Scott’s Column: The Fruits of Our Labor Mar 2, 2025 | News This post is the second installment of a series exploring the highlights of the last fifteen years. Those first six years were full of to-do lists and goals, and you can tell from the long list I published last week, that we got a lot done, in every area of congregational life. The middle years of my pastorate, roughly from the arrival of Katie Miller and my first sabbatical through to the pandemic, were less frenetic. We were able to settle in and enjoy the results of all the earlier hard work. Here are some of the efforts that stand out in my memory from this period. We cultivated an effective Staff team that worked well together. One of the strengths of our team was that we reflected every adult generation working at the time and almost every decade of adult experience. And we became more than just co-workers, but friends. The big project of these years was developing a new Long Range Plan. We had completed so many projects in the years before and now needed to cast our vision to the future. Lamar Jones, who chaired the long range planning task force, said at our first meeting that he had often been involved in these sorts of conversations in the church over the last few decades, but it was the first time we were beginning that conversation while operating from a period of growth and financial stability. The planning efforts involved some great sessions open to the entire congregation, generating lots of ideas that we immediately began to incorporate into the life of the church. Such as drum circles in worship, which was something Grant Switzer wanted. The final report set five goals: To become a Community Center, leveraging our location to provide service and mission to our neighborhood and the city. To build on our strong foundation in educational programs with a greater focus on the connections between science, technology, religion, and the arts. To cultivate global citizenship with our programs and missions. Address growing environmental concerns. And provide facilities and infrastructure that supports our ambitions for the future. During these years we were also navigating intense political polarization. There were worries, especially as Donald Trump first took office in 2017, that political disagreements could cause division in the church. I count it a great success that this did not occur. Sometimes it’s difficult to see all the work that went into making sure something didn’t happen, but your Staff expended great effort to achieve this result. The ministry I was most proud of during this era was our Refugee Team (fulfilling our global citizenship goal). The program launched in the winter of 2016 and continued for years as we supported three different families–from Thailand, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Pat Lamberty lept into leadership and formed a large and effective team of people. It was an immediate and effective community-building response to a political situation, and a mission that drew deeply from the ethics of our faith. We had become the second WISE for Mental Health church in the denomination and in 2017 hosted the very first WISE Conference. Moderator Kerrie Kleppin-Winn took the lead in ensuring this was a great event, attended by folks from all over the country. In 2016 and 2017 I attended the Festival of Homiletics and worked to further hone my preaching skills, particularly to meet the times in which we lived. Having a full-time Associate Minister afforded me more opportunity for deep study and reflection, and I began to teach more First Forum series and Wednesday night classes on in-depth topics. My book was finally published in 2018, and we held a series of events around it at church, plus I had a handful of speaking engagements. In 2019 I gave a talk at TedXUNO. In the fall of 2018 we had a fun worship series that we did in partnership with the Joslyn Art Museum. Each week in worship we highlighted an artwork from the collection and used it to center the sermon. We began to explore more with different genres of music in worship. Katie’s guitar skills and the beginnings of the Jazz Band really helped. Stephen began composing more original works for our choir to perform, and Katie wrote fun children’s programs. In December 2018 I remember Bernie Monbuquette remarking on how skilled and creative a staff we had, all writing and producing their own unique material. In November of that year we had a full house when we hosted the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service. There were also the less glamorous efforts to improve behind-the-scenes systems. We evaluated our church management software and selected a new one, launching it into the congregation with much education and effort. We improved and updated our IT physical infrastructure. And we updated the website yet again, partly to optimize it for mobile phones (an effort that took far longer than it should have). I thank Garret Higginbotham and Kerrie Kleppin-Winn for their leadership in these efforts. During these years we had a few building crises that turned out for our benefit. Like the day the roof leaked and it was all hands on deck to do what we could to protect our building and our assets, like the books in the library. But insurance covered our losses and we ended up with things looking better than they had before the accident. By the end of the teens our numerical growth had plateaued and our giving was not keeping up with increased costs, so we entered a round of budget-cutting, led very effectively by Garret Higginbotham who was Moderator at the time. It was no surprise that the long-range plan would lead to a capital campaign, so the early work on that began in 2018 and 2019 when Erin Bock was chairing the Stewardship Committee. We surveyed the congregation and she prepared a case study, and we began to identify what the funding projects might be. Then we formed a committee and prepared to launch the campaign with a sermon series in March 2020. I preached the first of those To Be More sermons the Sunday before we went into lockdown. Next week I’ll share about the final period of my pastorate, from the pandemic on.
