It‘s Groundhog Day, Candlemas, Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, or day after the Iowa Caucuses, depending on your orientation. I was thinking of writing about these for my blog post today, until I came across this article

Sweet Briar College gets record number of applicants.

Students and faculty say the number of applications – which increased from 751 at this time last year to 1099 this year — is just another sign of a community that has banded together to pull itself back from the brink.

I decided to retweet it, and so I checked to see if the #SavingSweetBriar hash tag was still active. It is, and from there I found an even more interesting article

Making the Most of Stakeholder Revolt: The Recapturing of the San Diego Opera and Sweet Briar College.

This article starts

Over the past few years, NPQ has been tracking nonprofits whose stakeholders rose up to save them after their boards voted to close the doors. They are in a larger field of organizations that have felt the sting of stakeholder rebellions when a board has somehow broken faith with the community it serves.

I skimmed over the beginning section and the part about the San Diego Opera. I haven’t been following that story as closely as I’ve been following the Sweet Briar story. The section on Sweet Briar starts off presenting some of the history, and then has this quote:

There was a failure of faith in the mission—probably over about a ten-year period—from what I can tell and have observed since being on the inside. There was a belief at the highest leadership level that women’s colleges weren’t relevant anymore. A lot of that was coming from generations of administrative leaders and board leaders who were from classes of an earlier date, when Sweet Briar was the option because…

This particularly jumped out at me, and I’ve included the quote, leaving out the reason people had gone to Sweet Briar on purpose. You see, this Sunday will be my last day as Clerk of the Vestry of Grace and St. Peter’s Church in Hamden, CT. I have loved serving on the vestry. For those not acquainted with Episcopal Church governance, being Clerk of the Vestry is a kin to be secretary of the board of directors.

It is a difficult time. Like Sweet Briar, we have had dwindling participation and have had to rely on our endowment. As a board, we have explored cost saving measures while trying to stay true to the mission. I’ve brought up what happened at Sweet Briar at Vestry meetings. If we had been a different church with different leadership, our story might be more like Sweet Briar’s. As I read the paragraph, I thought of how it would read if it were talking about various churches:

There was a failure of faith in the mission—probably over the past few decades—from what I can tell and have observed since being on the inside. There was a belief at the highest leadership level that churches weren’t relevant anymore. A lot of that was coming from generations of administrative leaders and board leaders who were from churches of an earlier date, when you went to church because…

I remember singing Hymn by Paul Stukey

I visited Your house again on Christmas or Thanksgiving
And a balded man said You were dead,
But the house would go on living.
He recited poetry and as he saw me stand to leave
He shook his head and said I'd never find You.

I don’t know if there were people at Grace and St. Peter’s who believed this, but it certainly wasn’t the case when I got there. At Grace and St. Peter’s there remains a strong faith in the mission, worshipping God, feeding the hungry, visit the sick, sheltering the homeless.

I don’t know what God has in store for Grace and St. Peter’s. I don’t know what God has in store for me, but I know that the mission still matters, and like Sweet Briar College, it will continue in unexpected ways, even when many people question its relevancy for today.