Minister's Annual Report

Friends, may the Grace and Peace of Jesus Christ be with you all:

Here we are, Annual Report time again. We pause to look back at the year that was and start to wonder what the next year will bring.

Life continues to be interesting as we sort out what things will look like on the far side of the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many churches are finding that regular Sunday attendance is not back to what it was 3 years ago. Many of us are thinking that this attendance pattern may in fact be with us to stay. That may push us to adapt how we see ourselves functioning as a church community, to alter our assumptions about what we will look like.

In our Bible Study discussion this week we were talking about growth. I asked a question about what growth might look like. Does it always mean things like bums in seats or dollars in the bank, stuff that is easily countable? Or are there other ways that growth is evident in our communities? In the middle of that discussion one of the participants said that she saw lots of exciting things happening in our shared life as a community of faith. Growth and change are happening here. The other submissions to this Annual Report talk about what we have done and are continuing to do.

For my part I want to do what I do every year in this writing. That is to say thank you. This community only exists and functions because so many of you give so much. Thank you for people who serve on Ministry Teams and Council. Thank you to those who help organize and run fundraisers. Thank you to Scripture Readers and Greeters and Coffee Makers who add life and variety to our Sunday mornings. Thank you to all who give money to our general fund, to our Local Outreach Fund, to Mission & Service. Over and over again I am struck by the generosity that exists within this community of faith. Thank you all so much.

Life in the Goo, what’s a body to do?
Sometimes you don’t know if you ever get through.
But God has promised to be there for you,
so every now and then you live your life in the Goo.
(Refrain from Life in the Goo by Jill Kirsten Warner ©1999)

This piece by my colleague Jill was sparked by hearing about the transition from caterpillar to butterfly and the ‘gooieness’ of a cocoon. A new butterfly has to fight out of the goo before it can take wing and fly away. Jill thought it was a good image for life in the 21^st Century church that spends so much time dealing with change and transition.

We have our own ‘gooieness’ at various times and in various ways, but there is one event this past year that I need to talk about. It raises a gooey part of our current reality. Last Spring the Pastoral Relations Commission and the Community of Faith Support Committee of Northern Spirit Regional Council asked every congregation in NSRC to complete an assessment tool looking at both financial and labour viability (though it mainly looked at financial information). When we pulled all the numbers together into one document it made clear what I expected we would find.

To put it bluntly, the numbers show that as a congregation we are not currently viable in the medium or long term. Given the last set of numbers I have seen for 2022 (end of November) I expect that the deficit for 2022 will end up being substantial, as in above $30 000. We have some time to come up with a plan but we have to start actively building that plan now. We must find a new way to be the church or we will cease to exist as a congregation. To that end, at our January meeting Council agreed to form a “Futures Committee” to look at options.

The church of Christ in every age, beset by change but Spirit led,
must claim and test its heritage and keep on rising from the dead.
(Verse 1 of The Church of Christ in Every Age
by Fred Pratt Green, ©1969 #601 in Voices United,)

Personally my dream for the future of St. Paul’s is that we partner with a social agency or possibly another faith community. My dream also involves working with a partner to acquire the building to the north of the church and redeveloping the whole parcel of land from 100^th ave to 101^st Ave (when I dream really big I add the Golden Age Centre property into the mix as well). There may be other hopes and dreams and visions for the future out there. I don’t know where we will land. I do know that if we don’t start planning for a changed future and making that change happen we will run out of time and money within a few years (there are various opinions in the congregation about how many years that is).

We might be in a bit of a gooey spot right now. But I believe we are still called to be the church. We still make a difference in Grande Prairie. Now is the time for us to sort out what a changed future will look like so we can “keep on rising from the dead”. After all, as Christians we are a resurrection people.

So as we head on into a new year, as we continue to explore who and how God has called us to be in this place and time I close with yet another song:

Let us build a house where all love can dwell and all can safely live,
a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive.
Built of hopes and dreams and vision...
Let us build a house where all are named, their songs and visions heard
and loved and treasured, taught and claimed as words within the Word.
Built of tears and cries and laughter, prayers of faith and songs of grace...
All are welcome in this place.
(Verses 1, 5 of Let Us Build a House by Marty Haugen
©1994, #1 in More Voices)

Together, and with God’s guidance, we can build a community of faith for a new era.

Peace be with you all,
Gord