10/23/25

Dear Friends,

I wanted to give an update on the 16 action items for our Children & Youth Faith Formation ministry named during our Congregational meeting on September 14th.

The top vote is for a Youth Ministry staff person. Church of the Holy Spirit is still completing the final step of building the addition to the church—that is managing the mortgage. We pay $4,600 monthly, which is $55,200 annually. This is currently paid by the remainder of the capital campaign funds, which will be used up in the next year or so. We will need to work on another funding source to continue these payments. (If you have a spare $800,000 you could share with COHS, that would bring this major project to a close. 😊)

We agree we need a staff person that can provide oversight to the youth program now. Therefore, we have been thinking through ways we might restructure time of our current staff to provide this needed oversight. Those ideas are not developed enough to announce now. We want you to know now that we have heard how important the C&YFF ministry is to you and your concerns about the oversight needed. We are working on how we can address this.

The second top vote is gathering data from families before putting resources into a big change, so we prevent burnout and are strategic. We also agree this is a necessary step before any major changes are made. When we have a clear vision of staff then we will review the ideal curriculum and age range for the classes. With this information we will then meet with the parents and share our vision.

The next fourteen action items didn’t have a clear priority. We are sending out a survey and asking you to select your top three from the fourteen. The results of the survey will help to give the vestry a path to follow in discussing them. The list of suggestions that were on each table as well as suggestions made by email or in-person have been collected. These will be scanned and made electronically assessable to the vestry. We would appreciate if you would fill out the survey by 10/31/25.

In the meantime, we have a plan to address any class that has only one or two children to include them in the story time or group discussion of the next age-appropriate class so the time is spent productively and in community.

Blessings and Love, DJ