October 30, 2025
Hello everyone,
Welcome to our first monthly update from your Senior Warden. These updates will be published monthly when we do not hold a quarterly Town Hall meeting. Last month we held our first Town Hall with our new format of “Inspired Conversations”, and I’ve attached the link HERE if you haven’t yet had the chance to see it. The Town Hall format is designed to last 90 minutes, with 45 minutes sharing current information with you from vestry and finance, and the remaining time for anyone to ask questions. I’ve received positive feedback from our first meeting with this format.
Recently, you received a Stewardship letter from me about considering increasing your yearly pledge amount. In it, I outlined several challenges that we face as a parish, the most challenging of which is facing our $150,000. deficit in the coming year. As of Tuesday, 33 pledge cards have been returned, with 6 new pledgers and 23 pledgers who substantially increased their pledge over last year. Thank you so much for responding so generously! This is very encouraging and proves to me once again that when faced with a difficult challenge, that our great people respond positively. I want to thank each of you who pledged so far this year, and if you have not been in the habit of pledging, please prayerfully consider starting this year as it enables us to plan better for the future. If you have not yet completed your pledge card, please do so as soon as you can, and you can find one HERE.
This week on Tuesday, October 27, our vestry met and conducted our monthly business. We adopted 2 new policies on Coffee Hour guidelines which you can find HERE; and our Gift Acceptance Policy which you can find HERE. Our Vestry search team is also actively working on identifying and screening potential candidates for the new year which is now right around the corner. I want to especially thank my team members, Bruce Rector and AJ Van Etten for helping me on this task as we get ready for a very exciting and challenging year ahead.
At our meeting, we shared the great work that our Outreach teams continue to be able to do because of you, including, but not limited to:
- The Jubilee Center, supported by the food gifts that you bring to church on Sundays. We want to encourage you to continue (or to begin) support of this ministry as we have been informed by James Sullivan, who runs Jubilee, that it has recently lost access to FEMA funding, which is where 90% of the food distributed by Jubilee came from. The need for food is only increasing at a very difficult time for so many in need.
- Your support also continues with providing books and supplies for needy children through our partnership with Niños Creadores de Historia, which is run by Deacon Phyllis Manoogian in Guatemala.
- If you have questions on supporting any of our outreach teams, please contact Gregg Geenty Prudhomme at outreach-team@allsaintsfl.org.
We also have teams hard at work on the ministries supporting us in our own parish:
- All Saints Episcopal Church Youth Education Team met to review progress with how the Sunday School program is going and is now looking ahead to include adding a teen group and a baby nursery. If you’d like to lend a hand with donating nursery supplies, they would appreciate your help, please contact Cookie Proveaux at youthcommittee@allsaintsfl.org.
- The stewardship team recently introduced a new creative way to revitalize our rector search with an exciting video that you can view HERE (note: this will open in your media player. Please share it on your social media to help expand the search!
- The Seniors Team recently had a successful Seniors Luncheon with Bishop Greg as the guest speaker. Watch the bulletins and join us for the next one!
- The Welcome and Integration team continues work on finding new ways to attract new visitors to All Saints and especially coming up with creative ideas on how to partner and integrate new people more quickly into our church community. This is a key ministry that builds upon the success that our own Jeanann Testyon began and directly ties to our goal of increasing our membership. You will be seeing a lot happening over the next few years from this exciting team. Watch upcoming bulletins for information on their next meeting date and if you have an interest, please join a zoom meeting with this lively bunch of great people! You may even make some new friends. If you have interest in learning more, please reach out to Mary Fertig or Heather Glenn at welcome-ministry@allsaintsfl.org.
Most of our meeting time was spent as we considered each of the challenges that I outlined in my stewardship letter. We discussed how we can work on these challenges and gathered a long list of ideas that we will now consider as we move forward. As a reminder, these are the challenges we reviewed, along with some things we discussed.
- We need to increase our operating income to be a thriving, growing church. This includes not only sharing information with our existing membership but finding new ways on how we can better engage our visitors and attract potential new members. We also discussed addressing our expenses. Several, including myself, talked about experiences in working with companies in which cuts were made while losing focus on its goals, which while it led to reduced expenses, it hurt the companies in the long run. We all agreed that we want our church to grow and thrive. If potential cuts will prevent us from meeting any of our goals, that is not sustainable and will take us in a downward path. We will not support us going in a direction that will harm us or our church. We will figure it out.
- We need to increase our membership, including diversity of people in all dimensions as commonly understood. This includes but is not limited to differences of age, ethnicity, gender, mental and physical abilities, race, and sexual orientation. Our strength has always been in our diversity, and we will find new ways to do even better. We want to truly be a place of welcome for all of God’s people who come to All Saints.
- We will focus on improving our communications with each other, including new ways that we may have not previously considered. In addition to our new quarterly town hall format “Inspired Conversations”, and this monthly newsletter, “Faithful Updates from your Senior Warden”, agreed that we will continue to explore how to do more as we move forward.
As previously mentioned, we are also now working on the assessment phase of our current in house systems as we determine what we need to bring us to a higher level of efficiency in our office and position us to grow as an organization. I want to especially thank Paul Odom and Rich Clarke for assisting me with this task. All of us have experience in companies in analyzing and implementing new software systems and understand how powerful they can be to help us meet the goals we’ve outlined. I also gratefully thank Michael Lee and Lou Strennen as they spend time with us to better understand our current processes and capture their suggestions on what we can do better. I also thank all of you who have reached out with suggestions and welcome additional helpers on this project before we move on to selecting what will best help us, not only now, but in the future.
As the vestry now continues to work on these 3 challenges that we plan to adopt as our goals, I want to also invite you to share your ideas on what we should consider as we move forward. Your feedback is crucial as I want to make sure that we consider everything possible. As we discussed at vestry, there are no bad ideas! Even if you think it’s way out there, or impossible to do, if you think of it, please let me know! Please send your suggestions on what you would do to address these 3 challenges to me at srwarden@allsaintsfl.org.
I will then consolidate the ideas submitted and they will remain confidential, I will not share your names. We will then further consolidate your ideas with what we have already compiled from vestry. As soon as we can, we will then share it with you as we determine how to narrow it down to best action what we can do over the coming year to work toward achieving these 3 goals.
As we all continue to build God’s kingdom together, it is my pleasure to serve as your Senior Warden, and I appreciate all that you do for All Saints. Please reach out to me anytime if you have any questions.
Yours together in our faith,
Richard J. Markiewicz
Senior Warden
All Saints Episcopal Church