Finishing the Church: Progress Report

We are blessed to be back in our church, again whole with our enlivening faith environment. It has taken tremendous effort to renew our church and our Parish Family.  We are now nearing the completion of our church and the financial obligation that came along with this work.  So, we have developed: Finish the Church, our final push of the Capital Campaign, to complete the transformation of the entire campus and ensure our success for the next 30 years. While we have come far already, we will all need to work together to complete our vision of the new Saint John the Evangelist Catholic Church.  Over the next few weeks, we want to give you an opportunity to learn where we stand, how we got here, and what we need to do as a Parish Family to Finish the Church together. 

Each of us have a responsibility to our Parish Family.  We have been blessed with an abundance of support and encouragement for all the work it has taken to open our church back up after an entire year of construction and renovation.  The results speak for themselves.  You have seen the transformation for yourselves.  The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and effusive.  I hope you feel at home and faithfully engaged no matter where in the church you are.  Our Parish staff and clergy thank you for your patience as we continue to Finish the Church (even if that means tuning the Air Conditioning properly for Daily Mass).

The effort has not only been within the church building.  Our Finance Council has been assisting us with finalizing all the complex facets of this project from a financial perspective.  We have been meeting with our Self-Insurance adjusters literally since the day after Hurricane Irma through to this past week.  We have attempted to ensure every item and claim is assessed and awarded to our Parish Family.  That has included not only the major repairs to the church roof and the soaked pews, but all the way to restitution for duplicating Masses for all of last season, with the double cost of priests, musicians, and even overtime for our Facilities Staff.  I used to joke that we were the only church in the area that literally had Jesus (the name of one of our Facilities Staff Members) tearing down the Temple and rebuilding it every 3 days.  We have now completed that process as well.  While we have been awarded a vast majority of the funds anticipated in those claims, there are still some components that the insurance provider did not allow.  That has made our final tally on the Diocesan loan larger than we anticipated, but not outrageously so.

We have finally all agreed to these numbers, which illustrate the total effort to repair and renew the entire campus of Saint John, at over $16.4 million dollars.  By now, most of you reading this have seen the transformation of our campus for yourselves. If you were here during last Season, you may recall that we were able to accommodate our Parish Family in multiple locations across the buildings while we completed the church you are sitting in now. In doing so, you may have been introduced to rooms you may have not seen before, like our Ballroom, or the new Gym. We hope you enjoy those locations for our Parish activities and events going forward, like our CYO Basketball, concerts, dances, and so much more.

As we have been discussing, this all played out for us during a Capital Campaign and a Hurricane. These challenges also allowed us to accomplish something we had never dreamed: a far deeper transformation of Saint John the Evangelist. Over 85% of our campus has undergone massive repairs and renewal in the past 2 years. This has been expansive and extensive, with every building and room receiving some renovation effort. The hurricane damage exposed the opportunity to address added renovations, previously planned for the future, in a very cost-effective way. In fact, the Parish Family Leadership took this opportunity to complete a major portion of our 5-Year Capital Plan all within this span, and much more, bringing the entire renovation to over $16.4 million.

All of this effort, however, did require additional investments that were over and above the $11 million gathered in our Capital Campaign. While the insurance did defray a component of this cost, the overall $16.4 million in construction on our campus in the last 2 years has left us with about $2 million left to fund. The Diocese has graciously assisted us in this effort and has allowed us to fund-raise without impacting our CFA Assessment for the remainder of this shortfall. It is now up to us again, as we have done in the past, to rally together to Finish the Church.

The outpouring of support so far for this final leg of our campaign has already provided over $685,000!  That is tremendous, and has already allowed us to pay down this loan to just over $1.3 million in the span of less than 6 months.  We thank all of you who have already given so generously to help us Finish the Church.  If you have not yet given, we ask that you prayerfully consider a gift.  Any amount would be helpful.  Father Tom communicated that if every family of our Parish gave $456, we would complete the loan.  That can be a difficult commitment for many of our Parish Family, and for others, it is not much at all.  Please contact Father Tom or JP Boucher, the Business Manager, for more details or if you have any questions at all.

God Bless You and Our Parish Family!