Rector’s Report
Preached Sunday morning, February 1 at the 9 & 10:30 am services
Good morning! I now call to order our 176th Annual Meeting. Every Episcopal church is required by law to hold a meeting annually at which we vote in our new vestry candidates and warden, and share the prior year’s budget. We also include in our Annual Meeting reports from all the various ministries in our parish, and there are many. That report can be found linked in your Thursday email, on the banner of your phone app, and in print version on the tables in the front and back of the church as well as in the Great Hall.
As I’ve said several times, it is so good to be back. We had quite a year, and I can’t even believe that I managed to fit a sabbatical into it (for 3 months).
Three major, notable events stand out from last year. First, we finished the last half of our 175th anniversary celebration. Some of the highlights from 2025 of that were:
- Caribbean Night. Thank you to Toni Lewis, Val Wiggan and Lyn Boreland for an incredible night, the proceeds from which helped our capital projects.
- There was also the concert in February featuring composers of St. James with historic and also brave sermons preached over the years by some of its clergy. Thank you to Victoria and Phillip Martin for all they did to put that together, and to all those who participated in the music and readings: the choir, Peter Clark, John McNally, Bishop Shin. I just want to briefly say, that was a highlight of my whole career. It made me prouder than ever to be here.
- We had lectures. Russell Grant, Geoff Loftus, Russell Crane, Hadley Miller, and Toni Lewis all spoke about different eras of our past.
- We worshiped to a steel drum band as we celebrated the variety of ways Anglicanism is expressed in our church and across our diocese--a celebration of who are today.
- To close out the anniversary year, we held our second “Popham Day” celebration with games, period costumes and music. Thank you to Hadley Miller, Tom Lacalamita, and Francia Mordhardt-Smith for organizing that wonderful day. And to Jim Hallowell for being, once again, our William Popham. In my mind, William Popham now looks exactly like Jim Hallowell!
- At that same event we installed the headstone for Marjorie DeLewis, the first African American woman graduate of Julliard and parishioner here. Marjorie died and was buried in 2017 and we hadn’t yet dedicated her gravestone. Right after that we installed the headstone for Isabella Johnson, the first documented Black communicant of St. James. She lived with the Popham family and was eventually buried here but without any recognition--until now. This took place in June, and brought us full-circle to the beginning of our anniversary year when Jim Boulden, descendent of our founder William Popham, gave a lecture on Ms. Johnson as well as the Popham family’s connections to Barbados prior to coming to Scarsdale.
At the end of all this, the chair of the history committee, Russell Grant, admitted to being a little exhausted by it all. We really burned the candle at both ends for that whole 175th year, from September through June--and that right on the heels of our Capital Campaign in 2023-2024!
For my part, I was both exhausted and energized. And, for the purposes of today’s talk, I’m going to share shortly What insights emerged for me after it ended, and especially when I stepped away for a while during sabbatical.
But before that, another major thing from 2025: the parking lot!! Can you believe that was in there too? Incredible. Just to remind you, five years ago we received a donation to hire a landscape architect to help us dream of what might be possible. Three years ago we brought in a consultant and engaged in a parish-wide discernment process. Two years ago we visited dozens of parishioners and applied for grants to secure your advanced financial commitment to the work. And then last year, as soon as we wrapped up our busy 175th year, we broke ground.
I’ll never forget that on Christmas Eve at 4 pm I stood out here shooing the construction guys away for good. Right under the wire. We have some work come spring, but the project is by and large complete and, once the snow finally melts, we’ll get to once again see it. It’s beautiful.
I cannot thank enough those who helped make this happen, especially Ocean Mills. She has led this project with grace, humor, persistence, and copious attention to detail. The Renew and Revitalize Committee was hard at work this whole time, too: Bill Haffner, Tom Finlan, Linda Killian, Mark Trager, Rob Fath, Monica Sganga, Chris Burrows, Omaira Crane, Lisa Wolfe, Pat Wynne. Thank you to all of them.
We still have work ahead: the HVAC system and the Great Hall are yet to be done. We may need to do more fundraising with our friends and alumni, but please keep giving those campaign contributions because the projects continue.
Finally, in 2025, there was my sabbatical, which I was so grateful, so grateful, to have taken. In the Diocese of New York now every five years a priest gets to take a three-month sabbatical. It’s hard for us to actually do it, as you saw in my case--it was in my ninth year here that I got to it. There are so many things going on in our churches and there’s just no good time to step away. But finally the diocese said, We can get you a priest and make this happen.
That priest was the Rev. Michelle Howard. She and Mo. Eliza did an incredible job filling in for me; thank you to both of them. And also to the Rev. Stephen Holton and the Rev. Charlie Mayer, colleagues who conducted burials and ran the vestry meetings in my absence. It was really the wardens, though, who held the reins during that time, and as you’ll see from their report, that was a bit more work than maybe either was expecting. They did their work with competence and grace and I couldn’t be more thankful.
Looking back at all this, I don’t think I’ve had a busier year in my life, certainly not in my ministry, and that’s even with my sabbatical thrown in!
This year, we have a big transition coming up. We’re going to be seeing off Mo. Eliza to greater things--she’s going to be the new Interim Rector at Trinity New Rochelle (by the way, 350 years old! Pre Revolutionary war!). I couldn’t be more thrilled for her. Working with this woman for 3 ½ years has had such an enormously positive impact on me and on this parish. She is fun, she is smart, she’s wise, she has such grace and stamina. We’ll give her a proper goodbye next weekend. You’ll still come by St. James, I hope, and I’ll be visiting you for sure over at Trinity.
We’ve recently formed a committee to hire a Christian Education Director. They’re already busy at work putting together a survey for families and working on the job description. I’m grateful to all of them: Meagan Henry, Simone House, Pam Heldman, Omaira Crane, Bill Foley and Deidre Wynne.
And now!! For the Big Insight from my time away about St. James.
Right after our 175th anniversary ended, I was invited to the bishop’s house in Manhattan. He hosted a series of four dinners for the clergy of about forty churches total, all churches in the diocese he considers to be flourishing (and ours is).
After the meal he asked us to go around the table and share the “DNA” of each of our parishes. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say, and a sense of panic spread through my body when the last person before me wrapped up. Then I opened my mouth, and it was like I’d planned it. The words just poured out.
St. James (I began) is a vibrant church, lots of energy, lots of families and kids. A strong sense of community and shared commitment to outreach and worship. I added that we just finished our 175th anniversary so I’d been very recently steeped in its history. One of the periods that really stood out for me was from the 1920s-40s (Russell Grant led our fantastic lecture on that era).
Those decades stood out because that was when they built much of what we basically see around us today: this grand stone section of the church, the Great Hall, the gigantic three-story Christian education building, the cloister connecting it all. They acquired in that era two of our three enormous houses on the lots right behind here.
Basically they built. And they built. And they built. I mean, they went bananas building.
Heads all around the table were nodding. I could tell everyone could relate, but only to a point. The bishop then confessed that he’s begun to use me/us as an example--or I should say a cautionary tale--of a place that’s demanding beyond what even an extremely competent and gifted (and I’m not saying I’m either of those things) leader can handle. It’s demanding beyond what an extremely competent and gifted (and we do have this) vestry can handle.
I wrapped up by saying, my people today didn’t ask to carry all this. I don’t think we can continue to if we want to be around and still vibrant in fifty, seventy five, a hundred and seventy five, more years. It seems to me plain as day: we carry a structure that’s too heavy for these times.
We’ve all inherited buildings and structures from a prior era with different priorities. Alongside that, all of us rectors wouldn’t necessarily want to be the rectors of those churches in the 30s, 40s, and 50s and half of us, the women among us of course, couldn’t have been the rectors of those churches.
Nobody wants to go back.
The church is an exciting place to be now. It’s vibrant, it has a social witness. We can say things we couldn’t say back then. We can have a presence in the community and the world that we didn’t then. Just look at our 175th history and how rectors who said things that seem like things priests today just say-- Jesus was Jewish!--were ostracized in this community.
We don’t inhabit that kind of church anymore. There’s so much that’s good about how the church has grown and developed over the decades since those days. We may not be the primary landholders of our communities anymore; we may not be the place where you come if you’re eager to improve your social standing or show off your Easter hat. But that doesn’t really square with what many of us want from our churches, anyway.
Now, this next thing I’m going to say could be right out of the 1950s Episcopal playbook—there are some things about us that haven’t changed—but I’ve formed a committee. I’ve formed a committee to look at our campus as a whole. They’ve just begun. Some are (and will be) touring other churches like ours and asking questions of their leadership: who kept their property and who didn’t, where did that money go? How did it impact your congregation near and long term? How did these decisions serve the church's mission and priorities? What mistakes were made? For that matter, churches once prosperous but now closed: what happened to them? What decisions led to their closure? What might they have done to prevent that from happening?
All the while this committee will be looking at our campus: what can we do, so that in 2050 let’s say, we’ll be lighter, more stable, less bogged down by things that aren’t central to our mission and priorities.
From my perusal of Annual Reports from past decades, leaders and rectors of St. James have felt for a long time like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill and getting nowhere. The current structure is exhausting, and it’s going to get more so as things continue to age and sag and crumble. To sum up, maybe it’s not us; maybe it’s too much of this (pointing around).
My priority in my remaining years with you will be to help us understand who we are, who we aren’t, what we’ve been but don’t need to keep being, what we need today, what we don’t, and to shore up our foundation.
Before drawing this to a close, I want to say one word about finances. Because one thing I didn’t mention in my year-in-review was the transition to a new bookkeeping system. Let me say here that I’m grateful for your patience. It hasn’t been as smooth a transition as I’d hoped and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but we’ve mostly made it and are moving ahead with a much better system with greater accessibility and accountability than before. When I think we did this, along with everything else last year, I’m amazed.
We’ve hired an accountant to oversee all this, the same person who works with Christ Church Pelham and does excellent work there. He’s set up new systems, raised standards for spending and receipt submittal, helped us transition to a new payroll company, and much else.
With the blessing of our bishop, I’ve asked the accountant to take our four quote-unquote “businesses,” our church, nursery school, rental properties, and our graveyard, and separate them in our profit and loss accounting into different “classes,” so we can track how they’re really doing. Having the ability to pull them apart will help us really see where our strengths and weaknesses are. We can either use that information to bolster the areas that are weak, or discern whether all these are things we need to carry into the future.
The good news is: we’re strong. We’re vibrant. We’ve just shown (especially last year!) we can do big things. Tempting as it is to now roll along comfortably and ignore what’s looming, this is the time to do this work.
I’m grateful you stuck with me through this longer-than-usual report, and as ever, and once again this year, I’m grateful to be your rector.
Respectfully submitted,
The Rev. Astrid Storm