From the Rector – January 14, 2021

This has been a hard week in a hard year. I’m so grateful for this community where we find inspiration and support to continue our journey of faith. What a wonderful coffee hour discussion we had on Sunday, a reminder that we can be reconcilers and peacemakers as we follow Jesus.  If you didn’t get to see Rev. Frank’s Spirit-filled sermon on Sunday where he reflected on the attack on the Capital, you can watch on our Facebook page or web page here:

Worship from January 10, 2021 – Sermon by Rev. Frank Fornaro & Music

Annual Meeting is another opportunity for us to come together as a community. In this year of everything being different, Annual Meeting will be different as well. For one thing, it will be on Zoom. Also, it will be shorter! It’s our goal to keep the meeting to one hour, during our normal coffee hour/formation time.        

Normally we do this by shouting out names in the Great Hall, or nudging our neighbor at our table to ask if we can nominate them. This year, that won’t be possible. Brainstorming names together in the Zoom meeting would be awkward, and also doesn’t give us the ability to work out a Zoom poll or other voting mechanism in advance.  So, please send me names now! Also, you can nominate yourself. If you would be interested or willing to be part of next year’s nominating committee, please let me know. If you’d like to know more about what the nominating committee’s roles and duties are, just click here: https://www.our-redeemer.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NOMINATING-COMMITTEE-description.pdf

Secondly, if you think you’ll need any technical help or have questions about how to get on Zoom, let me know now. I’ll connect you with a member of our tech team who can help out. We really want everyone to be able to participate.

Also, voting on Zoom is a bit complicated. Typically most of our Annual Meeting votes are unanimous and straightforward. If that is the case this year, we won’t have any problem and can easily do it on Zoom. But, we do want to leave plenty of room for dissent and debate. So if you think you will have an objection to the vestry slate of nominees, the change in the bylaws to reduce the nominating committee from 5 members to 4 beginning in 2022, or the nominees for nomination committee, it would be helpful to share that now or up front in the meeting. All the things we are going to vote on, including the vestry nominees, can be found here: https://www.our-redeemer.net/annual-meeting-2/

Then we can prepare for a more detailed vote or contested election. Of course we always welcome nominations from the floor and will certainly do so this year.

We won’t, however, miss out on some of the highlights of Annual Meeting. One highlight is the wonderful slide show of the past year that Randy Bowlby has put together the last few years. Randy has done his magic again, and we will start out the meeting with the slide show.

Also, of course one of the wonderful things about Annual Meeting Sunday is the festive brunch we enjoy together. This year sadly we can’t gather in the Great Hall for brunch. But we can still brunch together!

Thankfully Mary Ann Burnside has been working on collecting many of the recipes we typically enjoy together at Annual Meeting in a parish community cookbook.

There will be more detailed information coming about Annual Meeting to your email inbox in the coming weeks. Please let me know if you have questions, need tech support, or in any way need help participating.

Peace,
Kate