Parish Meeting Report
On Saturday, August 28, members of St Stephen’s gathered to reflect on how we’ve managed through the pandemic, what we are longing for from our “pre-COVID” times and to wonder if new ideas have risen up for us during this time.
We started with two questions: How are we feeling about the pandemic? And how is St Stephen’s doing now? You can see some of the responses to those questions in the photos with this news post.
The consensus was that we are incredibly grateful for how well we’ve adapted to worshiping with Zoom – that has been a real lifeline for many of us through isolation and the emotional ups and downs since March 2020. Despite the limits, we were able to do many things including: the online Christmas Market, having the Thrift Shop open, Zoom Trivia, our youth were able to meet with youth from neighbouring congregations, Archbishop Melissa was able to open the Pet Memorial Garden, and we built relationships with each other through Zoom social times and regular phone calls. We are also incredibly grateful for how many people from the parish continued to make their regular offerings by PAD (Pre-Authorized Donation) or by dropping cheques/cash off regularly. Several people were able to make additional contributions during the time when we did not have rental income and that was particularly helpful. THANK YOU.
We are really missing singing together and eating together. In our conversation about how to re-introduce more of both of those things, we talked about how we balance our desire to make Sunday morning feel as safe as possible for the greatest number of people. Parish Council is working towards ways to re-introduce both these elements of our life together in mid-October. We want to give the current public health measures a chance to do their work. Our hope is that we can use Thanksgiving Sunday as a time to embrace the next phase of our “new normal.”
One of the nicest things about the morning was just hearing the sounds of passionate conversations buzzing around the Parish Hall.