On February 11th the Vestry met for the first time as the 2016 Vestry. After dinner at 6:30pm, we shared our God Moments from the past month.
The meeting officially started at 7:00 and we welcomed new members, Evelyn Martinez, John Butterfield, and Penny Trant. Lori explained the process of the meeting and we proceeded with our agenda as we approved the January minutes and listened to the financial report presented by Lynn Locher. We are on track financially and have received a few more pledges, which brought us to a totally balanced budget, instead of a deficit budget as reported at the annual meeting in January.
We reviewed the calendar of events for the whole year as prepared by Lori and discussed the events and our roles in them. Vestry and Deanery Representatives will be commissioned at both services on February 21st and we are requested to be present at one service, if possible. Elaine talked about the PEP (Personal Emergency Preparedness) class that will be hosted at Saint James’ and we discussed the logistics of how to advertise and to provide lunch.
Next, Lori read a Diocesan Accord and explained the purpose and reason for it. Vivienne announced the new timelines for submitting reports for the Vestry packet each month to allow for distribution on the Saturday before the vestry meeting to give members more time to carefully read the packet and formulate any questions or comments before the meeting.
We discussed the Center for Church Vitality course which Lori attended last year. It is a two year program and is meant for church teams. Lori has secured a grant to halve the cost of fees for each person up to four. The Vestry voted to allocate the remainder of the fees to be paid out of the money received from the endowment fund, which is unspecified as to distribution. Lori had been sharing her learning with the vestry all of last year and the program has a great deal of merit and relevance to Saint James’. We were excited to be able to send a February Vestry Summary team of four, three of whom have not yet been selected, to attend with our rector.
The final order of business for the evening was to hand out the vestry assignments for the coming year. We discussed each of these and also discussed the fact that there is no one assigned to be called in case of a facility emergency. It was decided to post the telephone number of a willing parishioner in the hall in case there is a situation that needs immediate attention. Other assignments are as follows:
- Scott Whitaker will serve as the liaison to the Endowment Board and attend their quarterly meetings;
- Penny Trant will work on the St James’ Day celebration;
- Charles Hall and Elaine Miller will work on the New Member events;
- Evelyn Martinez will work on Volunteer Appreciation Sunday;
- Ashley Francis will work on the Ingathering celebration;
- Bruce Roberts will work on the Charter Document publication;
- John Butterfield and Meg Amouroux will work on the New Member packets;
- Nancy Castaneda and Karen Koonze will work on the Visitor packets;
- Vivienne Paratore will work on a Welcome Team creation.
In addition we will all work on stewardship. We acknowledged and thanked Gail Blalock for the huge amount of great work that she had done for many years on stewardship. We ended our evening together with Compline in the little church.
~Vivienne Paratore, Junior Warden