When our old boilers, lovingly dubbed Frank and Ernest, headed for retirement last year, we knew we had our work cut out for us affording their replacements. Even with a $40,000 grant from the diocese, we still faced the prospect of paying the remaining $110,000 out of our investments, which would leave our savings dangerously depleted.
And so, we asked for your help in replenishing those funds, with the goal of restoring them by May of next year. And you delivered – so quickly and so generously – that we surpassed our goal of closing the remaining $20,000 gap this week. And this is without factoring in the anonymous matching grant that a generous donor offered as an incentive to meet our goal by Thanksgiving.
The even more exciting news is that the donor has kept the match on the table, and still plans to double all the Warm Regards gifts made between September 1 and November 28, even though we’ve met our initial goal. These additional funds can be used for other parish projects, including addressing the long list of additional improvements that our plant requires. And this generous offer means that if you would still like to contribute to the Warm Regards Campaign, you can do so, and have your contribution doubled until Thanksgiving.
This offer allows us to convert our Warm Regards fund into a building improvement fund, where we can set aside contributions and gifts for scheduled work and for emergency expenditures. And that means that we have a cushion to help protect our savings and investments when big ticket building expenses hit.
For parishioners who have been giving monthly to the Warm Regards Campaign, you have a few options. Because we’ve reached our goal, you can go online and stop your monthly payment if you like. Or, you can keep the gift going through November, to contribute to the match. Or you can keep it going indefinitely to help feed our building improvement fund. No matter what you decide, we are so thankful for your ongoing gifts over the last year. They generated more than $400 a month toward our goal.
When it comes to the ministry of the church, building improvements and repairs are among the least glamorous things we do. And yet they are some of the most essential. We want our recovery groups to have welcoming spaces to meet, for example. We want to provide safe spaces for youth and comforting spaces for people who are grieving. We want our educational programs to be conducive to learning. And we want our worship to be warm and welcoming, not cold and shivery or hot and sweaty.
Here I want to extent a public note of thanks to Dave Kipphut who chairs our buildings and grounds work. Rather than committee meetings, this takes the form of painting, tiling, room modifying and decorating. His team also gardens and arranges the planters. While Dave does a lot of this work on his own time, he always welcomes help from parishioners with time to spare.
The most recent example is the corner office that before COVID had been the domain of the knitting group, and during the pandemic became a storage room. Dave and Tim Valera, or sexton, cleaned out the junk, and Dave painted the walls and laid tile on the floor. It just awaits a few more pieces of furniture and we’ll have a lovely multi-purpose space for knitting, book groups, children’s programming and more.
Dave is also the reason my office is a lovely yellow, and the walls and shelves are filled with art that I had put off hanging for more than two years. His dedication to the walls, floors, pipes, heat, signage and grounds help create the environment where we can be a “community of people rooted in God's love, growing through God's grace, reaching out to all.”
In the end it takes all of us to make a church – from the buildings to the works of faith that flow in and out their doors. Your gifts of time, talent and treasure, both in the immediate need for new boilers and in the ongoing work of living the faith, fill me with joy every day, not only on Sundays.
Thanks for all you do to keep St. Peter’s the warm and welcoming place it has long been, and will be long into the future.
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