Dear People of St. James’,
If you are new to the Episcopal Church, you may very well be wondering: What is this Annual Parish Meeting thing, and why should I bother showing up?
One of the things I love about the Episcopal Church is that we stop everything that we are doing every so often and take counsel together. We do this in big and small ways. Every three years, we do this in a big way in that giant family reunion/revival/mini-legislative session known as General Convention. Thanks to some aggressively friendly and insistent volunteer recruitment when Gen Con was in Austin in 2018, many of you saw this work in action. On a yearly basis, we do this in a big way at that extended business meeting/dinner party that we call Diocesan Council. In Texas, our Council, made up of lay and clergy representatives, is nearly as large as The Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies, but, as you know, everything is bigger in Texas. We are not simply beholden to the whims and wants of our own diocesan bishops, because the bishops across our multinational church take counsel together through the House of Bishops. The Lambeth Meeting gathers bishops from all over the global Anglican Communion every 10 years or so. The Anglican Consultative Council is like a global House of Deputies, including the voices of lay people and clergy alike. The Primates Meetings gather the head of each regional province in the church for mutual counsel and discernment.
Each of these gatherings offers us an opportunity to speak together with one voice about those things that are foundational to our faith and unity and to navigate sometimes profound and lasting differences in worldview, identity, and in our sense of God’s call in our particular time and place. At St. James’, we take counsel together through our monthly Vestry meetings and in the course of other committee work, but we also stop everything to come together for our Annual Parish Meeting, where we have the opportunity to look at the big picture of our life together so that we can forge a path forward, listening to one another and to the Spirit in our midst.
This year, be ready to receive an extra-robust, English-Spanish packet with reports in the e-news prior to the Annual Parish Meeting on the January 26. We plan to conduct the 10:30 am service in record time in order to get you snacks, headsets for interpretation as needed, and to get everyone into the pews for the meeting. We are still finalizing the Vestry and Diocesan Council slate and the 2025 Budget, but we will publish both well in advance of the meeting. If you have not yet made a pledge for 2025, but you would like for your pledge to be counted as we build our 2025 Budget, click here for more information. January 19 is the hard deadline for countable 2025 pledges (pledges that we will use to build a balanced budget).
Mark your calendars!
Rev. Eileen
