From the Vicar: My Annual Report

From the Vicar: My Annual Report

From the Vicar: My Annual Report

# From The... - Letters to the Congregation

From the Vicar: My Annual Report

This week is our Annual Meeting at St. C's, and the publishing of our annual report. This is an advance publication of the Vicar's Report from this document. Keep an eye out in future weeks for highlights from other reports and be encouraged to read the entire document (with contributions from many ministry leaders at St. C's) as it is published this weekend.

Dear Ones of St. Columba’s,

The first week of the pandemic, when we knew that lockdown was coming and we were headed into a season of dramatic isolation, fear, and change, I sat down to think about what we needed as community in that moment. What I came up with was a pandemic identity statement, something that we could use as a community to center and focus us – words we could return to as we made tough choices in the weeks and months ahead. The words that came to me were these: We Stay Connected, We Stay Church, We Take Care of Each Other. We decided to use these three statements to guide us in the uncharted waters ahead, and I believe we did this very well. I want to use these words to guide my 2020 report to you, as well.

We Stay Connected

We stayed connected in 2020, despite all odds and with multiple factors working against our ability to stay connected to each other. The primary mechanisms for this connection, I believe, have been our ministries and buddy groups. In the first week of pandemic lockdown Meghan and I organized the congregation into buddy groups, found captains, and started people calling, zooming, and connecting with each other to make sure we could keep tabs on everyone’s health and well being. These buddy groups did not all function identically or with the same degree of depth and regularity, but they did provide connection in the first months of pandemic and several groups are still connected in various ways now. This reminded us that we can connect outside of Sunday morning worship and in person gathering. 

We had to quickly re-organize our food bank function and volunteers, and many of us found new connections to each other and our community through this ministry, as well as supporting the ReachOut shelter through April until the men were relocated to safer quarters.  We stayed connected through Facebook and online worship, although this was challenging for many of us, who felt and still feel the loss of in-person worship even while participating online. We have learned to zoom, to livestream, and to call each other on phones. We have taken outdoor walks, and sat in our lawn chairs in the church parking lot in freezing weather in order to connect. We stay connected.

We Stay Church

As a priest and as your vicar, the loss of in person worship together has been staggering for me personally, as well as for us communally. I am immensely humbled by how this community has refused to allow distance and the radical changes to our worship practices together to stop us from being church. We stay church in many ways, only some of them worship and liturgy related. These are worth noting, however: the faithfulness of many of you to our worship services, even though it is not the same online, the continued practice of Morning Prayer led by James Wyatt every weekday morning, our faithful zoom Wednesday night with its excellent preaching by lay folk, and all the ways we continue to pray and keep our traditions alive despite distance. I believe these practices are still the heartbeat of our life together. I believe this because of how much I miss your physical presence in the space each and every Sunday morning, and because of how heartened I am to see your Facebook comments, or your faces at coffee hour. I also believe that worship remains our heartbeat because of how much you miss being together. As I talk to those among us who cannot bring themselves to “tune in” each Sunday I recognize that this, too, is a sign of how vital our worship is to each of us. This grief is also a sign of love. We miss each other because we love each other, and we miss being together because being together is core to how we love, and learn, and experience God. I take heart from these difficult learnings because this time of distance is not permanent. It is longer than any of us initially thought or wanted. But there is in person togetherness and love and singing and breaking of real bread around our altar ahead of us. And we have an amazing, creative Livestream production team led by Christopher Wagner working so beautifully to facilitate our worship until then (and likely even after!). All of our online connecting is a statement of hope against this future we await. We stay church because we deeply grieve these losses, and we will remain church when we are joyfully and finally back in person again.

We Take Care of Each Other

Friends, this was my first concern when pandemic hit: how could we take good care of each other in the middle of all that was happening? This is a developmental question, and a tough leadership question. Your leadership at St. C’s has had to make excruciating choices about what taking care of each other means in a pandemic world. We closed our doors in order to take care of each other. We made buddy groups so that we could find new ways to take care of each other – and because Meghan and I knew we needed a more formalized and less centralized way to track how people were doing, and whether or not anyone got sick. We made decisions as community to keep our food bank open, and to see the homeless shelter ministry through because taking care of “each other” for us includes our neighbors and our neighborhood. We could not circle up and only care for parishioners in this crisis, we had to also continue to care for the vulnerable humans who may not be formal members but nonetheless are part of the community of care and hope we steward here at St. Columba’s. We learned a lot as we worked to take care of each other. I learned a lot. I learned that there is great capacity for care in this congregation, and this capacity only needs a nudge here and there from your clergy to be activated – then it grows and flourishes on its own. I learned that I also need care, and was grateful and humbled by how many of you checked in on me, asked after Andrew’s well being as he worked the front lines of the pandemic, and loved on my family from afar. I learned that we have an amazing Associate Vicar in Meghan Mullarkey, whose careful leadership of many of our pastoral care and connecting ministries enabled many of us to keep in touch, keep contributing, and keep caring for each other and our neighbors in ways that were both challenging and rewarding. And I learned again how blessed we are to have Martin and Elaine and Becca on staff.

Friends this has been a tough year for me personally in many ways. Andrew’s work as a Respiratory Therapist at Harborview has ranged from exhausting to terrifying for our family although we are so proud of him and what he does. Having two school aged children at home is both a welcome exercise in togetherness and a discouraging exercise in frustration, as online school and the balance of childcare and work has been for many of us who are working parents. I am adjusting to my new expanded role as Canon for Congregational Development and Leadership Formation for our diocese, which began just before the lockdown. This role is both challenging and fulfilling for me. And I cannot imagine doing it without also being your Vicar, in real congregational community with you. These words – We Stay Connected, We Stay Church, We Take Care of Each Other – may have been my idea, as I thought through how to lead St. Columba’s. But you have taught me, in this past year, what these words mean. You: the staff, leadership, and congregants of this community of faith, have given these words bones, flesh, and breath through your faithfulness to God, to St. Columba’s, and to each other. Thank you. I am so proud to be your Vicar, and so grateful to be in relationship with you.

With care and gratitude,

Alissa


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