Big Day

Big day here.  I’ll start by making a pastoral visit to someone just out of the hospital.  They are on the road to recovery, so no worries.  Then it’s Offsite, with blueberry muffins.  Although recently, Phantom has been running low on muffins late in the morning.  It’s getting to the point to where I may one day have to choose between a cranberry nut or a plain bagel.  And really, when that’s your choice, choose “meteor”. 

After Offsite, I will waste gas to Portsmouth where I will meet with the Rev. Pam Mott of St. Mary’s.  Pam’s church is undertaking a building project right now, using a consultant, to try to improve their space.  They’ve got some similar problems to ours, but different also: their campus is very large, and their buildings are much older and more spread out.  It’s not the best set-up for ministry, so Pam has led the church to the decision to build/adapt/change.  Good for her. 

The reason I’m meeting Pam for lunch is that she won’t be able to travel up to Cumberland tonight for our building meeting.  There, two members of Pam’s church will tell us about the process they’ve undertaken, and hopefully answer all the questions we’ll be sure to have.  You have to understand; you come into a church, and you see its upside and its challenges.  Then it grows: new challenges arise, and old challenges either get met or get worse more exacerbated.  The church, as a community, chooses either to keep growing or to go back to where it was before.  I believe, as a community, that there is a strong desire to keep following God in growth.  This simply means that we cannot continue to do all that we do in the same space in which we’ve done it.   

Obviously, there’s much that is still to be done before we have anything really definitive to tell the parish.  All we can say now is that we are investigating the next steps, which I believe include hiring a consultant to lead us through the process from dreaming to feasibility to drawings to pledges to building.  The whole shootin’ match.  Look for updates here, or better, come to church.