On Sunday, many of us gathered after the 10:00 am service in Hadley Hall and on Zoom for a State of the Church conversation with Rev. Nick and the wardens. A special thank you to many of you who got there even though you hadn’t been at the 10:00 am service (yes, we noticed!). Rev. Nick opened with a reflection on the program year and possible next steps in our current activities, as well as some of the bigger questions about where we are going and the challenges we face.
One area that will have a major impact on our future as a church is stewardship. For our upcoming stewardship campaign, one of our challenges is to sustain pledge levels that support our current activities, as well as increases in staff salaries and inflationary increases across all of our costs. Historically, three households have contributed almost one-third of the pledges that fund our budget. Clearly, that is unsustainable and we will, in fact, see a reduction of about 10% of our budget next year. A key element of our stewardship campaign this fall will be small-group gatherings with the goal of building a greater awareness of how our individual pledges impact what we can do as a community, as well as engaging everyone in conversations about who we are and our priorities.
While stewardship addresses our immediate needs, one of our long-term needs centers around the repair and maintenance of our property and our endowment. Our property committee has been scrutinizing last year’s property assessment, and our current thinking is that our property repairs are roughly $3M over the next 10 years. Concurrently, our Endowment and Planned Giving Committee performed a short study comparing our endowment of $1M to other churches in the diocese of similar size and similar demographics. Based on that comparison, we are substantially underfunded. We do not have a buffer to absorb a down year. Our parish is funded from stewardship campaign to stewardship campaign. As a parish, we are doing the equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck. An increased endowment is an opportunity to fix that.
One of the things that holds us back as a parish is that each year $250K of your stewardship dollars goes to utilities, maintenance, and repairs to our campus. An opportunity with the capital campaign is to raise enough of an endowment to offset some or even all of the annual building costs. A $6M endowment for our buildings would free up $250K each year, which could have a profound impact on furthering our programming, mission, and impact on society.
Our Vestry is committed to addressing these challenges. For the capital campaign, the Vestry has approved funding for a campaign consultant to help plan and execute our capital campaign. Our first step will be a feasibility assessment, which we plan to start in the early fall. The planning stages of our capital and stewardship campaigns will be happening in parallel. Both campaigns will impact the overall direction of the church, which needs to be a shared vision with input from the full congregation. We will want to hear from you, probably multiple times.
In closing, this is an exciting time for Epiphany. We have had a very strong ‘22/’23 program year which has been a source of joy and gratitude: our community is growing; wonderful things are happening; and there are many places in which God is calling us into deeper relationships and faith as a parish community. We are facing some challenges which we plan to address through stewardship and a capital campaign. While they focus on things like operating budgets and property endowments, in the end these campaigns are really about investing in the future of this vibrant, active and involved parish that we call Epiphany.
Thank you,
Darwin Keith-Lucas & Nelia Newell
