A letter from the Dean: Our Music MInistry

Dear St. Paul´s family,

Our Pentecost celebration last Sunday was joyful and Spirit-filled. I had the blessing of attending all four services and experiencing the wide variety of gifts and cultures that we enjoy here in San Diego. We heard the Acts reading in many different languages, we experienced a graceful dance, we sang great hymns and enjoyed splendid organ music; at the 1:00 service we celebrated Baptism and First Communion with Mariachi accompaniment; and at the 5:00 service we joined with our Sudanese brothers and sisters in traditional songs in Arabic and Swahili, blending with the more usual Anglican offerings. Truly a Pentecostal celebration!

Our musical tradition goes deep into our history as Anglican Christians, and music speaks to the heart in ways that words alone cannot. People of faith have always sung the praises of God, as we see in the Psalms. Personally, I love to sing and to be in the midst of great music, and it is music that brought me back to the church when I strayed. God speaks to us through music.

Music is central to our worship life, as you know. Our girl and boy choristers are legendary in this city; our organ is one of the best in the country; our Choral Evensong is a gem treasured by many, including clergy of other denominations. A music program as extensive as ours normally has a whole team of staff and volunteers, but at St. Paul´s, somehow Martin Green and Gabriel Arregui produce fantastic results with other committed musicians, both professional and amateur, and minimal financial and support staff resources. I am grateful for those who volunteer significant time to sort sheet music.

Our Friends of Cathedral Music are those members of the community who make special gifts from time to time to support the music ministry. Designated gifts are placed in a special fund which is used for special occasions or, when the need is acute (as it is this year), to support the general operating expenses of the music program. We are developing a brochure to communicate different ways in which you can support our music ministry. A new music endowment is in its infancy, and you can make a contribution towards the cost of commissioning special music for our sesquicentennial celebration next year. Another current effort is the fund to rebuild our Steinway grand piano, so that we can host professional recitals in appropriate style. You may be shocked to learn that it costs up to $25,000 to rebuild a Steinway.

On Sunday June 3 our choirs will present their annual Spring Benefit Concert, featuring the beloved Requiem by Gabriel Fauré, accompanied by professional instrumentalists from around the area. I hope you will come to Evensong and stay for this short concert: I guarantee that your soul will be fed!

Donations in appreciation will be added to the Friends of Cathedral Music fund, which is in need of replenishment, but you can also mark donations for Piano Restoration, Sesquicentennial, or Music Endowment (we need $40,000 more to make the endowment active at $100,000, but our ultimate goal is $1m). You can make a gift either online or via check at any time for any of these funds. Each one will further our mission and enrich the ministry we offer the community.

St. Augustine said that those who sing, pray twice. I give thanks for all the opportunities we have to sing God´s praise, and for all the faithful and generous souls who play, sing, pray, and give in support of this ministry.

The Very Rev Penny Bridges

A letter from the Dean: Communication and sharing

May 15, 2018

Dear St. Paul’s family,

This week we celebrate Pentecost, the day when the church was born. It’s a day to rejoice in the ways the Spirit has gifted each of us for ministry and to be listening for the movement of the Spirit in our life together. I’ve been listening hard these last few weeks, both to the Spirit and to you. My weekly letters are starting to generate conversations of all kinds, and I am grateful for the parishioners who let me know what they are hearing. If we can’t tell each other the truth, we have no business trying to be a faith community. So please keep the feedback coming so that we can respond and ensure that everyone is heard and cared for.

As Chapter, executive staff, and I continue our work to plot a sustainable course forward, people share ideas that don’t have to wait for a strategic plan. Pentecost marks a turning in the middle of the church year. We have completed the cycle of Jesus’ birth, death, resurrection, and ascension: in this second half of the year we focus on being church, on living into the gift of the Spirit as we learn to live as the body of Christ in the world. How do we strengthen that body? Here are some ideas we are working on:

1. Continue these weekly letters and address themes suggested by parishioners. What do you want to know about?


2. Increase interaction between staff clergy and congregation members through a slightly more leisurely exchange of the Peace, and occasional lunch or happy hour gatherings after church on Sundays .


3. Invitations to spend a minute during church sharing something about a ministry you are passionate about. 


4. Summertime socials at parishioner homes on Fridays and Saturdays starting in early June. No agenda, just being together with me and hopefully other staff members, so we can know each other better. Let me know if you would like to host a gathering!

Ours is a faith built on hope: the hope that we and our world can be transformed by the love of God. Our hope is fed by faith, and our faith is strengthened by active participation in our corporate life. I am committed to being fully present for this part of the body of Christ, and my faith tells me that God’s Spirit is moving among us. My hope is that the love we show each other in friendship and care will spill over into the world around us, and that we will all experience the excitement and new life that once overtook another community band of faithful people, when the Holy Spirit swooped down on them and turned the whole world upside down. May God, who enlightened the minds of the disciples by pouring out upon them the Holy Spirit, make you rich with his blessing, that you may abound more and more in that Spirit.










The Very Rev Penny Bridges

A letter from the Dean: Membership

May 9, 2018

Dear St. Paul’s family,

This week’s message is about membership and engagement. It’s evident to all of us that attendance at worship has declined in the last four or five years, from an average Sunday attendance (ASA) in 2015 of 607 to 525 in 2017. It’s not a trend any of us want to see. I am committed to nurturing every member of St. Paul’s in faith, and when people choose not to attend, it means that we are not reaching them in a meaningful way, and that is something we need to address. I am always saddened when a familiar face is absent from the table, and often we don’t know exactly why they are absent.

The measurement of membership in the Episcopal Church is not an exact science. We don’t take individual attendance, we don’t require people to tell us when they leave, or their reasons for leaving, and we don’t require people to record their baptisms with us, although we encourage it. At present the best measure of membership that we have is in the pledge numbers. If someone pledges, I know they regard themselves as members of Christ’s body in this place. If they stop pledging, there can be several reasons including financial hardship or relocation. The numbers of pledges recorded tell a story: from 400 recorded for 2015 to 313 for 2018 (to date). Despite the drop in the number of pledges, we have almost maintained the total amount in dollars pledged, which means that those who pledge are both generous and committed. This being the case, only a small portion of our budget gap can be traced to the drop in pledges (see my previous letters on this topic). However, we are unlikely to correct the deficit unless we address the questions of both attendance and pledge numbers.

Jeff has called together a small group of longtime, trusted parishioners to reach out to those whom we miss, with the hope of gathering data to tell us more about why people have drifted away from St. Paul’s. The literature tells us that younger people tend not to place a high premium on belonging to an institution, so we are also dealing with a changing concept of membership. I know that the many staff and clergy transitions over the last six years have been hard on you all, and life continues to get ever more crowded with multiple worthy options competing for our time and contributions; people simply attend church less frequently than they used to. We have harnessed technology to address the busyness, with live streaming and video recording of principal services, and the development of Faith to Go for families (here’s a link to this week’s offering: http://www.stpaulcathedral.org/connect/cyf/faithtogo1/) .

Since I arrived in 2014 the staff has been engaged in building structures and systems to make our ministry more transparent and sustainable; perhaps this focus has had its effect on our common life and thus on the “glue” that holds us together. We all care deeply about the life and future of St. Paul’s. We are in this together, and I need your help in discerning a way forward. If you have ideas or thoughts, please share them with me. And please come to our next quarterly Community Life Council gathering on Wednesday May 15 at 6:00 pm in the Guild Room, to join in the conversation over a light meal. (Please RSVP to Judy in the cathedral office so we can plan for dinner).

There is good news: the recent Holy Cow survey told us that St. Paul’s is still well within the healthiest and most vibrant quadrant for ministry and mission compared to churches across the spectrum of size and theology. And we have nearly 350 people engaged in active ministry at St. Paul’s, from choir members to Showers workers to forum attendees. That is quite extraordinary! Let’s work together to strengthen our community and to make our cathedral a center of exciting and compelling ministry for all who know us. Thank you for your continued commitment as we seek to Love Christ, Serve Others, and Welcome All.

Your sister in Christ,

The Very Rev Penny Bridges

1st Quarter Statement Letter

Dear Cathedral family,

Alleluia, Christ is risen! As we enter the second quarter of 2018 I give thanks for the dedication and generosity of our cathedral community. As always, our worship throughout Holy Week was both profoundly reflective and gloriously joyful. Many, many people dedicated themselves to preparing the church,  learning the music, creating the service leaflets, offering hospitality, and making sure all was done with beauty and order. Thank you for all the gifts you share with your cathedral family, including your financial donations throughout the first quarter of the year, and especially for your generous response to our Easter appeal, which exceeded expectations!

In a large congregation like St. Paul’s, it is sometimes hard to communicate the complexity of our life together, and misconceptions can arise. I want to take advantage of this letter to clear up some conflicting narratives regarding cathedral finances. First, let me say that our finance staff and volunteers have worked hard over the last four years to transform our financial picture from complete obscurity and disfunction to transparency and clarity. (You can read more details of that history in my recent blog post, dated April 26). We now know what we have, where it came from, and what we need in order to maintain our current level of ministry. And we now know that our expenses consistently exceed our income. Here are some points to summarize the picture.

1. Some very generous, designated donations from a small number of parishioners have financed significant capital improvements including the installation of the audiovisual and sound systems and the floor restoration (which will continue in 2018). This is entirely separate from our operating budget, no pledge moneys have been used, and the funds were specifically given for the purposes above. 

2. We are now in the third year of a three-year plan to subsidize our operating income with moneys from our reserves, to the tune of $220,000 for 2018. Chapter’s hope three years ago was to grow our giving to the point where pledges would take over from these reserves and we would once again have a balanced budget. However, this has not happened, and instead of reducing the subsidy, we had to increase it for 2018. This is obviously not a sustainable strategy.

3. The Cathedral Campus Redevelopment Project will bring us a certain amount of money (the exact amount is not yet clear, because of likely costs during the construction period). However, we know that we will lose approximately $100,000 in rents from Park Chateau and that we will be paying $42,000 per annum in HOA fees. We estimate that this is about half of what the net sale proceeds will yield in annual interest income. The other half will not quite meet the anticipated deficit as described in paragraph 2.

The obvious conclusion from the above is that we need to find ways to expand revenue and shrink expenses. The stark truth is that the only way to make significant savings is to look at reducing staff positions. We have a terrific staff team that is devoted to St. Paul’s, and I want to keep the team intact if at all possible.

St. Paul’s is an exciting, vibrant, innovative congregation with much to offer both parishioners and the wider community. As we prepare for the three-year construction period, we are also preparing for our sesquicentennial year. Both of these prospects offer wonderful opportunities for community-building and celebration. As we continue to modify the Vision for Mission plan to fit current reality, I believe that we can come through the next three years with a stronger, more caring, and financially sustainable parish, ready to engage in the 21st-century ministry that can be accommodated in the new building.

As you see, we have some challenges ahead, but we are in this together, and together we will discern God’s will for this wonderful cathedral, to ensure that St. Paul’s continues to Love Christ, Serve Others, and Welcome All.

Your sister in Christ,

The Very Rev. Penny Bridges, Dean

A letter from the Dean: Budget

Dear people of St. Paul’s,

If you heard the sermons the last two Sundays, you’ve heard both Jeff and me talk about the significant gap between income and expenses in our operating budget, to the tune of about $200,000 in 2018. A number of people have said that they don’t understand where this came from: we seemed to be doing fine, so this must be a recent and sudden development. In this letter and in several more to come I want to share with you how we got here and some of the factors in play as we think and pray about where God is calling us to in the future.

First, let me state clearly that the budget deficit is not a new phenomenon. During the interim between deans, in 2013, Chapter became aware that for some time the cathedral accounts had been less than accurate. Gifts went into the wrong funds, people weren’t thanked appropriately, the distinction between operating and special funds wasn’t clear, and the policies governing the use of gifts were unclear or no longer adhered to, because of turnover in staff and leadership.

When I arrived in early 2014 the effort was already underway to reform our accounts and clean up the books. Erin Sacco-Pineda resigned her Chapter position to take the leadership on this project, along with our volunteer treasurer. It was a long process of discovery, and it took until 2017 to get to a point where we could have a clean audit of the 2016 books and have a clear sense of our resources. Before that, in 2015, we had developed the Vision for Mission strategic plan and Chapter embarked on a three-year plan to invest significant amounts from our reserves in the operating budget in order to launch some of the V4M initiatives. However, as the financial picture cleared, we realized that the investment was actually needed to support existing ministries and balance the budget. We are now in the third year of that plan.

We based the plan in part on two expectations: we hoped to grow the number of people pledging and the total amount pledged by 6% each of the three years; and we expected to close on the sale of the Olive building site by the middle of 2017, releasing funds for investment which would start yielding interest in 2018. While we have lost some pledging members, for a variety of reasons (which I will discuss in a later letter), when it comes to the total amount pledged, we have actually stayed almost level, thanks to the generosity of faithful parishioners, with a total loss of only about $40,000. The real estate deal timeline has slipped, as these things do, and we now expect to close in early 2019. So you can see that both expectations have not come to pass within the three-year timeframe. The details of the development deal are another topic which I will address in a future letter, but for now, please know that the net income from the sale proceeds will not fill the deficit but only postpone the inevitable.

The bottom line is that the deficit has been a longstanding problem and that we cannot continue indefinitely to fill the gap from our reserves, which are finite. We have worked on cutting non-staff expenses over the last three years, reducing bulletin volume, doing without additional instruments on special occasions, trimming hospitality costs, and trying to manage with outdated computer equipment (which ultimately failed catastrophically in the summer of 2017).

Since this deficit is of such long standing, why should we address it now? Why not continue supplementing our income from our reserves? From a practical standpoint, the more we invade the capital of our reserves, the less income we will draw from them, putting us in a downward spiral. From the spiritual standpoint, we have been entrusted with this treasure by those who came before us and we are called to exercise good stewardship in order to honor their generosity and carry out their desire to see St. Paul’s continue its ministry indefinitely. We could wait until we have used up all our funds and we are facing imminent closure, but in view of what we now know and what we see in the world around us, that would be unconscionably irresponsible. So we must find a way to repair the structural deficit even as we pivot to meet the challenges posed by a post-Christian world where church is seen largely as an institution that excludes and judges and where spiritual growth is regarded as a private and individual pursuit.

We are well positioned to make that pivot, with our strong liturgy and wonderful music, our ministries of service and outreach, and a facility and location without parallel; and most of all, the congregation of faithful, thoughtful, and loving people who have made the commitment to Love Christ, Serve Others, and Welcome All, come what may. Thanks be to God!  

The Very Rev. Penny Bridges

Creating Change

Dear ones,

I so appreciated all the feedback from my sermon last Sunday, which you can find on video here and on the blog here. It was great to have so many folks express interest after the service in getting involved, and we even had some new pledges! Thank you.

I do want to assure you that I was not proposing any specific path forward. Rumors and speculation are natural in times of change. Some believe that I intended that we cut the music program at the cathedral or add guitars and rock bands. Let me assure you that was not in my sermon, my intent, or on my mind! The music program and the liturgy are important parts of our cathedral life and I understand their value in our common life.

I am really writing today because change is hard. We do not have any path before us that allows for the status quo. The budget does not allow for things to just remain the same and Dean Penny is going to address that in the weeks to come. Dean Penny is being transparent about the need for some change as she develops a plan to address it so that we can participate in that as a community. As we move into that conversation, I hope we will consider a few of these questions: To what extent are we called to please/satisfy our own spiritual needs? To what extent are we called to offer something to the world around us? Must those two things be mutually exclusive? Are there changes we can make that might offer more of both?

So as we discern what to do about the change that is upon us, my hope is that we do it with grace and courage. St Paul, our patron, learned early on that the challenge of Christian community is not figuring out what to do. It is figuring out how to do it together.

That does not mean we all have to agree on everything. In fact, I believe we are better off when we have a diversity of opinions and are able to listen to each other well instead of individually stating opinions as if ours were the only way. So I hope that the markers of this important transitional time for us as we discern our path will be marked by the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal 5:22-23). Those charisms are what help change the world from an empire of fear to a kingdom of love, and what we committed to in our baptism.

There is a lot of information to deliver, so stay tuned. How we engage with each other in Christian community around it is up to you.

Blessings,

The Rev. Canon Jeff Martinhauk

State of the Cathedral 2017

At the forum on Sunday, Dean Penny led us through a powerpoint presentation on the state of the Cathedral. Here's the outline! 

Good News:

• CAT Survey says we are healthy and spiritually vital
• Financial Accounts are in excellent shape
• Revenue and Expenses YTD in line with budget
• Recognized in the Community
• Outreach is growing
• Membership tracking and Communication
• Vision for Mission is progressing
• CCRP is moving forward
• Renovated Chapel
• Floor Project
• Live Streaming and Videos on demand
• A Great Staff Team
• A busy summer!

Vision for mission

• Created in 2015
• Chapter received in early 2016
• Revised summer 2017
• Six goal areas
• Comprehensive objectives and tasks
• Changing Lives!

Cathedral for the city

• A Voice for Justice established: public conversations
• Public visibility enhanced by communications strategy

Community

• Leadership development for Misa members
• Bicultural Latino priest coming on staff
• Realm software facilitates pastoral care and incorporation

Christian formation

• Faith2Go for families
• Small group culture
• Multi-dimensional formation opportunities

Music and Arts

• Audio-visual system allows live-streaming and recording

Outreach and Justice

• Showers and Shelter for our homeless neighbors
• Advocacy through public events and the CPPN

Worship

• Live streaming expands congregation digitally
• Dinner Church idea in development

Revised Edition at stpaulcathedral.org/who-we-are/our-mission

Cathedral Campus Redevelopment Plan (CCRP)

• Forum October 8
• Apartments not condos
• Affordable housing included
• LEED certified
• Cathedral office/program space much expanded
• Parking doubled
• Community Space
• Design submitted to city
• Architect working with us
• Move into space underneath Great Hall
• Parking arrangements
• Cost-benefit analysis

Timeline

• Fall 2018: Close; construction begins
• Late 2020: Move into new building
• 2021: Renovations to original buildings:
• Accessibility
• Music Ministry
• Outreach Center
• Income to break even

What’s next?

• Cultivate Community
• Small groups: join one!
• Find your ministry
• Live and give fiercely and fearlessly!