Vestry News and Review: February 2023
February was an eventful month for the Vestry. It started with our Annual Meeting on the 5th, where the parish elected three new members (Anthony Amato, Susan Stone and Tom Young) and one continuing member (Beth Capell, who had finished off a one-year term last year).
The following weekend was our planning retreat, held among the redwoods at St. Dorothy’s Rest, over by the coast. We talked about plotting a course over the next few years that will help us reconnect with each other, revitalize our ministries and put us on a solid financial footing as we continue to emerge from the pandemic. Our current budget includes a deficit, which we’re hoping to minimize, but since deficit spending isn’t sustainable in the long run, we need to work on how to eliminate that deficit. In the coming months, we’ll be asking for your input on several choices that will help define the path forward. This will be done through town hall meetings and surveys of parish members, all starting in the next couple of months. We’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come.
We held our regular monthly meeting on the 27th and we talked about another question: “Is twelve members the best size for our Vestry?”. A twelve-member Vestry dates back to the beginnings of the Parish, but in recent years, much of the coordination among our programs is under the supervision of the Ministry Council, which was created just before Pamela arrived here. That coordination had previously been handled by a large array of volunteers, overseen by Vestry members, who no longer have that responsibility.
The upshot of this is that we may not need a full twelve-member Vestry, and so we’ve written an amended set of bylaws that allow more flexibility in the size of the Vestry, which if adopted would allow as few as nine members on the Vestry but as many as twelve (plus the Rector in both cases). The process for amending the bylaws is that we need to present the proposed changes to the Office of the Bishop, a month in advance of a planned Vestry vote. We haven’t yet done this, but we’re apt to do that within the next month or so. Now, I want to be clear that this won’t automatically reduce the number of members on the Vestry, but it will allow the Vestry to adjust the number of members (most likely by outgoing members whose terms have ended by a smaller number of incoming members) if circumstances arise where it’s beneficial to do so.
Having “outed” this plan to the congregation, I’d also like to say that this bylaw change is probably one of the least important things we have been doing, relative to what needs to be done to rebuild and grow the strong sense of community and mission we have at St. Martin’s. But it’s better to have this added flexibility while we’re planning for the years to come. There will be more to come in the months ahead on rebuilding and growing the sense of community and mission, from pastoral care to social justice to coffee hour to care for God’s creation—and the budget to do all that.
Neil Willits
Co-Senior Warden
