Dear Sisters and Brothers:

On Sunday, March 2, 2008 we held the Annual Meeting for St. Mary’s Church. This is a time when we come together as a congregation to look back over the past year and to look towards our future. We do this, however, with a particular perspective. We hold our Annual Meeting in Lent, a season of the Church Year when we examine our lives before God and the manner in which we are called to live as God’s people.

As a collective body, we in this parish join together to serve God in our neighborhood and to make the love of Christ known both in our individual lives and throughout our community. This is one of the important ways in which we are called to show the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. As a parish, we are corporate, literally an organized body, to carry out this mission we are given by God at our baptism, proclaiming by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, seeking and serving Christ in all persons and loving our neighbor as ourselves, striving for justice and peace among all and respecting the dignity of every human being. To accomplish this mission we need power.

First and foremost, we need the power of God in our lives, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As we learn from our community organizing with Manhattan Together, in our world power is organizing people and organized money. This is part of the logic behind our Annual Meeting.

First, we need organized people. To me, this consists of leaders in the congregation who with the support of the people of St. Mary’s behind them carry out the business of the parish. This is the role of the Vestry and Wardens. They serve in this leadership position to implement the vision we hold and to ensure that the mission with which God entrusts us and inspires us is undertaken. Please keep this in mind as we move to elect new members of the Vestry today.

Second, we need to organize our money. At St. Mary’s we are a small parish and we do not have a lot of money. You, the members of St. Mary’s have been very generous in your pledges over the years as well. We are also blessed by some other resources that help us to keep working at carrying out God’s mission in this place. Because we do not have a lot of money, we cannot afford to waste any at all (it is a very precious resource!) Like everyone else, costs are now rising.

At the Annual Meeting we heard that we must raise our pledge income in order to make sure we do not run a deficit in 2008. That is why it is important to spend some time in prayer about your commitment to stewardship at St. Mary’s and to fill out a pledge card, to do what you can to help us increase our stewardship for St. Mary’s.

This to me is why our stewardship is so important, because it enables the Church to be the means through which God’s Holy Mission of reconciling love is carried out in our community and the world. It is God’s Mission, and God calls us in Jesus Christ to be part of it and support it.

At the Episcopal Urban Caucus in Chicago in 2004, Mr. Byron Rushing, a state assembly member from Massachusetts and a devoted Episcopal Lay Person, preached a great sermon. In the pulpit of the cathedral he said, "The Church does not have a mission." There was stunned silence at this bold statement. He waited a beat for the impact to sink in, and then continued, "God’s mission has a Church."

May God continue to bless each of you and may God’s grace enable us as the congregation of St. Mary’s Church to serve God by seeking peace, giving voice to the voiceless, remembering and serving the forgotten and needy and showing God’s love in Christ Jesus to all.

Faithfully,
The Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, Rector