“And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work." 2 Corinthians 9:8
This past Sunday afternoon, members of our vestry, our Property, Creation Care, Planned Giving, and recently formed Capital Campaign committees met to have a strategic planning conversation about our campus. It was the first of what I expect will be many conversations with this group. We met out of a desire to integrate the many discussions over the past several months and develop a sense of alignment on the big picture for our campus: what the significant issues and decision points will need to be to move forward. And we had a conversation about our values.
We enjoyed lunch and fellowship during the first 30 minutes of our 3-hour session. We had a simple meal: soup, salad, and bread. I made my mother’s carrot soup. I have her recipe scribbled on a piece of paper in my own writing; I recalled years ago, she read it to me over the telephone. The recipe doesn’t make much – it calls for a pound of carrots, an onion, and two and a half cups of vegetable stock. So, most of the week leading up to the meeting, I was obsessing about how many multiples of the recipe I should make; it looked like we might have anywhere between 20 and 30 attendees. Ultimately, I settled on 10 pounds of carrots and went from there. It didn’t stop me from second-guessing myself, fretting that it might not be enough, laughing at myself for being so worried; you get the picture.
Part of our effort in parish life together involves shifting our culture to move away from the binary view that our building and our mission are somehow separate items. In my mind, we need to talk about the property for a while so that we can stop talking about the property. And what I mean by that is our vestry has developed a vision to self-fund our property needs from our endowment so that our pledge dollars are entirely focused on our people and our mission. To achieve that vision, there’s work to do, and it involves talking about our property.
At the end of 2021, the vestry charged the Property Committee with helping us get a comprehensive view of our campus maintenance needs so that we could do a better job of longer-term planning and financial forecasting. That work resulted in an engagement with Commercial Construction Consulting (C3) out of Boston.
C3 reports that while overall, the properties are well maintained and are in good condition, there are items nearing the end of their expected life and needing immediate attention. The accumulated cost to address repairs, spread over ten years, is estimated at $5.7 M. It’s essential to know that this figure is to maintain our campus and doesn’t include renovations or additions that we may want to do as we consider other uses for the campus.
Our afternoon was filled with several 15-minute sessions, through which we developed a set of property categories and core values that we’d like to apply to each topic to help us discern what will be next. We’ll be sharing more of this work with you in the coming months.
As you might imagine, our conversations veered into the “how in the world will we afford this” territory, and the room was mixed with both optimism and concern. I was reminded of how I was worried about whether there would be enough soup for lunch (granted, on a much smaller scale). In the end, there was enough soup; I even took home leftovers for lunch on Monday. While we don’t know where we will end up in this strategic conversation about the property, I know that God is able to provide us with every blessing in abundance. For now, I need to trust that we’ll have enough.
Dave McSweeney, warden
