We have great news! Phase One – the Discernment Phase – of our Capital Campaign is complete. To see what we’ve accomplished, click here!
Moving to Feasibility
Can you believe it’s been nearly 2 years since the vestry of St. Mark’s hosted a series of Conversation Cafés. Many of you – nearly 60 of you, in fact – participated in these cafés where we reflected together on three questions: (1) What keeps you coming back to St. Mark’s?, (2) Where do you see God at work at St. Mark’s?, and (3) What are your aspirations for St. Mark’s? We took your answers to these questions and grouped them thematically. Then, about a year ago, we held a series of Focus Group conversations. Again, many of you took part in these focus groups – conversations about worship and music, outreach, people and community, children and youth, and the building and finances. In addition, last fall, vestry members held one on one conversations with leaders of ministry teams at St. Mark’s and sought input from leaders of neighborhood organizations.
At the root of each of these conversations –the Cafés, the Focus Groups, and the one on one conversations – was discernment – discernment about the relevance of faith in our lives, our shared mission, and the shared practices we embrace as a community of faith. At the root of discernment is identity – the claiming of our identity as a people called by God, called by the Good Shepherd to shape our communal life according to God’s purposes, called to renew our commitment to one another and to God. Our discernment and identity-claiming led us to the realization that it was time for a capital campaign at St. Mark’s. In order to bring to fruition the aspirations and hopes we have discerned we will need to raise money for the projects we identified as part of our renewed vision.
During the summer we worked with design and build firms to procure estimates and drawings for those projects. Now we are ready for the second phase of our campaign – the Feasibility Study. The Feasibility Study is designed to formally assess our readiness to move forward with our campaign and fund the projects we have identified in discernment. Over the next 3 months we will use print materials, direct-mail and email surveys, and personal interviews to confirm our individual and collective readiness to support our mission, ministry and areas of financial need. We will collect and evaluate your responses from the survey and interviews and present our findings and recommendations back to our congregation.
Your wardens, your vestry and I look forward with excitement at this next phase our work together. We want you to stay invested in our process because this is YOUR vision – better, it is OUR vision, discerned together – for the future of St. Mark’s.
As a reminder, once Phase Two is complete (Winter 2020), we will move on to Phase Three – the Ask Phase – where every member of the congregation will be invited to make a pledge to contribute to the Capital Campaign. Once Phase Three is complete (Spring 2020), we’ll be ready to begin project work!