Greetings in Christ, all!
I want to share with you some substantial news about our parish and its work with the poor and vulnerable, as well as how this news will impact our parish and facilities.
Now, before I do that, allow me to please invite/ask/beg for your help on our Parish Clean Up Day. We will be attacking the very messy area behind our garage and along the north fence line. Apparently, we haven’t thrown things out in some time! 🙂 On Saturday, November 20, from 10 am until noon, we’ll need all hands on deck to help us move things from the garages and storage areas into dumpsters. Any help you can give will be so greatly appreciated.
Now, for the update: It starts with Holy Deacon Denny. Since I’ve been here, Msgr. Vincke and others told me about an idea Holy Family has been working on that Deacon Denny instituted in Flushing to great success. If you haven’t noticed, we do a lot of beautiful and sacrificial work here for the poor and vulnerable. As part of our radical commitment to be Pro Life, we make sure that anyone we can help gets help. We help people with their food, rent, bills, etc. We help people find places to live or stay. We are pretty well funded here, because you all are generous and your parish family is committed to putting our resources behind our words.
What Deacon Denny began in Flushing was a cooperative effort; namely, that any Church that wants to work with us can. We can, in fact, pool our resources (financial and personnel) to feed more people, help more people and get more people helping us help people. (How’s that for a sentence?!)
We’ve been meeting with local clergy on this topic for over three years and I’m very, very excited about where this is taking us. Our biggest obstacles have been the following:
First Issue: Location
The building that currently houses Outreach, now is a building that Holy Family promised the city will be torn down. The PUD agreement, made with the city back in 2017 or so, was that we would have it down in 2022.
Second Issue: Room
The building we use now is not only slated to be torn down, but even if it wasn’t, we couldn’t continue to function there. The need is great and the room there is not. We need a lot more room to store our resources and to take people inside in the cold weather so they are not meeting with our volunteers standing out in the cold.
Third Issue: Cost
Obviously, we don’t want to take resources the poor need and dump a ton of it into building a place from which to serve them. Buildings are expensive to create, the supply chain is messed up, and our search for a place we can afford has borne no fruit.
In prayer, I had a thought that could solve these problems and a few others. I ran it by our finance council, as well as the other Churches that want to join us, and it seems like this is the direction we are going to go, more or less:
Dad, Fr. Le and I will move out of the rectory and move into the house on our grounds that the parish owns.
We will then convert the rectory into a place where our outreach is housed. The current rectory will obviously still belong to Holy Family, but the cooperative outreach program will rent it from us.
Why are we doing this?
We are always looking for places to store things for our service to the poor and the rectory has plenty of room. This will also help us keep our word to the city and tear down the house from which Outreach currently serves, and create additional parking spaces, which the PUD requires us to do. Of lesser importance, is frankly, the goodness of having a rectory that is not on a major highway, making it challenging to sleep and drive in and out of.
Beyond this, Christians working together to care for the poor is one of the most important messages we can send to our community. Christ’s command to assist the poor and vulnerable is not optional; it is in many ways, the key to it all.
We have hopes that, with this new structure, we will be able to extend our help to include expectant mothers who may need a place to stay or people who are in the Family Promise program. I’m so, so excited about this!
How are we going to pay for this?
Well, that’s the good news. We received significant grant money that should pay for the restoration of the old house that will become a rectory. This will not (we believe!) cost the parish any money. This grant money was given to us to help us move into the other house and restore it so as to make the current rectory a Center for Outreach.
When will this happen?
Well, to some extent, it has to happen in the next year. We have to tear down the house from which Outreach is done and we can’t do that until we have another option for them. Many, many people depend on us for assistance and we can’t leave a gap.
Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Most of it hinges on reworking the house that will serve as a new rectory. There is an extremely significant amount of work that needs to be done there. Please pray for our efforts.
I will keep you all updated on this. I can’t thank Jesus enough for you all and for the incredible work for the poor and vulnerable that we do in this parish.
With all my heart, I am grateful to be your priest.
Fjk