Dear friends!

This month’s edition of The Chronicle is the final one that our parish administrator Tieran Sweeny-Bender will be editing for us, and we offer our deepest thanks to him for all of his hard work during the last seven months! Tieran joined us in December, working remotely from his home in Seattle since the pandemic forced the closure of the church office. He has truly been an asset to St. John’s | San Juan in the time he’s been with us, and we wish him all the best in his last year of college and whatever the future holds beyond that!

The last month has been a whirlwind for us at St. John’s | San Juan. We completed a successful capital campaign, and have been working through the details on moving forward with our building project. The outrageous spike in the cost of building materials has given us pause (making the bid for the project from our general contractor almost three times as much as the estimate was at the end of last year), and we are regrouping, getting input from the governing bodies of the Diocese, as well as figuring out what is possible with FORMA and our architects at KMB.

At the same time, we are continuing to resume in-person ministries, having resumed the Sunday Eucharist in both English and Spanish both in-person and online, and now having re-opened the Wednesday Eucharist for in-person worship as well (though space is limited, since there’s no ventilation in the Chapel). Once Thurston County moves to Phase 4 of the Healthy Washington plan, we will evaluate the guidance from offices of both the Governor and our Bishop, and make plans for resuming more of our in-person ministries. In the meantime, the in-person ministries we have already resumed will continue, and we look forward to resuming more of them in the near future.

Thank you for your patience as we work through all these details. We definitely have glimpses of what life will be like when the pandemic is fully behind us, and I’m as eager as anyone for us to just be there already. But we have further yet to travel, even as the end is in sight. Thank you for being part of this journey with us, and I look forward to seeing you again soon at church.

Faithfully,

R.C.