Good morning. I now call to order our 2025 Annual Meeting. I will give my address here, we’ll then finish the service, and afterwards we’ll grab coffee and refreshments in the Great Hall and reconvene there for about 45 minutes to an hour.
As a reminder, the Annual Meeting is required by law. We are a religious corporation, governed by the elected body of the vestry. The most important thing we do at this meeting is to vote in our new class of 3 incoming vestry members to represent us for the next 3 years. We’ll also vote in the new junior warden, as well as present both last year’s and this year’s budget. (If you’re new or have never been to an Annual Meeting, please join us. It’s a good way to know what’s going on and, this being St. James, there’s ample food and good company.)
We’ll also at this meeting take a look at the latest set of plans for our Parking Lot and Arrival Court, projects that we raised nearly 2.5 million dollars for in last year’s Capital Campaign. By this time next year that project will be largely finished and that will be a major milestone. I hope you’ve found the member Tuesday emails to be helpful. We want this process to be transparent, so that you can trust that we’re doing what we promised--and that we’re doing it well.
This is our 175th anniversary year. It’s probably also our 175th annual meeting, or very close to that. We’ve been learning a lot about our history as a parish--from our beginnings as a country church, surrounded by fields, small plantings and a few scattered graves to what we are today, a bustling suburban church surrounded by busy roads in a town of thousands. We began as a parish in a country yet to go through the Civil War, a country just 73 years old, so close to its founding. The tallest building in Manhattan at that time was Trinity Wall Street, Episcopal Church. The year of our founding, 1849, does anyone know who was president? This is a major bonus question. Zachary Taylor! He was the 12th president of the United States and I would totally have bombed that in a trivia contest.
The solidity of this place, the old stone, the historic finishings make it seem changeless, but the truth is, we’ve changed a lot over the years in response to a changing community and a changing world. Our building, our budget, our property, liturgy, kids’ programs--really, nothing looks quite like it once did. In some cases things are vastly different. Reflecting on our history this anniversary year, I’ve come to appreciate how one of the strengths of St. James has been its ability to read and respond to the times, meeting each new decade and each new century--and yes, we talk in centuries--with courage and creativity.
So how are we doing that today? That’s what I want to talk about in the rest of this address. How are we at St. James being responsive to the world we live in now?
It used to be, by the way, that the rector’s annual address was more a listing of vital church statistics: how many people were baptized and confirmed, how many services we did, the number of funerals and weddings. These things don’t vary too greatly year to year here, but more than that, these aren’t numbers people talk about much anymore. Even our parochial report, the report we submit to the national church every March that contains some of this information, doesn’t ask the questions it used to. We’re trying to find new measures for congregational engagement and vitality. That’s one way the larger Episcopal Church is responding to the demands of our times.
I hope you’ll find it useful that my annual reports in recent years are less about raw data, and more about sharing what church leaders are talking about now, and how we, here at St. James, can move with intention and success into a future that may not look in many ways like the past. If you’re finding this address a bit long for what we’re used to here, be assured we’ve shortened other parts of the service to make up for it.
Three things about the wider culture have affected almost every aspect of church life, from how we do liturgy, to how we raise money, to how we staff, do programs, rally volunteers, choose events--everything. These are: the secularization of our culture, where going to church isn’t an obligation and it’s even acceptable to leave it out of your life altogether. Second, the competing demands in families’ lives, where weekdays and even Sunday mornings can be overscheduled with other things. And third, charitable giving is significantly down--especially to churches. That’s not just because fewer people are affiliated with church, but also because those who are are giving less than they used to. This is not necessarily about St. James, but it’s a challenge we need to be ahead of.
In some ways we’re just starting to understand and then respond to these changes. But some of that work has already begun here. For example, and I’ve said this a lot, “church” isn’t any longer just sitting in a pew for an hour on Sunday. Personally, that’s my favorite kind of church. But more and more people are coming here not having had that background or attachment to this weekly model. That’s why it’s so important moving forward that we “do church” in a variety ways: packing food for the pantry, attending discussion groups or dinners in each others’ homes, Bible study, going on pilgrimage--to the south to learn about the Civil Rights movement as we did in 2023, to the Holy Land or Turkey to build relationships and learn about our Christian tradition. Those are the best. All these things are a deliberate part of doing and defining church more broadly. I’ve begun to check myself on Saturdays down at the Fordham pantry: I no longer say, Will I see you in church tomorrow? But rather, will you be in church on Sunday, too?
But just taking “church” in the traditional sense of gathering for worship on Sunday, that too is changing--and here I have to give credit especially to Victoria for challenging me (and us) in this. Two years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed that drums would become a regular part of worship here. Or that we’d be planning a jazz mass, coming up this March. Her knowledge, both of traditional church music and the things happening out there in our larger more diverse congregations is really a gift she’s brought us. And she’s a great musician. She and I, by the way, have just begun discussions about making her the permanent Organist and Music Director. So tell her how much we appreciate her!
We’ve also come to recognize that what families need has changed. More than in the past, parents want to be with their kids on Sunday; sometimes it’s one of the precious few moments they get to spend together in a week. Mother Eliza takes such good care of the Children’s Corner, so that our children can be with us and also fully immersed in worship. When I was growing up we had these demeaning spaces called cry boxes, where moms (and it was always moms) would have to go up to the balcony, encased behind sound-proof glass, and listen to the service piped in through a speaker overhead. Being banished up there as a child made me so mad. I’m sure my mother wasn’t thrilled either.
We’ll keep kids with us and families together Sunday mornings by providing fresh coloring sheets and toys to play with and high school interns assisting in keeping watch over them. And we all gain.
Figuring out and responding to families’ needs is something our staff talks about a lot. Those needs aren’t the same today as when my kids were little, just ten years ago. They aren’t the same as they were before Covid even. We’re learning that, because of our geographic draw, because of how busy families’ lives are during the week, because weekly attendance isn’t always the norm for our younger families, we have to try new things, such as--
Videos, sent by email, to train kids in a song they’re singing Sunday, because not everyone who wants to sing can make it here for rehearsals during the week.
Texting parents. That has transformed our attendance at confirmation. I text about 3 hours ahead of class and if the parents out there are anything like me, that text is the difference between remembering to get your kid there and not.
Sermons. If you miss one on Sunday, you’ll get a recording of it that week and can listen to it later.
Reels and social media posts If you want to see pictures or even video of a missed church event, you can see that online.
The Tuesday member email: if you’ve been away or it’s winter and the whole house has been passing around a stomach virus for five weeks or your kids’ sport season is wiping out your weekends for a time, or you’re older and you don’t want to be in a crowd on Sunday with that stomach virus, you can stay in the loop with those emails (and the sermons).
I’ll never, by the way, be able in a single address to thank all the people I need to thank. The volunteer spirit here is unlike any other church I’ve ever been in. But I do want to quickly call out the Communications Committee, led by Deidre Wynne and Tracy Haffner, for their diligence getting all the events of this year out there in our communities. And also for figuring out where to advertise, because that requires really staying on top of a changing landscape. Thank you guys--you’re all amazing.
And by the way, I’ve picked up a number of volunteers through the years with this Annual Meeting address, so if anything here sparks your interest and you’d like to help, you can be sure, it would be much appreciated.
Even pastoral care looks different now than it used to. I can remember when, more often than not, people needed it to be the priest who paid them a visit or prayed with them or gave the help and support they needed. But for people who didn’t grow up expecting that or even knowing that’s what priests are for, a lay person is as good and better for care and support. We come to church to connect. Most of us don’t live in neighborhoods where people sit on their front porches and invite you in to talk when you’re having a rough day. To have a friend from your church, a Samaritan or lay chaplain, ask if they can drop off a tray of cookies or say a prayer with you, and they’re doing it as a friend and fellow parishioner — who wouldn’t want that?!
I’d like to turn (as the last thing I mention) to the third change I’ve observed: charitable giving, and especially to churches, has dropped dramatically in the last twenty years. We’re all feeling it. Whether we respond to it, will determine how well our churches are doing in fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years.
Logistically, we’ve had to change how we accept money, and pledges. For some people, if an online platform doesn’t work with Apple or Google Pay it’s useless, so we have that. Not everyone dutifully turns in a pledge card when we do our Annual Appeal; they just assume their automatic giving will roll into the next year and we have to make sure we catch that. If you’re pledging online, the cards on the ends of your pews are there so you can visibly demonstrate that you’re participating in the upkeep of this place.
In addition to pledging, we need to explore other sources of revenue--we’ve known that for a while. More space rentals, donations from non-parishioners, estate bequests: that’s a big one. I’m grateful to those who manage our endowment so faithfully, led by Sean Smith. Churches without carefully guarded endowments will struggle more and more as the years go on. We have one--it’s modest for our needs, but without the income it generates we’d be looking at a much bleaker future as a parish. That’s why we talk so much about making sure it’s preserved for future generations.
But beyond all this, we may also need to have some serious discussions in the coming years about the size of our campus, what it takes to maintain it, and whether that’s possible and even desirable moving forward. The people of St. James are generous in light of larger trends. We couldn’t be happier or more thankful for the broad participation in our Annual Appeal. But the pledge base we would need to have to really keep up with our costs, which include staffing, programs, property, and physical plant, would need to be unrealistically large. I’ve read so many rector’s, wardens, and treasurer’s reports from the past fifty years here, and the persistence of these problems, stemming from larger trends we’re not going to be able to fight and that are just progressing as time passes, is striking. Someone who writes about congregations in transition once said, “Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder.” In other words, doing the same thing but more rigorously isn’t going to help if that thing you’re doing no longer meets the needs of the day.
I’ve asked three parishioners of different backgrounds and views here to do research on our campus, focusing on how we can make better use of it. It’s not clear to me at this point whether income on our buildings even fully realized can ever be enough to match the costs of this aging campus and the staff it takes to maintain it. That’s an analysis this group will do, and before them will be the larger (more important) question of whether our campus precisely as it is now is an essential part of who we are and who God’s calling us to be. I don’t know what that discussion will look like but we need to have it. We need to consider all possibilities.
Bishop Matt likes to say to us clergy, if you feel like you’re working harder than you ever have and still you’re struggling to make ends meet: it’s not you. It’s the times we’re in. We’re facing challenges we haven’t before, and these require new ways of thinking. We can lament, or we can accept and face these challenges.
After all, what I’ve noticed in my 24 years as a priest as the church has become less prominent in the culture overall, is that in many ways it’s become more vibrant. (It’s more fun to be here when nobody's telling you you have to.) There are challenges ahead that we didn’t create, but that we’ll respond to with energy and creativity, because every challenge is an opportunity.
The best leaders here over the centuries have led this community through changing times with curiosity, vision, and perspective, and above all, confidence that while the church doesn’t always look or stay the same, God does. God is always with us. That never changes.
I’m gratified to be your rector. I look forward to another year of working together with you to make sure we continue to flourish, and do what we were put here on earth to do: share God’s love with the world.
Respectfully submitted,
The Rev. Astrid Storm