Our mission at St. Stephen’s is to “Walk with Christ and share the journey.”  This can mean different things to different people, and we welcome all interpretations of having Christ with you in life, and sharing your life with others.  

In the fall of 2020 St. Stephen’s conducted a Church Assessment Tool (CAT)survey which allowed us to deeply look at our church and our hopes for the future.   We had a wonderful response with 85% of our average Sunday attendees responding to the survey.  The results pointed to some cohesive thoughts about where we were as a parish, and what directions we wanted to move toward.  The following were quite collectively identified as priorities as we move forward at St. Stephen’s:

• Make necessary changes to attract families with children and youth to our church.

• Develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to reach new people and incorporate them into the life of the church.

• Provide more opportunities for Christian education and spiritual formation at every age and stage of life.

From there, we took these goals and conducted a follow-up survey, seeking ideas from all parishioners about how we might achieve them.  Ideas were gathered through the survey, as well as during Listening Sessions, and all ideas were forwarded to our vestry for review and planning purposes.

To help attract families with children and youth to our parish, we have realized that we need to make church accessible to the variety of schedules that different families have.  To this end we have taken the lessons we learned during the Covid-19 Pandemic and are bringing them forward into the St. Stephen’s of the future.  We recently took advantage of a $2,000 Technology Grant offered by our diocese to purchase a camera, computer, Eero Wi-Fi units, and microphones to allow for ongoing streaming of church services.  In addition, we hope to launch some family specific programming and to grow more ministries in this area, as our congregation grows in the future.

To help St. Stephen’s reach new people and incorporate them into the life of the church, we have launched a new, modern website, with a plan to maintain it weekly, as well as to use various social media outlets to drive online traffic to our site.  We hope to continue to post videos of weekly sermons and even start a church blog in the future.

As we all know, the life of a church is interrelated.  As we progress with our first two goals, it is our hope that we can bring back the education ministries St. Stephen’s was known for in the past—an engaging Sunday School, annual Confirmation and First Communion Classes and an active Youth Group.  During the Covid-19 Pandemic we were blessed with the ability to continue to host (virtually) our EfM class, our Men’s Group, and Book Studies for the seasons of Advent and Lent. 

Our mission to “Walk with Christ and share the journey” is central to who we are. We welcome all into our journey of faith.