Discerning God's Call for Calvary
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” - Ecclesiastes 3:1
Throughout 2021, the Calvary Vestry, Clergy, and Staff have begun the process of listening to God’s call to us in this season of our parish life. We have gathered information through the Episcopal Church Foundation’s EFC 360 Assessment and a Congregational Survey. We look forward to future opportunities for discussion, and we presented our initial observations at a Parish Meeting on November 7.
In this process of discernment, we have asked some important questions:
What are our values?
Where do we see God’s vision of hope in the world?
How is God calling us to live in to this hope?
What areas does our vocation lead us to focus on?
What steps do we need take to follow God’s call more closely?
The Vestry has found that we are called to focus in six Vocational Areas: Fellowship, Formation, Mission, Worship, Administration, and Facilities. Within these areas, we have identified three — Fellowship, Formation, and Mission — which offer the most opportunities for us to grow in the near future. In order to do so, we are formulating steps and gathering resources to support this work.
Calvary’s Annual Budget can be displayed in terms of traditional budgetary categories, as seen above, and this is helpful in understanding the context of our finances. For instance, one can easily see that the majority of our budget is dedicated to providing salaries, insurance, and retirement plans for our clergy and staff. It is also helpful, however, to view our budget in terms of the Vocational Areas which we have discerned.
Displaying our Annual Budget in this way helps us understand how our expenditures line up with the areas into which we hear God calling us. As we further discern the path which lies ahead of us, we can adjust our allocation of resources to match the work we are celled to do. It is also interesting to compare our spending in each vocational area to Calvary’s various sources of income.
What is most notable about this illustration is that the percentage of our income which comes from lease and building use sources is closely matched to our expenditures in facilities. This means that parishioner contributions are freed up to support the programmatic areas of our vocation — Fellowship, Formation, Mission, Worship, and Administration — rather than keeping on the lights and maintaining the parking lot. As contributions grow, so does our capacity to follow God’s call at Calvary.