Dear saints,

Last Sunday, we took our proverbial look under the hood at the current state of our buildings and grounds as well as a long-term 30-year forecast of our financial life as a church. If you were not able to be there, please do catch up on the forum here. I am especially grateful for the excellent presentations made by our Director of Operations and Finance, Nancy Dodson, and our chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee, Danny Johnson.

For those of you who like to read rather than listen, I’ll try to capture here the learning this forum offers up for our discernment.

Our buildings and grounds needs for the next decade have been determined via a comprehensive survey carried out by Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates in 2019, which has since been updated by the architectural firm we have been working with, Houser Walker, who themselves utilized assessments made by construction companies and engineers over the past couple of years.

As you might expect, the state of our buildings is not uniform across the church campus. The best news on that front is that our beloved church and chapel is in good shape. You may remember the major investment we made to restore our stained glass windows and recently we replaced an aging boiler. Over the next decade, we anticipate that a small number of capital investments will need to be made to keep things in good order. The same holds true for the parish house, which of course saw a wonderful upgrade through the last capital campaign of 2013. 

Other parts of the campus are more complicated. The Egleston building, which houses most of our staff offices, the music suite and our parish library, has sustained significant structural damage, so much so that we will have to determine if it is better stewardship to do extensive renovations or rebuild Egleston altogether, with the potential of retaining the West Peachtree facade while rebuilding what lies behind it. We recognize that Egleston is a beloved space and we would want to listen carefully to one another as we weigh those options. 

The Pritchett Center has longstanding challenges mostly related to water intrusion. It is a vital part of our parish's life, housing our children and youth ministries along with the Bright Horizons daycare center. The long-term recommendation from the professionals is to replace the existing roof with one that will better protect the building from water, as well as undertake other measures. 

The buildings that pose the most diverse set of challenges is the cluster that coalesce on the corner of Spring and North Avenue, which currently house MAC, Covenant Community, RRAM (Covenant's non-residential programs), and very soon some Midtown Alliance artists-in-residence studios. The condition of these buildings varies and having not been built for purpose in most cases their programmatic functionality is less than ideal.

One way of addressing these varied campus needs is what the vestry was presented with at its retreat last month as option one for the master plan: renovate the campus as is. This is the option we have always referred to in our block discernment process as a decision to "change nothing," and invest in what we have.

There are a couple of reasons why the "change nothing" master plan option had few enthusiasts on the vestry: one, it doesn't address the long-term nature of our finances; two, it fails to make the most of the opportunity the block presents us with.

Starting with the long-term 30-year financial projections (even from a conservative perspective), while we can be confident of being able to balance our budget for 2025, our capacity to do so in 2035, or even more so in 2045 will be limited if we continue to operate under our existing financial model. Our current financial model provides for an annual budget of a little over $4 million, around three-quarters of which comes from pledged giving, the other quarter coming from our endowment, lease income and other sources.

In a nutshell, as wonderfully successful as our newcomer work is—with nearly 800 people arriving as newcomers here over the past five years—the long-term projection is that we simply won't be able to replace the pledged income we will lose as some of our beloved saints go on to glory. To be clear, giving at All Saints' has grown double the national and diocesan average over the past decade, by about 21%, which is testament to the fact that you are an incredibly generous parish. Thank you! The fact remains, though, that we would need to increase giving by more than double that rate of growth to keep up with demographic trends, and that is not a growth level that we can realistically expect to achieve. 

In short, from a long-term financial perspective, we will need to grow other sources of income beyond pledges for All Saints' to be sustainable for the duration of the 50 years ahead of us.

All of this takes us to this coming Sunday’s forum when Houser Walker will share conceptual models for the block that consider options beyond "change nothing." The Future of our Block steering committee has spent the summer kneading the dough of all of the incredible and creative insights and ideas you offered during the spring. Expect to see a variety of models for potential master plans for the block. Some of them imagine a defined use, others are more open to possibilities. Some are a few stories in height, others reach for the sky. Yet all of them invite us to imagine the opportunity for vitality of many sorts—financially, as a parish church and as a vibrant city block.  

I invite you to imagine with us and ask what sort of future God calls us to. We will want to hear your feedback and reflections. There is an exciting future ahead of us. What a blessing it is to make our way to it together.