From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

Some of you will have received this year’s stewardship mailer recently. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll let the office know so that we can ensure we have your mailing address correctly recorded.

The theme for this year’s campaign is a relatively simple one: Gathered in Love. You may recognize it from the vision statement we use on various materials. It’s the first part of Gathered in Love, Transformed by Grace, Sent to Serve.

We’re in an election year and a time of so much division that it feels like community is a rare and precious thing. There’s so much at work in our culture telling us to fear and even to hate one another.

The pandemic, too, exposed how precious community is. So many of us were alone or separated from those we love. Or we realized we hadn’t put enough time in our lives into developing close connections that could carry us through such times.

A church community is a special and beautiful thing. It’s a community that is called together to love God and is called together by God’s love for us. He knows we need one another and has made us for companionship—we’re made for Communion.

There are so many ways people form community here. In many ways, Saint Philip’s is a community of communities. We gather in a variety of ways and we do it all for the love of God. We are charged, across our differences, to love one another as God loves us.

The stewardship campaign this year focuses on community because it feels like we need deep and true and lasting community now more than ever. As connections fray and we feel ever more alone in ever more seemingly crowded spaces, we find ourselves bombarded by a kind of noisy blindness. We’re pushed further and further away from one another even as God is always calling us into closer and closer relationship.

Church is one of those places where we get to be the community we want to be. We get to share and we hope people will share with us. We get to care in ways we might miss being cared for. We get to serve and remember all the times we needed help. We get to draw near to God even in times when he might feel distant. We get to work for peace in a time of strife, with joy in times of anger, and with love when love seems scarce.

Our churches are places where we get to use our gifts to support the kind of world we want to live in. We get to support beauty, meaning, connection, hope, care, joy, and love. We get to be generous with our hope and with our resources so that we might be a place of hope, a resource, for others.

No community is perfect. God called only one perfect person into ministry and we’re not him! But we try. We strive to do his will with creativity, joy, and hope—and that is worth supporting.

Karrie and I will pledge $16,000 this year to Saint Philip’s. We will do so because of the love we see nurtured here. We will do so because God has blessed us with you, our friends and our companions, in this faith journey. We will do so because our boys are learning to sing, serve, pray, and love here. That’s the kind of world we want and that’s why we are happy to help make that hope a reality with all that we have and all that we are.

We’ve been brought here, gathered together with you, by God’s love and for that we are beyond thankful and our pledge is a reflection of that thanks. I hope you’ll consider how God has blessed your own life, what community has meant for you, and what your own hope looks like as you consider your own pledge this year.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert