We’ve deferred a capital campaign a couple of times over the past decade because the season just wasn’t right. Now that the economy is slowly emerging from the recession, we need to put Christ Church in better financial position. The parsonage vote is just the first step towards recovering our longer term financial health. There are three pieces to this puzzle.
           
The first piece is debt.
           
We accrued debt in two reasonable ways.
 
First, we had a normal sized overrun when we built the new educational building.
 
Second, 57 New England Ave. came on the market right when we were building the new educational building. The timing couldn’t have been worse but we bought the property for three reasons that were collectively convincing in 2000.

First, we needed office space during the construction and that house became the offices for staff and church meetings for two years. Second, the people selling the house told us that they were likely to sell it to a contractor and we wanted more control of what went up on the property. Third, at the time, almost everyone in our area expected real estate prices to rise endlessly, so a defensive purchase seemed like it had very little downside.
 
The Twin Towers were attacked in 2001, which dramatically changed the social environment. For reasons complex as they are obvious, we never raised the capital to pay for the parsonage at 57 New England Ave. Neither did we go back, hat in hand, to ask our lead donors to pay down the debt on the new education building. We carried the debt which put a drag on our annual budget.
 
The second piece is the organ.
 
In 2007, we had an extensive bid done on restoring the organ pipes and replacing the organ console. The price on that was $350,000. The Eboard approved a capital campaign, organized a committee and we were set to kick it off in the fall when Lehman Brother’s and Bear Stearns collapsed, sending the national economy into a tailspin. At the time, we had no choice but to pull the campaign. The brochures are still in a box.
 
The third piece are capital projects that we have identified for the short-term future.
 
Property managers have identified things that are likely to need to be addressed in the relatively near future (roofs, etc.) that total about $150,000 and the staff has identified technological infrastructure that we would like to develop in order to grow (webpage development, video, etc.).
 
The ideal would be to pay off our debt, repair our organ, and establish enough endowment to cover these capital projects in the near future.
 
We can do this by selling property, identifying Angels that can make bigger contributions, and opening a capital campaign to the congregation.
 
I’ve been at the Church for 20 years. Nothing would make me happier than the Congregation stepping up to the plate and putting us into the fiscal shape we need to stay healthy into the foreseeable future.
 
Fortunately for us, the Angel givers in the congregation are not only exceedingly generous, they are willing to give with minimal restrictions on their gifts. Fortunately for us, the congregation is also growing. Both of these will help to keep the burden on ordinary families at a manageable level.

At the same time, we recognize that the wider financial climate remains quite challenging, which is why the Executive Board of the Church has delayed a capital campaign for several years despite a unanimous recognition of its need. Even today, you could probably characterize the confidence of the congregation as “I want to believe, but prove it to me” that we can raise the money that we need.
 
It will be a real test of faith and commitment, for better and worse. But I would share with you what I learned from the last capital campaign, when we built the education building for our children to grow and develop. Our congregation ended up giving an average of $10,000 per family. The average was actually much higher if you added in the top 10 gifts. We broke all the records held by the fund-raising group that led our effort, the top church fund-raising group in metropolitan New York.
 
What it taught me was that Christ Church is actually much more important to people than they let on and that we are higher in priority on their charity giving than you would expect. Our congregation is actually quite generous.
 
We’ve put this off long enough. David Bunting and I have approached a small group of people that have been Angel givers in the past and the response has been positive. Expect that the leadership of the Congregation will put together a capital campaign with specific goals in the relatively near future.
 
Pray for our congregation that through this process we can develop genuine consensus around the goals for this next chapter of our life together and that we can collectively pool our resources to grow and thrive. And thanks for what you do to make our community a special place.
 
The Rev.