Ministry Portfolio - St. James's Episcopal Church

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Ministry Portfolio Full Portfolio

(last updated Jan 3, 2017)

St. James’s , Richmond, Virginia 1205 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23220, United States Contact:

Rector / Vicar / Priest-in-Charge | Receiving Names until 02/15/17.

[email protected]

Weekly Average Sunday

Number of Weekend

Number of Weekday

Attendance (ASA)

Worship Services

Worship Services

Number of Other per Month Worship Services

555

3

1

1

Current Annual Compensation

Cash Stipend

Housing / Rectory Detail

Utilities

SECA reimbursement

Compensation Available for New Position

Housing Available for

Pension Plan

Healthcare Options

Dental

Full family

Yes

Housing Equity Allowance in budget

We're in compliance with CPF requirements.

Annual Equity Amount

No

Vacation Weeks

Vacation Weeks Details

2 (standard)

One month, including 5 Sundays (standard)

Continuing Education Funding in budget

$1001-$2000/year

Continuing Education Weeks

Continuing Education Weeks Details

Sabbatical Provision

Travel/Auto Account

Other Professional Account

Yes

Yes

Yes

Housing allowance per IRS rules.


Ministry Portfolio

Full Portfolio (last updated Jan 3, 2017)

St. James’s , Richmond, Virginia

Contact:


[email protected]

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“Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” James 1:22 This verse appears prominently above our altar. We are doers, joined by our love of God and our desire to serve Christ in the world. In September 2015, Richmond hosted an international biking championship. The event route blocked access to our church for days, including a Sunday morning. From this problem, Servant Sunday was born. On that day, we met in a school to pack meals with Stop Hunger Now. 300 people of all ages participated, packing 20,000 meals and attending a ministry fair to get involved in ongoing ministries. We also opened our church to the community as a viewing site for the races. The first Servant Sunday was so successful we repeated it on Sept. 11, 2016, this time offering parishioners a choice of 13 ministry opportunities, including packing meals, picking up litter, singing hymns for disabled adults and organizing space at a shelter for veterans. After a brief service in our sanctuary, all ages proceeded to serve in the ministry they chose. This event allowed hundreds of parishioners to work with people they did not know before and to experience new ministries, while doing good in our community.

How are your preparing yourselves for the Church of the future?

In 2015-2016, St. James completed a strategic plan to determine our goals for the near future (http://cdn.doers.org/wp-content/uploads/pubs/STJ.StrategicPlan2016.pdf). We plan to expand our international missions and local ministries, strengthen our social justice advocacy and improve our environmental stewardship. Increasing stewardship and strengthening our spiritual life are 2 of our biggest priorities. Our parish house and church steeple require significant renovations. While we plan to renovate our structures, we also want to become a church “without walls,” expanding our digital outreach. The Plan included creation of our new St. James’s app. We identified many ways to strengthen our spiritual life, balancing our internal growth with our focus on “doing.” We will expand opportunities for parishioners to participate in our worship and music programs, better engage our youth and find new opportunities for small group ministry. Finally, we seek to be a welcoming home for all people who want to experience the love that is in Christ. We are blessed that our open doors have welcomed many young families, but we also hope to see more diversity within our congregation in the future.

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Vibrant and inspiring preacher; warm and approachable pastor; masterful administrator, leader and mentor; spiritually grounded.


Ministry Portfolio



Contact:


[email protected]

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St. James’s services follow traditional liturgy, but include a variety of diverse music. On Sundays we have Holy Eucharist Rite I (7:45), followed by a Holy Eucharist Rite II family service (9:00). The 9:00 service has a children’s chapel during the sermon, and children are invited to sit in front of the altar as communion and baptisms are prepared. The kids are often even sprinkled with a little baptismal water! This service includes traditional classical and occasional popular music (e.g. Beatles, U2). At 11:15 we have a service of Holy Eucharist Rite II or Morning Prayer Rite I. This service has no children’s lesson and offers traditional music. A few times a year, we combine Sunday services into one music-themed service, including the Bluegrass Mass, Jazz Mass and Bob Dylan Mass. We offer a Jazz Mass monthly on Sunday evenings - a contemporary, music-focused casual service. In summers, we have 8:00 and 10:00 services and evening Jazz Mass weekly. On Wednesdays, we have Evening Prayer. We also offer 5-6 Evensongs a year. The staff has a Morning Prayer service weekly. Music is central to our worship. Our innovative Music Director has been at St. James’s more than 20 years.

How do you practice incorporating others in ministry?

Our Every Members’ Ministry program launched in 2010. Through it, we encourage every person in our congregation to claim an area of ministry. We have a dedicated Director of Servant Ministries, who helps us identify service opportunities. Our worship services include Lay Eucharistic Ministers, youth acolytes, readers, and ushers. We have an extensive Sunday school program led by many adult volunteers. Volunteers also conduct a Godly Play program for young children and Vacation Bible School in the summer. In the community, our parishioners work with children and seniors at the Peter Paul Development Center, mentor children in city schools and send volunteers to local agencies with urgent needs. Our many additional ministries include Food Force, which prepares meals for delivery to homeless shelters several times a month, and our Wednesday night cooking teams, who feed anyone who wants to dine with us. Our Parish Resource guide makes it easy for parishioners to see the many ministries available to them: http://cdn.doers.org/wp-content/uploads/pubs/parish-resource-guide-2015-16.pdf

As a worshipping community, how do you care for your spiritual, emotional and physical well-being?

A variety of worship services spiritually sustain us, as well as additional prayer services, music ministries (including 2 adult choirs, youth choir, 2 children’s choirs, and a guitar ensemble), and Christian education classes for youth and adults. Bible studies, book studies, movie theology, weekly yoga, and mindful meditation classes bring our parishioners together. During Lent, we provide daily devotional emails. Parish-wide retreats at Shrine Mont and the Society of St. John the Evangelist provide time for bonding and reflection. Our new Stations of the Cross hike capitalizes on Richmond’s renowned outdoors. The young adult group organized this popular devotion, with dogs and people walking by the James River on Holy Saturday, pausing for reflections and scripture reading. Social celebrations keep our fun-loving community engaged and connected. We have an annual picnic, supper clubs, and Wednesday night dinners. Mardi Gras for Missions funds our mission programs with a lively party and auction. Finally, though we are a large parish, our parishioners expect and receive personal interaction with our Rector.


Ministry Portfolio



Contact:


[email protected]

How do you engage in pastoral care for those beyond your worshipping community?

St. James’s doers impact our local community and the world. Our youth and adults participate in mission trips both locally and internationally, including Appalachia, Cuba, Haiti and Honduras (http://www.doers.org/faith-in-action/missions/). We have one of the largest mission programs in the Episcopal Church. We send 8-10 mission teams out each year to share God’s love through service. The annual Mardi Gras for Missions event raises an average of $70,000 to fund this mission work. We also designate $85,000 of our budget specifically for local outreach. Many ministries support the homeless, who often seek help at our urban church. We work with other local congregations to give emergency assistance to those at risk of homelessness (ACTS) and to shelter and feed the homeless overnight one or two weeks a year (CARITAS). Every other year we hold a weekend-long symposium called Womankind, where nationally recognized speakers bring in many members of the larger community to learn and worship with us. We also participate in the World Pediatric Project, sponsoring an international child in our parish while he or she receives surgical care in our city.

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We are an urban parish in the historic and vibrant Fan section of Richmond. Our parishioners come from across the area, with many driving by more convenient Episcopal churches on their way to St. James’s. Our location positions us to lend space to various groups, including 12-step programs, Stop Child Abuse Now and the Boy Scouts. St. James’s provides space and support to the St. James’s Children’s Center, an affordable full-time preschool for at-risk children. Many parishioners are active with the Children’s Center, which is widely recognized for its exceptional education. We have a close relationship with our neighbor, Temple Beth Ahabah. With Beth Ahabah we hold Interfaith Dialogue lectures to foster understanding between our congregations and co-own a parking garage. We worshipped at Beth Ahabah for 3 years while our sanctuary was re-built after a fire in 1994. We are a registration site for CARITAS, a group that shelters the homeless in local churches, as well as housing the homeless for a week annually when we welcome and feed CARITAS participants. Our Food Force teams cook & deliver food for local homeless shelters several times a month. We are active in the Diocese.

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In 2011, we began the Taste of St. James’s, a gourmet food sale and party held the week before Thanksgiving. The Taste evolved from an annual Christmas Bazaar held for more than 100 years to raise money for ECW ministries. We realized that competing events reduced our profits, so we simplified the Bazaar into the Taste. Volunteers prepare food orders, as well as frozen soups and appetizers sold at the event and a beautiful gourmet bake sale. Since its inception, the Taste has evolved into a well-organized event that offers fellowship opportunities and fun. People volunteer for cooking teams in the church kitchen to work with people they may not know. The Sunday School kids make snack mix. A team of ushers makes breakfast casseroles. The older youth make lasagna, soup and other treats. All gather for an evening of shopping and socializing. Many new friendships have formed from this ministry. Last year, the Taste raised $10,000 to buy ingredients for our Food Force teams, who then feed hundreds of needy people in our community throughout the year. Contact: Louise Bald, [email protected]


Ministry Portfolio



Contact:


[email protected]

What is your practice of stewardship and how does it shape the life of your worshipping community?

At St. James’s, we approach stewardship as giving back to God. More than 93% of the annual budget comes from annual giving. In 2016, we launched a peer-to-peer stewardship program, wherein parishioners reached out to their peer groups to check in, ask for prayer requests, and encourage them to pledge. We have a goal of increasing our pledging households from 618 to 650 (out of 1344 total households). This year, more people increased their pledges than in previous years, and we received many new pledges. We are on pace to match last year’s giving, despite losing our beloved Rector. We also found that the peer-to-peer program helped us connect with each other while meeting our financial needs. We find other ways to keep our stewardship efforts personal and joyful. We recently established Founders’ Sunday, celebrating estate givers each June. Every October we hold the Feast of St. James’s, a joyous stewardship celebration for the entire congregation with dinner and a musical performance. 500 parishioners typically attend.

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We struggled to identify a time of conflict in our recent church history. We largely credit our most recent Rector with the lack of conflict we have experienced. Many church members recollected his encouragement for us to hear and empathize with our fellow parishioners on points of disagreement. He dealt with potential conflicts openly and directly, and worked very closely with the vestry to ensure that they led the Church’s direction. An example of this was in 2015, when we celebrated our first gay union within St. James’s. Long time active members approached our Rector and asked him to perform the ceremony. The Rector got approval from the vestry and announced the church’s decision to bless their lifelong covenant. The joyous celebration caused virtually no controversy within the church, despite our having many conservative congregants.

What is your experience leading/addressing change in the church? When has it gone well? When has it gone poorly? And what did you learn?

Despite our 175-year history, St. James’s has changed with the times. Changes like the introduction of our Jazz Mass on Sunday evenings were welcomed though they were different. In 2012, St. James’s received a donation for an evening casual service with alternate music and liturgy. We held Jazz Mass weekly throughout the summer, with jazz, poetry and scripture readings in a casual, Eucharistic setting. Weekly attendance was low, but there was still demand for this alternate service after the initial funding ran out, so Jazz Mass is now held monthly. Changes to our traditional services tend to go less well. When we changed the way ushers collect the offering, starting from the back rather than the front, many people voiced objection. It was clear that St. James’s parishioners resist changes to the rituals of our traditional services, so we returned to the original format. It’s a blessing that several of our parishioners could only identify this trivial, short-lived change as the most controversial in recent memory!


Ministry Portfolio



Contact:


[email protected]

Prior Incumbents

Name

Position Title

Date Begun

Rev. Dr. Thom Blair

Interim

2016-08

Date Ended

Name

Position Title

Date Begun

Date Ended

Rev. Randolph Hollerith

Rector / Vicar / Priest-in-Charge

2000-12

2016-06

Name

Position Title

Date Begun

Date Ended

Rev. Bob Trache

Rector / Vicar / Priest-in-Charge

1994-03

1999-12

Student numbers above are average weekly attendance. We offer a number of small group study settings for adults on Sundays and during the week, including short courses, Bible studies, book studies, EFM, Pilgrim’s Path, and topical forum presentations. Some of these are ongoing courses and others are special offerings that continue for a shorter period.

Church School

Sunday School, Godly Play, Senior Youth Fellowship, Junior Youth Fellowship, Confirmation Class, Sunday Christian Formation, Intentional Spirituality Group, Sunday Adult Forum, Sunday Short Courses, Bible Study, EFM, Pilgrim’s Path, Christian Number of Teachers/Leaders Number of Students for Journey

Number of Teachers/Leaders for Children School

Number of Students for Children School

112

70

for Teen/Young Adults School

Teen/Young Adults School

Number of Teachers/Leaders for Adults School

Number of Students for Adults School

28

53

46

197

Day School

Number of Students for Day School

Number of Teachers for Day School

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Ministry Portfolio



Contact:


[email protected]

Worshipping Community Web site: www.doers.org Media Links:

Online References:

> http://cdn.doers.org/wp-content/uploads/pubs/parish-resource-g uide-2016-17.pdf > http://cdn.doers.org/wp-content/uploads/pubs/minutes/2015-Ann ual-Report-with-insert.pdf

> http://www.youtube.com/stjamesrichmond > https://facebook.com/St.James.Doers

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Provide Worship or Classes in:

English

English

St. James’s has a detailed website and we invite candidates to see our many activities and ministries there. In addition we have developed a St. James’s App for our parishioners to directly access our website.

References Bishop:

1-800-DIOCESE

The Rt. Rev. Shannon S. Johnston Diocesan Transition Minister

The Rev. Dr. Mary Brennan Thorpe/ Mr. Ed Keithly

[email protected], [email protected] 1-800-DIOCESE x 1013 and 1015

Current Warden/Board Chair

Mrs. Peggy Crowley Previous Warden/Board Chair

Mr. Geoff Sisk Search Chair

[email protected]

Mr. Charles Whitaker Parish/Institution

[email protected]

Mr. G. Bernard (Berno) Hamilton Local Community Leader

Karen Stanley

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[email protected]