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Open Doors Winter Update
December 19, 2025
What has the Open Doors Working Group (the group tasked with spearheading the work of discerning the future of our wonderful and challenging building) been working on this fall? We will answer that question in two ways!
First we would like to invite you to spend time with ODWG as we host coffee hour after each worship service in January. There, we will be sharing some of our work with you and we will be eager to hear your ideas and opinions. We are planning to have these coffee hours in the back of the sanctuary, possibly moving a couple of pews to increase the space, with the twin goals of making coffee hour very easy for everyone to access and of starting to open our eyes to possibilities in our use of space. We will be sharing what we have been thinking about and asking for your input in informal and easy ways. We hope to see you there.
Secondly, we can briefly share here what our focus has been this fall. We recruited three additional people to be part of our group, but scheduling proved challenging for one, so we have ended up with two of them – Branda Wilhoite and Kris Montgomery – to work with us. We are glad to have their insights and perspectives as part of the group. So far, rather than splitting into two working groups, we have all worked together on the two main parts of our work – the congregational zone of the building, including the sanctuary, and the mission zone, likely to include some or all of the parish house. We have made no decisions about the building and its use (and will not do so without the congregation!), but we have been trying to work out what our path forward should look like.
Regarding the congregational zone, we have made, with detailed input from the Ministry Team, a schematic space planning document, listing what kinds of rooms we need as a congregation, including such things as storage needs, adjacency preferences, whether rooms need to be single-use or can be shared and size requirements. We have started to put out feelers towards finding a design professional to see how we can re-imagine our building to satisfy these needs.
Parallel to this we have created a framework for decision-making for the mission zone of the building – we call it our Opportunity Rubric. We have 5 main groups of attributes – Mission Alignment, Financial, Building Fit to Usage, Community Impact, and Risks – each with a number of different topics. We hope you will be able to comment on this rubric and offer your own suggestions at one of our coffee hours in January.
We are always open to being approached individually at any time. Please feel free to share your ideas, passions and comments with us, or ask any questions you may have. We hope you will join us for some of the coffee hours, too!
Open Doors Working Group: Ben Keeler (LT representative and chair), Jonathan Goodell, Kris Montgomery, Andrew Sansom, Penny Sparrow and Branda Wilhoite.
