Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. - 1 Peter 2:4-5
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? - John 14:2
These excerpts from our 5th Sunday of Easter Mass, remind me of our Prince of Peace buildings! We indeed have many places here and our church is a spiritual house where Jesus dwells and we worship God. All of us, the members of Prince of Peace, are “living stones” who build up the parish church, but we can’t forget about our physical stones that make up our campus, lest our place of worship and faith formation crumble.
Back in 2018, before my time here, there was the beginnings of a plan to renovate our church. This was put on hold due to the Archdiocesan One Faith Campaign and the COVID outbreak. Now, 5 years later, it is time to think again about our campus. But before we jump into something, we decided to to hire HTK architects to do a master plan for Prince of Peace.
In this master plan, every square foot of our entire campus (church, hall, school, EEC, offices, parking lots, field, etc.) was looked at by professional engineers. They assessed the overall conditions, noted all areas needing repairs or renovation, and graded them by urgency. They also spoke with staff and groups and toured all our areas to see how well all our spaces serve our needs. They then put together a report and plan as a tool for us to know the probable costs to fix things up and the directions we can possibly move to improve how our entire campus functions.
The final report is nearly 100 pages! We did have a summary presentation for all staff and the parish pastoral and finance councils. I desire to get a summary to all the parishioners soon and to begin a process of discernment which will include input from everyone on how we should move forward. The results were that our campus is overall in pretty good shape, but there are some problem areas both in need of renovation or functionality. More to come on that. At this point, I just ask for your prayers and patience. I wanted to update you so you know we are not ignoring the physical campus. This is a slow process that I will soon need you to be informed about and involved in, so that in the end we all have solid buy-in to keep Prince of Peace in great shape and to continue be a true spiritual house for all our “living stones”.
Peace,
Fr. Greg