Tuesday, May 7, 2019

MAy Newsletter (Part the Second)

Every year in Dream House season I tend to indulge myself. Not in imagining what i would be like to win the house – I have never seen a dream house I would actually want to live in, in the off chance I did win one I would rather sell it and find uses for the money. My indulging comes more when I hear the amount of the 50/50 drawn and start to think what I might do with that sort of money (purely theoretical since it is pretty much impossible to win when you never buy a ticket).

My thinking along that line often starts with looking around the house and realizing all the things that should or could be done inside and outside. That gets a little overwhelming pretty quickly. So then I think about the church and what we might do if we won a large sum of money.

That list depends on the amounts I choose to dream about. With a few million I dream about finding a partner and embarking on a major redevelopment. With a few hundred thousand I dream of what we might do with our current building both in terms of changes to the building and programs we could co-sponsor (all my dreams eventually get to finding community partners to work with).

In both sets of dreaming I tend to set priorities. At home it might be a new roof, or a redone kitchen, or a driveway that is not terribly cracked and shifted. At the church it might include redoing the flooring in the basement, or upgrading to all LED lighting, or finding a solution to the water under the building that causes it to shift so much. But I know what I would want us to do first.

One of my dreams is to redo the audio-visual capacity of our sanctuary. The organ needs work (new speakers at the least). Having the projector hung from the ceiling would both allow us to get a brighter, larger unit which will show pictures better but also mean that those of us who walk along the chancel won’t blind ourselves every time we walk past. Currently only one of our speakers is working (that has been true for about 4 years now) and playing a video is always a roll of the dice as far as audio goes.

My dreams include new speakers (I see four in the sanctuary space to balance out the sound). And a new sound board so we can have more options for microphones or instruments. And a booth at the back where the sound could be controlled along with where the Power Point would be operated from. And new organ speakers in the short term – as the organ console is 40 years old a decision about whether to replace it will be needed within the next generation.

My dreams are expensive. I know of one congregation with a slightly larger space than ours who spent about $100 000 on audio-visual redevelopment. So we might do some picking and choosing. The first step would be to have someone who knows about these things give us a list of options. But I do think it is something we need to consider. Not only would it enhance our life as a worshipping congregation, it would also enhance our ability to host concerts or speakers or movies or other events in the sanctuary. Ten years ago this congregation wrote in a Joint Needs Assessment how the acoustics in the sanctuary made it a good site for concerts. It was and is true. We could make it better (which would be an offering to the community and a possible revenue source).
Gord

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