From the Associate Vicar: My Annual Report for 2022

From the Associate Vicar: My Annual Report for 2022

From the Associate Vicar: My Annual Report for 2022

# From The... - Letters to the Congregation

From the Associate Vicar: My Annual Report for 2022

Dear One's of St. C's

Does 2022 feels like a blur to anyone else?  I think starting off the year and ending the year with covid didn’t help.  We also had two staff changes this year, which always shifts and alters things.  Elaine, our Director of Children, Youth, and Families left her staff position in March.  We went into a period of discernment and ultimately ended up hiring a member of our community, Val Rawlinson, with a slightly different position.  Val has done an amazing job working with me to discern what is next for our children and youth programming.  We feel as though Godly Play pre-k-2nd/3rd grade is going well.  But the 3rd-6th graders seem to be after something different.  In 2022, with Craig DeVine, we began discerning what a Robotics team could look like for this age group with an emphasis on community, Christian values, and Christian ethics around ever changing and growing technologies.  There is a lot of good energy around this idea.  Much more to come in 2023. 

Our treasurer, Dean, our Bookkeeper Becca, and I spent much of the fall preparing for Becca to leave her position with us.  Again, we began looking for a replacement for Becca, when another community member seemed to fall right in our laps, Jessica Mayabb.  Jessica is a bookkeeper for her day job and much of the position overlaps.  Jessica, Dean, and Becca having been working on a smooth transition since December. 

As many of you are aware that since the pandemic began Alissa and I have been working with a feminist scholar, Dr. Kimberly George.  The Diocese purchased some of her classes and some women at St. C’s took one of them this past fall, led by myself.  Many of the ideas in this class has impacted my preaching, my “from the’s”, and my personal, and family life.  This group of women has also continued to meet to ask important questions like, what does its look to center voices and people in our community outside the bounds of the patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism?  How do we welcome and provide a place of belonging for people who are neurodivergent, who don’t have kids, aren’t married, identify as non-binary, or identify anywhere on the LGBTQ spectrum?  How does our church provide a place for all people from all backgrounds to feel like they belong, to feel free to bring themselves, and to do know they are loved by God and our community?  

This is the ultimate question we are asking as we look at who we center in our community.  An encouraging piece that keeps coming up is around how we have welcomed children into our community.  I was once told by someone that how a community receives children, a group that is vulnerable in our society, will show how a community will receive other vulnerable groups in society.  This community’s work around welcoming children’s dancing, playing, giggling, crying, and whispering in the service, impacts how we welcome neurodivergent people, the elderly, the refugee and the houseless.  It has also been a visceral reminder that it is not an either/or; either we welcome the vulnerable or the privileged.  Instead, I believe, we are coming to see and learn there is an abundance of space for all types of people from all walks of life in our church. 

In 2023 we will continue this work as we continue to look for Jesus in those people who are often pushed to the outside of the circle and as we continue to expand the circle.  I pray that we will continue to know that as we work to place the vulnerable groups in our society at the center, that is when the whole community gets to experience and discover their own freedom, as I often like to preach about and as Martin Luther King Jr. so famously said, “no one is free, until we are all free.”  

- The Rev. Meghan Mullarkey

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  St. Columba Episcopal Church   ·   Physical address: 26715 Military Rd, Kent, WA 98032
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