Back in the saddle

So back to work after the holidays. I decided ahead of time that today would be a paperwork day and what better thing to do than start filling out the parochial report, which means counting up all the services, attendance figures and calculating ASA. Doing so here is quite a bit different than at my previous cure because here there is daily morning prayer (Monday-Saturday) so those figures are entered twice a year from a separate book, and there is daily hospital visitation and those figures are in a different book, and then there have been several hands at the main service register because of it being an interim year so the whole thing is a mess.

The ASA is down from 196 in 2002 to 148 in 2008. It is down 28 from last year. I will attribute the decrease to the rector leaving in early January and the parish going through a transition. I can only hope that somehow people might return though there are at least six households that will not return because of my being called to the church. Ay, such is life, ¿no? On the other hand, there have been maybe two or three newcomers, so we will see. I state these figures as reality, not as a complaint. It is how it is.

Then it was doing a bunch of phone calls, talking with the administrator, writing my report for the annual report, figuring out the agenda for annual meeting, vestry this week and all that other sort of paperwork.

Getting through those piles is a great accomplishment for a day when I am not up to visiting people. I still can say I accomplished something.

Best, there was heat in the office area of the building. Yesterday the church furnace (one of three in the entire joint) quit for the third time this week. The sexton called me at 7.10 to say the alarm/phone gizmo had dialed him at 6.40 so he'd gone over to check on it. The furnace clearly quit again during the 8.00 and sort of was on for the 10.00 but it was a bit nippy in there (52º).

Ah, the shades of my previous parish. The furnace demons have followed me, oh joy.

However, the loss of heat was great for the Religion and Ethics Weekly film crew who were there to record our solemn procession out of the church proper to the parish house where we will be worshipping for the rest of the winter. People were still all bundled up as they did the usual Episcopalian stand up, sit down, kneel down, stand up routine. Some people squawked at the invasion of video camera with audio man holding his mic that looks like a big Fuller brush but someday, hopefully, we will be in a program on churches saving money by moving into smaller worship spaces and what they do (i.e., outreach and mission) with the money saved.

All in a day or two....