of bearing good fruit.   

So where are we? 

To start with, we have people showing up and becoming part of the parish, and that is a very good thing. It is a very good thing because it means that what we are doing offers a faith community that meets the needs of people who are looking for one.  We may not be perfect, but we are doing something right.  In the past six months, I count about a dozen new folks who have been showing up, many of them already using their gifts in a variety of ministries. The challenge for us as a parish is to welcome and incorporate these and future newcomers into our parish life.  Boarding a 150-year-old train is not easy, and all of us have the responsibility of helping people find their way through the liturgy and learning about our ministries and offerings.  We also have the responsibility for getting to know each other in ways that create a supportive community not only for church stuff but also through all of the ups and downs of life.  These strong relationships have been a past strength of St. John’s.  Given the business of modern life, today we have some room to grow in this area.

Without overemphasizing a more institutional perspective, we do need to incorporate effectively about a dozen new members every six months.  Currently one-third of our parish is age 75 and over.  If we want to maintain our parish life, we need to focus more on evangelism, welcoming, and incorporating new people so that we can reach an additional 20 to 30 people each years who want to join us in our parish life and ministry. 

One new way we are going to work on getting to know each other and incorporating new members is a church night on Wednesdays during Lent.  On Wednesdays from February 17 through March 23, we will start at 5:30 with a Lenten worship service that will include music, Eucharist and preaching.  At 6:30 we will have a parish dinner that will be brought in, cooked or organized by a volunteer. We’ll take donations to offset the costs, but the vestry felt like potlucks were harder and harder to make happen for people who were working. At 7:30, the choir will meet, I will teach a new member classes, and folks are welcome to organize anything else they might want to do. Everyone is invited, and the classes are open to new and experienced members who are interested.  If you can’t make all three activities, feel free to come to just one or two. If these evenings are successful, we would like to continue some kind of midweek Eucharist and more frequent parish dinners, as well as offering additional small group learning and formation opportunities.

Of course, having the number of new people we have attracted recently has a few implications.  The primary one is that things change.  New people do some old things in new ways, as well as doing some new things.  This change is normal, but sometimes it is also painful.  Throughout our history, we have structured things in many different ways, based on the needs of our parishioners and the community.  Let me mention some of the parts of our parish life that are currently in flux.

Two-thirds of the 2016 vestry has been at St. John’s less than six years.  They are bringing great new ideas, like an AED for the lounge, but there are probably also going to be some things that will be forgotten or missed.  We’ll all need patience to catch things that might otherwise get overlooked, and an openness to experiment with new projects and ideas.

Our children and youth ministry is changing.  The diocesan grant funding Diana’s position ended in December, and we have had fewer children showing up regularly for Sunday School.  At the same time, we have children coming to our Saturday lunches, some folks (surprisingly not me) who want to start a liturgical dance group for our children, and another couple who is interested in building on the very successful confirmation class mission trip last summer with more mission trips going forward.  Our youth confirmation class will be taught by me, but not on Sunday mornings.  We also have a new nursery worker, Suzanne Prather, who will be here every Sunday through both services.  We will have some broader Christian Ed discussions in the coming weeks, but we will follow people’s passions and go where we think we can reach young people instead of just repeating what we have recently done.

Another area of change has been music.  Ron and I, and others, have been working hard to broaden the range of worship music in ways that are appropriate to our liturgy, that inspire us, and that can be done well by our musicians and choir.  Like all experiments, some things have been great successes and a few things we might not try again.  Also, the music that sends some into glorious rapture doesn’t do anything for other people, and that is OK, which is why we’ve worked to refine and improve offering from different time periods and different styles, with different instrumentation, whether that is organ, piano, guitar, a capella, brass and tympani, or even bagpipes.  We have new people joining the choir, and in some cases coming because of our current music program. I want to thank Ron for all of his hard work. In terms of using music to create a powerful worship experience, he is probably the best liturgical artist I have had the pleasure to work with, and the special services he has organized have been incredibly powerful.  I also want to thank the choir and all our instrumentalists for their very valuable contributions to our worship life. 

To shift topics a little bit, I also want to note that we are paying all our bills and have a roof over our heads.  In terms of our buildings, we are not facing any significant deferred maintenance issues.  We are a year into a five-year capital campaign, and you have already generously contributed a third of what we expect to receive.  This money will allow us this year, in the early spring we have been told, to repoint the older stone and brick buildings in our plant, as well as complete a number of other small projects, like insulating our office windows.  We have already resealed the parking lots, and hope to do things like replace the coverings on our stained glass windows in the coming years.  One new concern we have, however, is water entering the new Allen Hall building. We will be following up with architects and contractors about what exactly is happening there.  I cannot express enough thanks to those who worked on the capital campaign, both in putting together the building plan and in the stewardship area.  I also want to give a shout out to Bob Verholek, who has tirelessly cared for our facilities, whether in wrestling very old electric wiring, taking careful stock of our walls and stone, attending to seldom-visited corners of our basement, or in any number of other ways.  Fred, our sexton, has completed some important big picture projects, and we have a number of great volunteers that help regularly with cleaning, with repainting and refreshing different areas of the church, or with other special projects.

Financially, we had a small surplus in 2015 and have presented a balanced budget for 2016.  We are blessed with a significant endowment that provides us an income stream of between $80,000-$100,000 a year.  We cannot use the corpus of the endowment, but these gifts, mostly in the form of bequests, from those who have gone before us are a huge help. There are two ways, however, that are finances are a bit more precarious than in the past.  First, about a third of our giving, totally about $75,000 a year, is given by people aged 75 or older.  Second, we no longer have the captains of industry in our parish who were able to write a huge check and fix any problems that might arise.  The Buhls and Perkins and Hendersons are no longer here – either in the parish, or, for the most part, in the Shenango Valley.  Instead, our giving comes from regular people who are stepping out in faith, tithing their incomes, and watching God show up in their lives as he is showing up in the life of the church.  In many ways, having to do what we can and rely on God is not bad way to move forward. We know that St. John’s is God’s church, and that God is certainly capable of providing what we need.  I would thank Bob Edeburn for helping shepherd our finances for a number of years now, as well as Keith Rowlands and the finance committee for their work with our budgets and investments.

I could spend much time thanking many in the parish for all the work that is done: the Episcopal Church Women for their events and their generosity in funding activities within the church and in the community; Episcopal Community Services that feeds hundreds of people monthly while providing a well organized pantry that allows dozens of volunteers to serve effectively; all those who help make our Sunday morning worship happen – the altar guild, our readers, Eucharistic Ministers, ushers, acolytes and greeters; the collection counters that come in Monday mornings; those who help with the Saturday lunches; our Sunday School teachers and other youth volunteers; our Eucharistic visitors and prayer team; and Barb Lipinski, our Senior Warden last year, and the vestry, especially for their work during my sabbatical; and to others who I am probably forgetting.  A big thank you, also goes to Tina, our parish secretary, who does amazing work.  We are blessed to have her.

Finally, I want to give a huge thank you to Deacon Randy Beck, who has offered so many gifts to this parish for such a long time.  Although Deacon Erin Herald will be joining us, she will be offering her own gifts and not in any way replacing the work that Randy has done.  I have been grateful for the opportunity to work with him, to dream with him, and to pray with him.  We know he is taking us with him as he takes the gifts he has developed here and uses them to help plant a new church.  Raising him up to go out into this nearby mission field is another sign that we are on the right track as a parish, doing what God has given us to do in ways the will bear good fruit.  Next week, we’ll hear from Randy and have a chance between services to recognize and thank him again.

I am excited and hopeful about where we are as a parish.  We face some challenges, but we have the gifts to meet them.  I remain grateful to be your rector and I look forward to the coming year, and to as many of the next 150 years as I am able to see.  St. John’s has been, and can continue to be, like a tree, planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither, that will continue to Worship God, Care for People, and Grow as Christians.