St. Christopher’s Long Term Plan

Over the past year, St. Christopher’s Church (the “Church”) compiled a Long Term Plan (the “Plan”) for the purpose of providing strategic and tactical direction to the parish leadership and staff for the next 3-5 years. This was an effort of both Vestry and non-Vestry members and included input from the Rector and Office Manager. Beginning in the fall of 2021 the vestry engaged in a discernment retreat facilitated by the Listening Hearts Ministry. Then, the Church was assisted in this effort by Holy Cow! Consulting, a church consulting firm headquartered in Ohio. A team from Holy Cow!, led by President Emily Swanson, also conducted a survey of the membership in July 2021 and those results were used to form this Plan. Following the Listening Hearts retreat and the Holy Cow survey, the Vestry commissioned a Visioning committee who helped to bring all the threads of discernment together with prayer and hard work.

Core Values or Goals of the Church’s Plan

The following values will be the guiding principle of how the Church will guide it’s programing and ministries:

To deepen personal connections and community among the parishioners through fellowship, especially fun fellowship.
To continue to provide worship services that are holy experiences and build community among the parishioners. To share the holy experience and sacred presence of God with one another by exploring the many worship services of the Church.
To build and grow spiritual connections among the parishioners and experience spirituality together.
All leadership of the Church should strive to embody joyfulness and genuineness, exhibit the grace of God, experience the grace of God, and enable communication of our spirituality to one another and outsiders.
The Church will be a welcoming, hospitable place that is accepting of all people, visitors and parishioners alike, and consist of people that care for one another.
The Church will strive to be creative and adaptable and be a learning and faith development place.

The Plan must work within the current environment we are living with and be cognizant of the trends in American suburban church life. Many of these trends are not helpful to the Church and its ultimate goals, but the Church must adapt and respond to the environment and trends as best as it can.

Current Environment and Trends

As we build our Long Term Plan, we researched many of the trends that are facing our religious communities today. They include:

Global and National Description

Young parents are generally not interested in church and are often overbooked. Adding church to their weekly lives is difficult.
COVID remains a disease which inhibits the way things have always been done and forces new ways upon us.
Many other organizations, including schools, are booking activities on Sundays, the day where most Church activity takes place.
Children have lots of options for their time.
The American consumer culture of doing more, being more and always being busy can push church or religion off the list.
Most main line denominations are losing members, including Episcopalians.
With our Episcopal theology of inclusion and grace, we are primed to offer a welcoming home for all seeking a Christian community.
The public image of Christianity is dominated by words and images of exclusion, judgment, and an absence of the charity we, as Christians, are called to practice.
Communicating to the parish and externally must increasingly use technology such that people can be virtual and still be part of parish life. However, some experiences such as Eucharist cannot be virtual, and the Church is limited in building community using virtual means.

Local and Regional Description

Children in our area are often exposed to high pressure situations and stress in their lives.
The Hive provides a virtual meeting place for spiritual growth and collaboration that needs to be as connected to the Church as possible.
Despite the enormous wealth in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, there is hidden poverty amongst us.
The Church resides in a very desirable school district with many good private school alternatives. Education, athletics, and socialization keep residents in our area busy seven days a week!
New rental housing is being built in Lower Merion Township that could be a source of new families and members.
The Church’s property is large enough to accommodate a larger parish and there is no desire to expand geographically. Additionally, there is no need to expand our real estate as the virtual options allow easy expansion of some of our offerings.

With the Core Values and Goals in the forefront and cognizant of the local, national and global trends and environment, the Church has settled on three themes of this Plan. Those themes are:

The Church will improve and grow the Church’s Marketing and Communications
The Church will grow its emphasis on Outreach
The Church’s members will grow spiritually

Each one of these themes will be more broadly described below with ideas identified to achieve the themes.

Improve and Grow the Church’s Marketing and Communication

The goal of this theme is to grow the parish membership organically through better name recognition, identifying the Church’s strengths and attractions to an audience of potential members. Members of the Church are defined as those who are active in parish life through worship, fellowship and spiritual development and who support the Church financially, ideally through an annual pledge. A Marketing Committee needs to be formed to lead this effort.

The Church will execute a comprehensive marketing plan, with the active involvement of members and staff, on a variety of marketing platforms which will target individuals and families who are likely to engage in the life of the Church. The annual budget for this activity will be at least $5,000, beginning in 2022. For this to be an effective plan, the Church needs to identify target audiences, which are young and middle-aged families, empty nesters and retirees. An outside marketing firm will assist the Church with this endeavor as that firm can identify which platforms are most likely to attract new church members. For instance, local newspapers are apt to attract retirees and senior citizens while online platforms like Instagram and Facebook are more likely to attract younger families. To date, be Marketing in Trooper, Pennsylvania has been engaged to place online ads and information about the Church.

Grow Outreach

The goal of this theme is to enhance the Church’s Outreach programs. Today, it is mostly fundraising and check writing to various non-profit organizations who are assisting the needy. The Church wants to expand this effort to include hands-on outreach opportunities that can be done in groups to build member connections. Working together to fix a home, for instance, will build stronger connections among the parish, just like staging Azalea Day has done for years. Currently, the Church’s outreach efforts are mostly confined to the Outreach Committee and a few one-off member energies. The Outreach Committee will lead this effort at the Church.

Increase Church Member Spirituality

The survey conducted of the members in July 2021 had the Church ranked very low in overall spirituality. One of the main purposes of church is for the members to maintain and grow their relationship with God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Said another way, the goal is for members to have God become a more important part of their daily lives. The Worship and Discipleship Committee will lead this effort at the Church. The survey also defined our Church as a MAGI church, which tends to emphasize reason and rational thinking. One of the most important jobs of any Christian church, including our Church, is to reinforce beliefs, through worship, education and collective wisdom. (See the video below for a clip from the Annual Meeting detailing MAGI culture as it relates to St. Christopher’s.)

Implementing the Plan at the Church

The Plan will mean nothing if there are no action steps taken to implement the Plan into Church life. While Committees of the Church are responsible for implementing each theme in the Plan, the Vestry, and the Visioning for the Future group must take a leading role in making sure that the Plan is implemented. The main proponent of the Vestry is the person assigned to the Plan, and it will be an agenda item in every Vestry meeting on how we are doing, where we are struggling and what is and isn’t working.

The Plan will be communicated to the parish membership and staff via email and mailed hard copy with a cover letter from the Rector and/or the Long-Term Plan Committee. Those Committees responsible for a theme will incorporate as a regular agenda item the implementation of the Plan. Accountability and measurement of progress is critical but must be weighed against the demands on Committee members and staff on other matters. Some measurement items could be:

Ease of Spirituality conversations among parishioners
Number of annual pledging units
Average Sunday attendance at church services
Number of hits on online marketing pieces
Number of new outreach organizations where the Church members are hands-on
Attendance at Discipleship, classes and workshops
Number of volunteers to lead classes and workshops

The Plan should be the topic of a Sunday sermon and periodically, a progress report should be sent to the membership in the weekly email that is our current form of communication to the parish.

If you would like to learn more about the Long Term Plan and our parish survey that helped to create it, please watch this video from our Annual Meeting.