As promised at the congregational meeting yesterday, you will find a link below to an online survey to share your response to the Facilities Master Plans and Financial Long Term Planning Goals.
All feedback needs to be submitted by February 3rd.
For those who were unable to be present for the annual meeting to see the master plans and hear the report from the Capital Campaign Feasibility Team, you can read a summary of their report below. The master plans are on display in the gathering area. You can view them any time the office is open during the week (Monday-Thursday, 9am – 5pm) and on Sunday mornings.
Facilities and Financial Long Term Planning
Summary from January 19th Annual Meeting
Context: The congregation has been waiting a long time to hear and see some progress on possible facilities renovations. Before sharing those plans, it will be helpful to remember the context for this conversation. In anticipation of our 150th Anniversary in 2012, we began “Discerning our Future”. We were looking at our ministry priorities, we began talking about facilities, and we began looking at our long term financial picture. One of the early events in that year in February 2012 was a Facilities conversation in which 40 people participated. That was the first congregation wide discussion about our buildings we have had in a long time. We explored how our facilities support or hinder our current ministry as well the ministry we envision for the future. Months before that event, the Buildings and Grounds ministry had begun their own conversation and documented some basic capital needs that we must address sometime in the near term future. Throughout that anniversary year, we had a number of events with wide participation that brought the themes for our ministry into focus as well as some vision for improvements to our facilities to support that ministry. At the same time, the Stewardship and Finance ministry was looking at the long term financial picture for our congregation. They were looking at the demographics and giving patterns and began looking for creative opportunities to support our annual budget into the future. From the beginning we’ve been thinking in terms of both facilities and finances in the context of our future ministry.
From that wide participation we inevitably needed a smaller working team as facilities master plans were developed. The Capital Campaign Exploratory team did that initial work with the architects we hired, Elevate Studio. The reason it has taken so long to share these plans is because the consistory felt that a project of this scope needed all the financial information we could gather including how our operating budget was going to conclude for 2013.
Every aspect of these master plans can be tied directly back to the visioning work we did together in Discerning our Future. These plans give increased support to our current ministry and bring some much needed cohesiveness to our physical plant which has expanded in a rather piecemeal manner over the years. We have been entrusted with a legacy and heritage here at Hope Church both in terms of ministry and in terms of facility. These master plans make it possible for us to consider what we want to leave behind to support the ministry of the next generation. If we had unlimited resources these are the master plans we would plan a capital campaign around.
The master plans are on display in the gathering area. You can view them any time the office is open during the week (Monday-Thursday, 9am – 5pm) and on Sunday mornings.
Cost: The Capital Campaign Exploratory Team gathered cost estimates for the renovations envisioned here and the Stewardship and Finance Committee proposed the endowment goal for our long term financial stability. The total cost for this joint proposal is 4.2 million dollars. The cost of the renovations is 3.2 million dollars. The goal for the endowment is an additional 1 million dollars. The rational for the endowment portion is that a combined endowment of 2 million dollars could generate income to support our operating budget. Given the very large numbers involved, the consistory launched a Capital Campaign Feasibility Team to look closely at whether this scale project was realistic or responsible for us to pursue. They have been working through the fall and the initial feedback on these master plans is a sense of excitement for the concept and a sense that this is a very lofty goal. But rather than just going back to the drawing board, the consistory felt it was important first to share these plans with the congregation to get feedback. They wanted the congregation to share together in this discernment. Eventually we need to decide whether to launch a campaign using these master plans and this endowment goal or whether we want to go back to the
drawing board and develop some new master plans that might be on a smaller scale.
We are asking for your feedback as part of that decision-making process through a very simple feedback form. Feedback can be offered in two ways:
- Online feedback form
- A hard copy of this feedback form is available in the gathering area near the master plans display.
The deadline for congregational feedback is February 3. The consistory will take all the feedback into their deliberations at the February consistory meeting and will make a proposal to the congregation at a congregational meeting being planned for February 23rd during Pizza Sunday.
Peace,
Pastor Jill and Pastor Gordon