Taking measure of Parkview

Dear Friends,

Over the years in this column I have approached the life of our congregation from a variety of angles: from culture to generations to community outreach to energy or the lack of it. But what if serving a congregation like ours was just like solving a series of math problems? For instance, we have 52 or so Sundays a year and eight sound system operators. Do the math. We have 52 Sundays and 31coffee hour volunteers who serve in teams of three. We have 52 Sundays and nine chairpersons. Do the math. We have 52 Sundays and 12 parking attendants. Do the math. We have 52 Sundays and 3 regular pianists and 3 substitutes. Do the math.

In order to do a congregational meeting we have to have one third of our members present to have a quorum. Last year we declared our membership at 118, which would mean we would have to have almost 40 actual members in attendance for the meeting. That is hard to do with a total attendance of 40-70 every Sunday. So we had to take a hard look at active membership, and as a result we lowered our membership this year to 84. All of this is division math. Some of our losses came from people who passed away in the last years, leading to subtraction in numbers. But in just the last month we increased our membership by 5. I am doing the math. And that’s addition.

The Presbyterian women will be talking about coffee hour and how to make the numbers add up. For instance, should we go down from three to two coffee hour people, limit what we serve, and thereby have the coffee hour servers coming three times a year rather than five? Can we open parking attendant to every member? It has a shorter time commitment now. In spite of the math problems we run into, we have some really impressive numbers to be proud of. One shining example is the number of people Eddie’s Crew and the congregation serve for our fundraisers, which add up to 1500+ meals. We have a large impact in light of our relatively small membership. Through our residency program, we multiply the contact with people in the

community, a little more very day. (Read “Mission Insite Study” on page 3 to learn a bit about how we are looking at our numbers in new and exciting ways.)

Although we have become a little leaner because of our generational change, there is a lot of positive and healthy energy. Let us be grateful for that. I am grateful for all of you. Please help us add to volunteer numbers so that we multiply our mission impact. Please think of something new you could give your time for.

May God bless our ministry. See you in church. Aart