Our Needs

Updated Rectory

Our rectory, a single-family home, does not adequately accommodate the now common practice of having priests, retired priests, and seminarians living communally to serve a parish of our size.

The house has a one-car garage, five small bedrooms, one of which serves as a too-small group chapel, three bathrooms, no separate workspaces, and kitchen, living, and dining rooms that are inadequate for our group of priests, seminarians, and their guests.

Expanded Parish Center

We have outgrown our Parish Center! Our existing staff doesn't have sufficient office and work space, there is no room for any additional future staff, and it offers no multi-use space for other parish needs.

Our staff, who serve the needs of our faith community in so many ways, has only three offices for seven staff members.
The Pastor, Parochial Vicar, and Business Manager have offices, the Secretary has a dedicated workspace at the Parish Office entrance, and the Custodian uses a desk in a dark, makeshift area in the furnace room.
Classrooms and meeting rooms double as offices for the Faith Formation Coordinator and Assistant, who lose access to them when these rooms are needed.
If we were to hire additional staff, like a choir director or youth minister, we have no office space.
The area doesn't have a large, private conference room for church leadership, group, and staff meetings.
All of our facilities, including the current Parish Center, have woefully inadequate multi-use meeting and classroom space for faith formation, youth, and adult ministry meetings and activities.
The Center doesn't have enough storage.

Larger, Dedicated Food Pantry

Our food pantry is vital to our service and mission to help feed our community’s people and families in need.

The pantry’s basement location is small, inconvenient, limiting, and not easily accessible for clients or volunteers.
There is demand for a much larger space, ideally separate from our church building, and with better pantry warehouse access.

Larger Social Hall

Our dining room is just too small! It seats only 240 people, which is not enough for most of our fellowship activities and completely inadequate for all-parish activities.

Our too-small kitchen is insufficient for catering large and all-parish events, has aging, outdated appliances, limited food storage, very little food preparation space, and no serving cart storage. The kitchen access, only available through the serving line area, has drawers that open in the way of serving.
Due to our lack of adequate faith-formation and meeting spaces, the dining room is used for these activities and provides no privacy or sound-proofing.
The dining room's many uses cause constant scheduling conflicts, additional expenses, and wear and tear on the room and furnishings. For example, funeral lunches on faith formation days delays class set ups until all funeral guests have left. Or on Sunday afternoons when there are student retreats, set up must be delayed until after fellowship guests enjoying donuts have departed.

More Multi-Use Class, Youth, & Adult Meeting Room Space

Our lack of multi-use class, youth, and adult meeting room space regularly impacts our programs, ministries and services. It also limits opportunities to offer any more of these.

Both the dining room and gathering space must be regularly set up, furnished, equipped, and subdivided (poorly from a soundproof standpoint) as temporary faith formation classrooms.
Class starting times must be staggered to accommodate the great and growing number of students.
We have only six real classrooms, most holding only 12 students each. We cannot effectively and efficiently accommodate all our faith formation students.
We are unable to offer our parish youth a dedicated go-to space for activities or just to hang out that is positive, safe, secure and free from negative outside influences.
Our ever-growing adult ministries are impacted by our lack of meeting space and limited from expanding.

Worship Space Improvements

Our beautiful worship space was built in 1960! It was designed for a much smaller membership and then subsequent remodels impacted its architectural layout.

Our main entryway is rarely used because the main parking lot’s drop-off area is on the opposite side of the building.
The most used and convenient church entry is from the Parish Center into the front of the worship space. This can be distracting, especially after services have begun.
When the Parish Center was added in 1994 the Tabernacle was moved from the Worship Space to the chapel where we still hold private prayer and Eucharistic adoration.
Ideally, the Tabernacle should be located directly behind the church's altar in a permanent, prominent, elevated, and visible position – part of the focal point of our church and liturgies. Though, our Tabernacle has been returned to the church’s altar area, it is not positioned as it should be.
Our worship space's seating is inadequate for our needs, especially for busier Masses, holy days, and holidays.