Join the journey to build our future together
Sunday, March 20 at 9am OR 11:30am | Hutton Hall + Zoom (11:30 only)
Click here to learn more about the event.
Read the video script below:
Good morning everyone. It’s good to see you. My name is Don Henninger and I serve as your Senior Warden. I am here today to talk to you about a pivotal moment in our lives together at Saint Barnabas. I know you share the love I have of our church and what it means to each of us. In that spirit, I want to talk about how we can come together as a church family and continue to build an amazing future together.
We are resuming a journey that we started together two years ago and it’s a journey that will leave a lasting impact on our church for our children and their children and indeed for generations to come. A little over two years ago we launched a project to beautify our church grounds and make significant long-lasting changes. The development of the Ritz right behind us was the impetus for our campaign, which we titled Welcoming the Neighborhood.
We knew that the Ritz and all that’s coming around it would transform the desert behind us – where it used to be that nobody could see our rear end now, as you can see, we are on full display. This awakened us to realize that our campus grounds and our buildings – not just our back end – were in need of some tender loving care. Perhaps long overdue.
Welcoming the Neighborhood got off to a super start.
We put teams of people together to envision what a refurbished campus grounds would mean, including the need to take care of some of our basic infrastructure, from our aging parking lot to wiring our campus to get properly connected to the technology world. To taking care of our church family, staring with our children.
We began a capital campaign and we were extremely successful. Through the generosity of many of you, we raised over $3.5 million. What a blessing!
Then Covid hit and like a lot of things in our lives, the campaign stalled. But it did not dampen our vision or enthusiasm for what we wanted to do. Nor did it stall our work. With the money already raised, we remodeled the Children’s Center and playground – and have you looked at the faces, the smiles and the love in the eyes of our children – and their parents. You can see how important that is. We also built the connecting walkway to all the education buildings and installed fiber-optic cabling to equip every building with high-speed wireless internet. Now we are well into in the planning phases of re-doing our parking lot and the perimeter landscaping that surrounds our church grounds. Adding state of the art lighting and new monument signs that welcome people onto our campus. That work will start later this year. So the work has continued. And now more of the dream does, too. We’re going to continue the journey of improving our campus and we are re-starting the capital campaign to get it done.
We’ll be gathering on March 20 to outline our plans and to invite and encourage all of you to be a part of what we are doing. The next phase of the campaign has a goal to raise $1.5 million and that will help us to do a number of things. Many of you have not seen what our kitchen in Hutton Hall looks like. Don’t worry. You’ll get the chance. The kitchen, just like in our homes, is the hub of our activities as a church family and a vital part of our parish life together. To say our kitchen is aging would be a kind way to describe it. That’s the first project on our work list, as we plan to replace our aging appliances and remodel and expand the kitchen. We’ll do other renovations in Hutton Hall, too.
We also plan to provide the infrastructure for video conferencing – which we know has become such an important part of our Zoom life as a church family. And we welcome all you who are seeing this via zoom today! We also are going to improve our internal signs to help visitors get around our campus and provide new interior lighting that will help us all do it feeling safe and secure.
After that as we look at our funding progress, we’ll examine ways to renovate our Youth Center, the Learning Center and do some internal landscaping work, too
On March 20, both at 9 am and at 11:30 after church, we will share details on our plans, answer any questions you may have and ask for your feedback on what you see. Even if you have made a pledge already, please come. There is more to share and learn.
Here’s the most important thing I can ask of each of us today.
Get involved. Come to our forums on March 20 to learn more. We’ll live-stream the 11:30 session so our on-line viewers can be there, too.
After that and into April, we’ll be doing a series of Gatherings, small groups meeting at parishioners’ homes and on campus. In fact, we have 16 of these scheduled. It will be for fellowship, food and information. It will be a wonderful chance to get to know each other better and learn more details on our plans and an opportunity for you to provide some feedback. We’ll have sign-up tables in the courtyard every Sunday and ways to connect via our web site too. Please, attend one of those.
We’ll also be offering tours of the kitchen, as well as the Children’s Center if you have not seen that. Will have sign-ups for those and hold the tours after church into April as well. Please, attend one of those.
Finally after you learn and see more of what we want to do then I would ask you to do two more things:
Pray. Pray about how you can respond to the financial needs of our church and how you can make a lasting impact on our future. This is ultimately a decision based on Faith. And perhaps love.
And then commit. Our campaign will finish at the end of May, and by then we hope you will have committed to making a pledge to the campaign and join your fellow parishioners in helping to improve our campus and grounds for the future.
I would suggest that we have an even more important goal than the final dollar amount – which is to achieve 100% participation from our entire worshiping community.
Friends, we can do this. There is no commitment too small nor is there any commitment too large! If you have sent your pledge in and are inspired and now in a position to do more, that would be a real blessing.
I continue to be amazed at the love I see at St. Barnabas. I see it every Sunday at church. I see it in my TAEHS small prayer group, which is really not a group. It’s a family with unconditional love for each other. I see it in our fellow parishioners and the work they have done and are doing on various committees, to prepare us for these next steps.
When I think of the campaign that we are going to revive now in this post-pandemic era, I have a small addition to how we refer to it. I don’t think of it as just Welcoming the Neighborhood anymore. I think of it as Welcoming the neighborhood … and changing lives.
We are changing the lives of our children, and their children and beyond. We are changing the lives of our parish members today, all of us, as we continue to show our support for our church and for each other. We are changing the lives of those who we are inviting to join us anew as we continue our mission of making disciples.
I invite you all to share in the joy and the blessings of our lives together here at Saint Barnabas. Let’s look back in a few years and marvel at what we have accomplished. And let’s make sure we all are a part of it.
Thank you for your support and may God bless you and your families.
