This past spring, I took part in The Episcopal Church Trajectory Study, a set of surveys exploring what Episcopal congregations are doing around worship, welcome, formation, and leadership. The goal was to understand why, since the pandemic, some churches have grown while others have struggled.
The preliminary findings are striking. What seems to matter most isn't worship style or theology or programming for children and adults. It’s relationship: people feeling welcomed and seen, people sharing themselves and their stories with one another. In other words, it’s what the early church was all about, what Jesus did, everything he told the disciples to do in order to make God’s love real and tangible in the world. Go figure.
And all these things—welcoming, seeing, sharing— are things we do together. No one person can create a flourishing congregation alone. It takes all of us, together, much like the loaves and fishes story Rev. Anne Howard preached about this summer , where generosity shared in service of others becomes more than enough.
This time of year marks the beginning of Trinity’s Annual Giving season, a time when we ask parishioners to make a financial pledge to the church to fund the 2027 Operating budget. But, your pledge isn’t simply about the money needed to keep the lights on and staff paid. Our pledge to share what we have—our bits of bread and fish—is one of the ways we draw together as a body, as Christ’s body, and participate in the relationships that make all our ministries possible. Pledging is a statement of hope, a mark of trust in abundance over scarcity…that despite there seeming to be only a mere 5 loaves and 2 fish, there will be more than enough to go around, and all will be fed.
I invite you to take home a pledge packet, review the enclosed materials, and consider what financial commitment you can make for your 2027 pledge in support of, and with gratitude for, this community that provides so many opportunities to make God’s abundant love real and tangible in our own lives and in the world.
With gratitude for all of you—all of us—doing what we do together.
-The Rev. Elizabeth Molitors, Rector