Parish Committee

Greetings from Parish Committee!   After much deep consideration by the Opening Up Committee and the Parish Committee the decision was made to expand in-person capacity and lighten the protocols at the church starting on April 3rd. Please see the below information and community commitment the committees confirmed: In the spirit of community, upon entering communal space and gatherings at our church, we ask everyone to take a moment of care and concern for the larger community and please chose...

Greetings from the Parish Committee! Our month started with the Opening Up committee meeting on February 1st. It was an exciting meeting as the group reviewed the positive trends in high vaccination rates and lower covid numbers. Beginning in-person and multiplatform services is a great joy! We hope to continue to expand in-person capacity as spring approaches. With all this good news Religious Education is ramping up! As Lauren our DRE talked about in last week’s Arbella article RE is holding...

Greetings from Parish Committee! Once again it’s been an active month. The results of the multi-platform worship survey are in. We had 28 responses.  Thank you to those who responded. The results have been compiled into 15 pages of charts, graphs and 9 pages of reflective comments, helpful suggestions and ideas! Once we have finished organizing the results, we will share them with committees and staff and will be putting a link in the next Arbella for the congregation. Overall, people feel the...

Greetings from Parish Committee!   What a busy time it has been for all. The month began with Parish Committee coordinating a meeting to discuss the Multi-Platform services and our in-person protocols with a wider scope of people. The meeting included three Parish Comm members, the Opening Up group, 3 staff and committee representatives from Worship, RE, Personnel and Safe Congregations. The group had an in-depth discussion focused on clarifying the in-person attendance protocols. We also...

Greetings and Gratitude! Our church continues to thrive in this church year. We now have a new way to look at the total numbers of people attending our Sunday services. When you log into zoom on a Sunday morning, you may see 47 screens logged in as you did last week, a number of these are 2 (or more) attendees. Then we add the number of members who are live at the service plus our Choir members. This past Sunday, we reached over 90 adults before adding the number of youths enjoying the Sunday...

Greetings from Parish Committee, We are on our way in a new church year. In this time of change, there has been a flurry of important items and questions to attend to as we try to find a way to recover from the pandemic and begin to gather again in a safe way that includes all.  We hope we have answered some of your questions or created a path to explore the issues at hand and resolve them in way that is mutually satisfying to all. We deeply appreciate all the work the church members and...

As Rev Sophia says at the beginning of our services, “Welcome Welcome Welcome” to our new minister and the new church year! It is wonderful we have now begun this new path together.

Greetings from the Parish Committee! Our month began with the congregational meeting unanimously voting to call Reverend Sophia as our next settled minister! Thank you again to the Search Committee for the time and effort you gave to the search process as well as organizing the Candidating week. As the next step in preparation to support our new minister, the Committee on Ministry has been formed. Judy Kamm will be the representative from the Search Committee and Norah Mulvaney-Day will...

Greetings from the Parish Committee! What an exciting, gratitude-filled month it is has been! As our church year came to an end, the annual meeting had a full agenda with productive zoom dialog culminating in approving updates to our by-laws, approving Article 5 of the warrant “Vote on expenditure of funds for infrastructure to enable The First Parish of Watertown to provide hybrid services,” and our ‘21-‘22 budget. Many thanks to our treasurer, Matt Calabro and the Finance Committee for all...