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During the next few weeks, we’ll have several opportunities to reflect on our community life together at St. Clare’s, and what we can all do to support our congregation in the year ahead.
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- Read the weekly Stewardship devotionals in the St. Clarian, and reflect on this theme throughout the coming season.
- Hear from several St. Clarians on Sundays (or in our podcast) about what they have found transformative about being members of St. Clare’s.
- Reflect on the saints who have come before us on All Saints Day (celebrated on November 2).
- Participate in Ingathering Sunday on November 16, when we’ll bring our Estimate of Giving cards to the altar and pray and celebrate together.
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A note from the Stewardship Committee
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Dear Friends,
What does the concept of stewardship mean to you? For me, it is a way to nurture something that brings an abundance of joy and blessing to your life, like St. Clare’s does for our parishioners. This nurturing of blessing grows from the root of God’s whispers in your heart and soul. These seeds grow into a calling to offer support with your time, talent and resources, including the monetary gifts that are needed to keep the church’s mission fully funded and growing. When it feels right and good to give, this is a sign of a rich quality of life embodying love of God and love of neighbor.
I encourage all of you to think about what matters most in your life as a Christian. How is God calling you to participate via the choices you make to promote the betterment of worship, education, and service for the years and generations to come?
When we consider the importance of religion, church, and community in our lives, it helps us more clearly evaluate what generous giving really means. Giving can lift us up, lighten our load, and enrich our spirit as we praise God for our great church life and fellowship.
Without ample financial support, St. Clare’s cannot maintain all of our wonderful, caring work and activities, including humanitarian service, church school programs, the food pantry, and community support missions. Humanity will be better served because we support what we believe in.
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In her wonderful book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes:
“In the spirit of the reciprocal gift economy, you might consider how you can reciprocate the gifts of the Earth in your own way. Whatever your currency of reciprocity…be it money, time, energy, political action, art, science, education, planting, community action, restoration, acts of care both large and small…all are needed in these urgent times. You are invited to become a member of the gift economy on behalf of people and planet.”
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Please listen to what your own spirit is saying as you consider your estimate of how much you can give over the next year, and consider increasing your pledge to allow us to keep up with the needs of our budget (see below). Spread the word. Together we can grow this joyous worship community, maintain it, and sustain it in perpetuity. This is essential work for the betterment of Christian life for generations to come: an investment in the future of our children and grandchildren and beyond. Using our time, talent, and treasure to support what we believe in is a way of showing the world how God’s light shines through the actions of humanity.
Yours in Christ,
Susan Draffen
On behalf of the St. Clare’s Stewardship Committee
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Dear friends,
I recently had the chance to visit our congregation’s archive boxes in the Bentley Historical Library. I thought I’d share a few of the photos and clippings I found, as they seemed full of reminders that many of the themes of people and communities spiral around back to us in different forms as the years go by.
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March 1952: Bishop Emrich’s letter thanking Dr. Inez Wisdom for their visit when, presumably, she agreed to give her land to the diocese for the site of a new church. (I read several other letters to Dr. Wisdom from prominent men in the same file, and she seems to have been the type of woman who inspired deference!) He said, in this letter, “I do not have the slightest hesitation in predicting that some day, upon the property which you now love, there will be a fine parish Church, with many hundreds of people learning to love their Lord.”
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Dr. Wisdom and Miss Griffith had already acted on their own dreams about community, in building their chapel. Together with people who couldn’t pay for the medical care they received from them, people of goodwill who contributed time and money, and others memorializing loved ones they’d lost, they built a community gathering place of prayer. The article about the chapel aptly says “Despite its physical uniqueness, however, the chapel’s most unusual feature remains the diversity of faith and fellowship on which it was built and was used.”
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Summer 1953: Worship began outside under Inez and Gertrude’s trees, and then moved into Stone School down the street when the weather got too cold.
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Meanwhile, they began raising money to build a church building. They considered for a while building a cheap, temporary structure, but decided to trust that investing in a real building would give them a home for years to come. Here’s what the first architect imagined in 1954.
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During these building months, they had all kinds of logistics that were clearly stretching everyone thin: they would meet for worship at Stone School, whose space they had already outgrown, and then several people within walking distance would volunteer their living rooms for Church School classrooms. You can imagine how hard it would have been to get everyone in the right place! They moved into their building before it was even finished: here, you see the picture of them walking into the church across some planks set up in the snow, before the steps were built up the doorway.
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I looked up what was happening in 1953 and 1954. The Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear bomb. The Korean war ended, in a fashion, but the Vietnam war was brewing. There was a coup in Iran. More people tuned in to watch Little Ricky’s birth on I Love Lucy than watched Eisenhower’s inauguration, to many people’s consternation. We think of those years as boom years, but there was a huge amount of uncertainty, fear that the world was ending, that the social fabric was unraveling. They weren’t silly to worry; there was plenty there to be afraid of, just like there is today. Their more mundane struggles were the same as ours are too: arguing over who would coordinate the janitorial work, struggling to find enough Church School teachers for all the kids, wondering if it was an auspicious time to try something audacious, fearing that what was wrong in the world would get in the way.
But their children needed a place to come to know God, and they needed a place to gather, to find community and to connect with God and build up good things in the world- to worship with joy, grow in faith, and act for justice, as some would come to explain it more succinctly.
And so they kept moving forward with those dreams, and they built something that endures. And what struck me, in those letters and pictures and architectural imaginings was that they couldn’t have imagined the much grander dreams that God actually had for this place and this community. The people who called and visited and wrote letters to each other, trying to raise the money for that little rectangular church, couldn’t have imagined it expanding to hold congregations of two faiths, and the transformation and goodness that have happened because they built a home in this place.
And so, like they did 72 years ago, and like this community has done every year since- we will ask everyone to pray about what they can contribute to this place and this community. And we’ll follow up (fewer paper letters, more emails and texts, still phone calls!) and talk extensively about the budget, and worry that we won’t have enough to make it work. Probably not everything will be ideal- we have our own ways that we are outgrowing our infrastructure, and our own 2025 versions of wooden planks holding up crucial arteries. But perhaps we can remember, from our forebears, that God is dreaming and building right alongside us, and that when we all gather for something good, that God can work in the midst of it to do much more than we could ask or imagine. There’s no community I’d rather be building and dreaming with than all of you.
With care,
Rev. Anne
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The above chart shows our operational expenses so far in 2025 broken down by percentage. (This does NOT include the portion of the curate's salary and benefits covered by the Trinity Wall Street grant.)
What increased expenses might our operations budget need to cover in 2026?
- Outreach expenses are likely to increase; the clergy have already seen an increase in the number of requests for help from the Discretionary Fund.
- The expansion of our children and youth programs have already given us the responsibility and privilege of hiring two additional Sunday morning program assistants. Those two additional paychecks will carry over into 2026. The Children and Youth Program Director's hours have also increased.
- We provide our staff with an annual salary increase to keep up with cost of living increases, in keeping with diocesan guidelines.
- Building expenses tend to increase at a similar rate, as insurance and Genesis staff pay also increase with inflation.
- The Trinity Wall Street grant which covers Rev. Toby's salary and benefits will end as of June 30, 2026. After this, half of the cost will be covered by St. Clare's and half by the diocese until Rev. Toby's contract is up at the end of June 2027.
While the future is uncertain, we do know that we want to be able to meet the needs of that future together as a church-- the needs of our world, our community, and our own growing membership. Your gifts to our operations budget help us provide the programming and staff which allow us to engage thoughtfully with those needs, and your Estimates of Giving help us make our budget and plans for the coming year.
You can fill out your Estimate of Giving card in person on any Sunday, or online by visiting saintclareschurch.org/pledge.
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