Dear Friends,

Last night I had the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of another parish. It is always informative to visit a different community for worship or other gatherings, and inevitably, I find myself making  mental notes and  comparisons. At this annual meeting, there was a wonderful slide show of events of the past year, with many delightful pictures of persons in worship and ministry, along with beautiful scenes of stained glass windows and church gardens. Suddenly, in the midst of those pictures there was a series of more prosaic images: the blower for the church organ, a furnace, and steam pipes in the church basement. Hardly beautiful, hardly evocative. The pictures, however, pointed to a reality – these are essential parts of the building, mostly unseen, but necessary components for all the ongoing ministries that take place there.

On one hand, it can be easy to come into a church on a Sunday morning and give some thought to these things. We may feel that there is not enough heat, or that the church is too warm. On the other, do we really take time to consider all that is necessary for us to have that heat, to have that electricity, and to have a place to gather week after week?

There is a group in our midst that is giving quite thoughtful and prayerful consideration to these unseen things and how we can maintain them for the future.  Currently, the Partners for Sacred Places Team is taking a close look at our heating systems. As is the case with many older structures, we have boilers and furnaces, hooked together in ways practical and quite impractical. And many are old. We have learned, for example, that one of our boilers  will need replacement by next winter. One of the goals of the team is to come to the vestry with a plan for how we can make that replacement and, conceivably, make significant improvements, resulting in greater energy efficiency.

Each of has gifts for ministry in this place. I am grateful for those who have gifts to help us explore some of those often unseen parts of our building. After all, given how cold this winter has been, one of the most beautiful images to behold at a future annual meeting just might be a furnace or boiler that provides heat efficiently and at a considerable cost savings. And for that we will be grateful.

Faithfully,

Tom

PS – Members of the PSP team are George Born, MIchael Giese, Melissa Giese, Steve Spinetto, and Ken Stone. They would be happy to talk to anyone interested in their work.