St. Paul’s Family,
Since the beginning of the year, the vestry has continued to focus on a few focus areas: required maintenance and enhancements for our building and property, continuing to streamline and modernize our administration, and maintaining financial discipline.
Led by our Junior Warden, we have continued to work through an ever-evolving prioritized list of maintenance projects for our building. This includes many visible and invisible projects, including recent emergency plaster repairs in the back of the Nave, gutter repair and cleaning, quieting the squeaky stairs to the choir loft and in front of the Lady Chapel altar, and many others. We are so blessed to have our next door neighbor, Mike, who has done much of this with incredible quality. We were also able to acquire some very gently used new choir chairs and chairs for the table in the rector’s office used each week for the book studies.
Additionally, you might have noticed that we’ve recently started some enhancements and refreshing of the Parish Hall, as that has become our primary space for coffee hour, gatherings and events. This includes the recent installation of kitchen cabinets and serving tables. We will continue to look for cost-effective ways to enhance that space to improve usability and maintenance, and making it an inviting space particularly for visitors checking us out.
We also continue to make progress in our ongoing efforts to modernize and streamline our processes at St. Paul’s. This includes the recent work for some clean-up to our parish membership files aligned with new national guidelines, finishing implementation of QuickBooks, and the hiring of Laura Nordell as our Parish Administrator. We look forward to continued improvements across our administrative processes.
And finally, as we head into our fall season, please do consider ways you can spend some time helping our ministries and outreach here at St. Paul’s. Whether it’s hosting a coffee hour, helping out Altar Guild once a month, or using your skills on a project, we would love to help you find a place to use your time and talents! It is a blessing that we have been seeing a steady stream of visitors the past few months, and we’d love your help and participation in welcoming them. In that spirit, special thanks to Celeste Kendall who volunteered earlier this year to take over the Animeals relationship. They are planning a great neighborhood event Oct. 5, so stay tuned for more info on that!
If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to any of us.
Koji Torihara, Senior Warden
