I hope everybody had a nice Easter.  My family took up a whole bench at church on Easter Sunday – my aunt from North Carolina was visiting me and my sister and her family also joined us!  My aunt has joined an Episcopal church where she lives in Greensboro, NC, and she was telling me that one of the reasons she picked an Episcopal church is because of the welcome feeling she got whenever she attended Mediator over the years during the holidays or for my children's baptisms.

Just before Easter, Lisa H. and I finished leading our Lenten study group.  Many of our group members grew up with different religious backgrounds; our diverse backgrounds came up in many of our discussions about our beliefs and really made our sessions interesting.

As you all know, the parish workshop originally scheduled for the end of April has been postponed.  We discussed it at length at our Warden's meeting and we felt that it had not been publicized enough nor the format fleshed out enough for the Vestry to go out and try to recruit church members to attend.  Rather than set ourselves up for failure and/or have a small turnout, we thought it best to wait until the Fall to hold the workshop.  Before that point we need to have a definite format that can be communicated to the parish and have lots of “advertising” and enthusiasm built up about the event.  A commission chair also told me that she would like to be more included in the planning. 

Also discussed at the Warden's meeting was Mediator's legacy policy.  Tim Smith and I will be revising our current policy to add more flexibility into how undesignated money left to the church can be used. 

Finally, last week Lisa H. and I watched a seminar hosted by Moravian College titled Christian Community and Practice for a New Generation led by Carol Howard Merritt, a pastor at Western Presbyterian Church, an intergenerational congregation in Washington, D.C. and the author of several books.  This is a description of the seminar:  what are the particular economic, social, and spiritual challenges faced by adults in their 20s and 30s, who are widely thought of as post/un-Christian (and how has our society shifted since that relatively recent time when congregational life flourished in our country)? As we think about the next twenty years, how can we create innovative church cultures that will effectively engage the vision and energy of this age cohort?  We will explore these questions as we imagine what responsive spiritual communities might look like in the years to come. 

Lisa and I plan to meet to go over our notes and thoughts about the seminar and complete a summary of the event that we can share with the Vestry. 

As we think about our workshop in the Fall and where we want to take our parish in the future, I think it is important to keep the younger generation and their needs in mind.

Nora Esquieres, Senior Warden