Once again, it is time to think about altar flowers and Christmas greenery decorations for the church!
If you would like to have your loved ones remembered or honored this Christmas, send in your list of names and your donation to the flower fund no later than December 19.
The greens and poinsettias are one of the lovelier traditions we have in celebration of our Christmas liturgy. Don’t miss your chance to be part of it!
There will be one worship service on Christmas Eve at which the choir will sing the prelude and the children will be involved in the service as well. The worship schedule for Christmas is as follows:
Saturday December 24 – 7:00 pm Christmas Eve Rite II Eucharist (The Rev. Angie Emerson)
Sunday December 25 – 9:30 am Christmas Eucharist (The Rev. Angie Emerson)
November 21, 2011
Dear Members of Trinity,
The Vestry wants to assure everyone that all of its members are doing everything they can to make this time of transition as smooth as possible. The Vestry wants to also assure people that our transitional phase will be transparent and that we will be communicating regularly with our members to explain where we are in the process and what progress is being made. If anyone has any questions please speak with one of the four wardens or another Vestry member.
The discernment process has made clear that the congregation wants its priest to be its spiritual leader and chief executive officer who works closely with and in conjunction with an active vestry and its operational teams.
Trinity accepts and realizes that our church cannot rely primarily on its priest to carry its work; it must be a collaborative relationship that has clearly defined roles for members of the parish and the priest consistent with the duties and responsibilities that are worked out together between the priest and the Vestry.
Minutes of the Vestry are available to any member of the parish – just ask Wendy for a copy. The Vestry will be operating with an executive committee so that weekly staff meetings are attended and the regular operations of the church are supervised on a daily basis. It is thought that this will be a good way for people to experience how the Vestry hopes to operate in the future. Most of the day-to-day operations of the church will be done by the teams as we have them now constituted but they may change as people find better ways to operate.
Jim Cassarino and the worship team have been arranging for supply priests and they are working very hard to make this coming season a meaningful time for all of us. We thank him and those working with him. Our lay pastoral care team also has a lot of responsibility during this time and we thank them for the critical and important role that they are doing for all of us.
The Vestry is meeting December 1st with the Bishop and Lynn Bates from his office for the first time to talk about what happens next for Trinity. We will be informing you what we learn and what is going to happen next in the process of our finding a new priest. The Vestry hopes that all of the work that has been done will help shorten the process considerably.
Being on the Vestry is always hard work. But during this transition time, the work is especially difficult. Please keep Trinity in your prayers.
Peace be with you,
The Vestry
The Worship Team has made the following arrangements for November and December:
Message from Wardens
Following the Bishop’s meeting it became apparent that we could improve our communications with the congregation. This message is the first of our regular communications with you that will be in each edition of LOGOS. Very little occurs within the Vestry that is confidential, and copies of the minutes of our meetings will continue to be kept by Wendy, so please check those minutes or ask a vestry member if you have any questions. The only items that are confidential deal with contract negotiations, personnel matters, pastoral care issues or items of a personal nature about anyone connected with Trinity.
First we want to let you know that our final meeting for putting together our transformation plan with Larry Jensen and Tom Huebner will be November 17 at 5:00p.m. Anyone who wants to know more about the plan and what we are doing is invited to attend. Part of the plan is a new model of operating that is modeled after the recommendations found in Robinson’s book entitled “Changing the Conversation”. The vestry and congregation will be playing a very active role in what happens at Trinity as we move forward. We expect that our operational teams that we have set up will play a major role in what happens at Trinity.
These teams will be overseen by the vestry with participation by our next priest.
Two of our most critical teams are “worship” and “lay pastoral care”. These teams will play major roles during our transition time. The worship team is already actively involved in finding and scheduling our supply priests for Sunday service. The team has recommended that we, at least temporarily, have just one service at 9:30 to make the process easier and keep all of us together and aware of what is going on. Members of the vestry will be keeping you informed at announcement time during the services as well as through LOGOS. We ask you to give us input about this preliminary plan of one service and encourage you to pass on your comments to Jim Cassarino, who is the leader of this team, or to a member of the Vestry. We also greatly appreciate the work of our lay pastoral care team and their leader, Winnie Grace, in this very importance ministry.
The vestry will be meeting with the Bishop and Lynn Bates, Canon to the Ordinary, November 20th to talk about our future.
The vestry will be presenting the Bishop and Lynn with our plan and all of the criteria that we have put together regarding what we are looking for in our next priest so that we can begin a search process. We will soon be putting together a search committee; anyone who is interested in participating should submit their names to one of the two senior wardens – Marc Brierre or Aaron Tinsman. We are expecting a small committee of about five people with one person from the vestry leading the committee, so not very one who wants to will be able to participate. But, we will be keeping everyone well informed about the process and our thoughts. We want to let everyone know that we have put together our information based upon much work striving to get input from all of our members of the congregation and synthesizing that material. Even our plan of having the vestry focus on our operations while having a separate search committee has been in response to input from members of the congregation. After we meet with the Bishop and Lynn all of the material that we provide them will be available through Wendy. If you want to offer other input, please feel free to do so.
Vestry meetings are open to everyone unless we have something that will require executive session. We will have a brief period during the meeting to listen to members and anyone may remain with us while we deal with the issues of Trinity. Our next vestry meeting is November 10 at 6:30.
