• Home
• Calendar
• Worship
• History
• Parish News
• Letters to the Romans
• Children
• Youth
• Contact Us
  • Our Clergy
  • Our Staff
  • Our Vestry
• JOY Group
• Canterbury Club
• Mission and Outreach
• Stewardship
• St. Peter's Legacy Society
• Strategic Plan
• Master Site Plan
• Prayer and Worship Links
• Stained Glass Windows

Strategic Plan

We must grow—not only in spirit, but also in membership, involvement and financial resources—so that we may better serve Jesus Christ, his community, and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.

The Discernment Committee—after more than a year of listening to the parish in neighborhood meetings and church-wide parish meetings—believes that four goals  pursued with commitment over the next four years will better equip us to serve our Lord, his body, and each other.  We believe that our church community is healthy, growing, and fiercely devoted to the best of what we are.  Our church community is also mindful of what we could become.

Four dominant themes emerged from conversations at virtually all of the neighborhood and parish meetings:

(1)               We are hungry for more inreach, not just to offer better care for those of us in need, but also to offer more programs tailored to specific constituencies and more opportunities for fellowship.

(2)               We need to communicate more clearly, not only with each other, but also with our community and potential new members.

(3)               Our worship facilities are awesome, but they do present obstacles for those communicants who are physically challenged.  Our other facilities need varying degrees of maintenance, and many are not configured to best suit our current and projected needs.

(4)               We are mindful that while we are a wealthy parish when our overall membership’s income and resources are considered, our church does not receive the annual resources—nor does it have the endowed resources—to implement the parish’s recommendations to this committee.

We recommend that the clergy and lay leadership adopt the following goals for implementation over the next four years.  Since we are not recommending that any existing programs be cut or even curtailed, these recommendations can only be financed through the acquisition of new money and not by using existing pledges or other existing resources.  It truly is a step in faith, but one that we believe will be rewarded with every kind of dividend.

Goal 1: Strengthen and Build Our Inreach Ministry!

Our recommendation:  

A.     Hire a Director of Inreach and Fellowship.

B.     Identify constituencies and needs.

C.     Prepare and implement sustained programs for

(1)   pre-school and elementary children;

(2)   youth;

(3)   parents with young children;

(4)   the retired;

(5)   the sick, the shut in, the grieving; and

(6)   visitors and newcomers.

Goal 2: Enhance Communication within the Parish and our Community!

Our recommendation:  

A.                 Hire a Director of Communications.

(1)               Internal Communications—

(a)                Develop a web-based communication strategy for the following publications (with email directory supplemented by mail for those without email addresses):

i.                     Service bulletins;

ii.                   Letters to the Romans;

iii.                  Parish news and volunteer opportunities; and

iv.                 Visitor and newcomer information.

   (b)       Publish sermons on the web site.

(2)               External Communications—

(a)                Identify and develop our “brand,” disseminating it more effectively to the community, visitors, and newcomers.

Goal 3: Facilities:  Inventory and Preserve What We Have; Plan and Build for the Future!

Our recommendation:  

A.                 Complete the site plan currently underway.

B.                 Identify core and non-core facilities.

C.                 Ensure that core facilities are handicapped accessible and make improvements necessary to maximize their use.

D.                 Maintain non-core facilities until a long-term site plan can be developed.

Goal 4: Broaden the Church’s Financial Base!

Our recommendation:  

A.     The vestry should continue its efforts to establish an endowment for the benefit of St. Peter’s, identifying specific uses for the income generated from the endowment.

B.     The vestry should establish a budget and time line for the implementation of goals 1-3 without cutting or curtailing existing programs.

Summary Discussion

After meeting with virtually the entire parish in small and large group settings, we found that consistent themes quickly emerged.  To pull these themes together we broke them into four general areas:

(1) Strengths to Build On

The most commonly expressed observation was how pleased parishioners are with the parish, the clergy, the programs, and our commitment to our community.  Our church and chapel evoke awe and reverence. Our worship services are beautiful and the music wonderful. The level of intelligence, discernment, and thought that goes into preaching is consistently recognized and appreciated.  Parishioners find St. Peter’s a welcoming and nurturing place. Our history of mission and outreach is a source of great pride, showing that we are, indeed, capable of doing Christ’s work in our community.

(2) Missions to Our Community

As we noted in the strengths section, our history of mission and outreach efforts in a variety of contexts stands out as an example of why we are proud to be members of St. Peter’s. Communicants do not want this to change, nor do they want to see outreach efforts curtailed or capped.

However, the parish was equally clear that we are not serving the community within St. Peter’s as well as we would like.  Programs for some core constituencies, such as the shut-in, the grieving, and the disabled don’t always function as well as they might. Periodically, we have gaps in our programming (e.g. youth) that we would like to see eliminated.

Members also expressed concern that we do not clearly define who we are and

what it means to be a member of St. Peter’s, instead allowing others to define us by what we are not.  We believe this may inhibit new members from joining us. 

(3) Things that Need to Be Changed

We need to focus as much effort on inreach activities as we do on outreach.  In- reach includes education, fellowship, and ministry to each other.  We believe that an effective overarching inreach program that fully integrates education, fellowship, and servant leadership will create a more vibrant, spirit-filled community within St. Peter’s parish.  It will help each of us to discern Christ’s path for our actions.  An effective inreach program will also allow us to identify new lay leadership and alleviate volunteer exhaustion.

We heard the parish tell us that some of our facilities are obsolete and that

others are in need of serious maintenance.  The parish also expressed the view that the current facilities don’t always address current needs. For example, there is a shortage of meeting rooms and the area reserved for our senior high youth is inadequate.  We are also concerned that handicapped persons cannot enter Daniel Hall or take communion at the rail within the church.

We need to join the 21^st century in our communication efforts. That is not a criticism of  the information provided through the weekly bulletin or the Letters to the Romans.  We would like to see more web-based communications available to those with Internet capability.  We would like to see more information posted on our web site, including sermons. 

Identifying the St. Peter’s “brand” was also noted as a clear way to increase our opportunities to introduce this parish to visitors and newcomers.  We heard the parish tell us that our “brand” includes wonderful and beautiful spaces to worship, a teaching liturgy that evokes awe and wonder, and thought provoking sermons that include the critical message that Christ resides within each of us. At St. Peter’s, a willingness to question and grapple with complex religious issues is not only encouraged but also considered a requirement for modern Christian life.

Finally, the most frequently voiced concerns identified an inadequate financial base from which to operate and the absence of an endowment.

(4) Aspirations for the Future

We are delighted that our church community is growing. We attribute the positive momentum and general contentment with the state of the parish to strong clergy and lay leadership.  We believe that implementation of the recommended goals over the next four years will continue and accelerate this trend.  While we are mindful that St. Peter’s will never be all things to all people, we do believe it can be a nurturing home for those seeking Christian truths in a complex and complicated world.

We hope our recommendations are seen as basic rather than revolutionary.  If our growth and positive momentum continue—and this results, as we believe it will,  in a more robust financial base—another strategic planning committee convened in four years could better evaluate the need for a major upgrade of our physical property and facilities.

Inreach is the first key. The two fastest growing constituencies within our parish are parents with young children and retired persons.  We believe that some of the current programs, such as JOY trips and foyer dinners for young parents, are partially responsible for this growth.  We would like to see additional focused programming across the board.  We have no criticism of the current programming and believe it is executed with diligence and intelligence. We just want more of it!  We believe that hiring a staff person to focus on this area—integrating inreach with our education and fellowship activities—would make St. Peter’s a richer and more vibrant community. This, in turn, would encourage members, visitors, and newcomers to get involved. It should also help to identify and develop new lay leadership.

Communication—both within and without—is the second key.  Effective communication and utilization of more web-based resources would bring us closer together and undergird our inreach efforts. Making the sermons available on line to shut-ins, visitors, and newcomers could be one example of this web-based initiative.  Improved external communications should also help us to attract new members.

Preservation and enhancement of our facilities is the third key.  The development of the site plan currently underway is a step in this process, as is the identification of maintenance and repair needs for the systems within our facilities.  We believe that the site plan should be expanded to segregate our facilities into core and non-core facilities.  The core facilities should be up to date and handicapped accessible.  The non-core facilities should be maintained until a capital improvements program is adopted, presumably within four years, to serve an expanding church population and to address the space needs of our growing church.

We recognize that hiring additional staff and implementing these recommendations is expensive work.  We do not recommend that we pay for these new activities by curtailing or capping existing programs.  The implementation of these recommendations will require a significant increase in giving designated for the parish’s annual budget.

Finally, we applaud the leadership of the vestry in starting an endowment program. We believe this effort should be sustained and encouraged.  Ultimately, a strong endowment could become the source of income needed to sustain and improve our facilities and our mission and outreach efforts. Endowment income could free up other financial resources for additional mission-defined programs and projects in the life of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.