a year in the life of st. simon s episcopal church
TRANSCRIPT
The year 2020 presented St. Simon’s, along with the rest of the world, with unique challenges, forcing us to think
and act creatively to work with and around the restrictions imposed on us by the COVID-19 pandemic. What
follows is a look back at the past year with the question “How did we celebrate God’s love and embody Christ in
2020?”
January began as most Januarys do . . . fond memories of
Christmas past and anticipation of the new year to come. 2020
held particular significance in that it marked an arrival point in the
21st century . . . by 2020 we will . . . sort of thing. And St.
Simon’s was looking forward with great anticipation to the calling
of its new rector, maybe even by summer. There was a virus
circulating in Wuhan, China, but we weren’t worried about it. We
celebrated the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ with a baptism of
our own. We greeted Ryann eagerly at the door, welcoming her
into our community, and gathered around her as our Interim
Rector, Bryan Cones, sat her in the middle of the baptismal font
and poured water over her head! Surrounding the altar, we
celebrated Eucharist with Ryann and each other.
February was a
busy month –
good thing it had
an extra day. We
held our Annual Meeting on February 23 and elected new
Wardens and Vestry members. We gathered for Table Tennis
Tuesday, and enjoyed a meal together followed by prayer at Walk-
In Wednesday. Our book groups met in member’s homes or at the
church to discuss their chosen book of the month and the
Centering Prayer group met in the St. John Room on Saturday
mornings to pray together. On a cold and snowy February
morning, we reached out to our Arlington Heights community,
bringing them Ashes To Go at the Arlington Heights Metra
Station.
March. It turned
out that our last
Sunday together was Sunday, March 8. Bishop Lee called upon us
“to help slow the spread of the disease . . . this is among our most
pressing Lenten disciplines.” That first Sunday, Bryan provided us
with a worship bulletin and a pre-recorded homily. By the next
week, we had begun our experiments of worship on Zoom! We
began with a bare-bones Liturgy of the Word with pre-recorded
offertories and a cappella hymns. Easter Day was our first
experience of accompanied, live music, as Walter had been able to
access a piano. Over the summer we experimented with an Agape
Blessing of Food and Drink, before settling into a pattern of
Morning Prayer. With each iteration, we deepened our experience
of prayer together, leaning into the practice of praying for each
other. Pre-pandemic, we had experimented with the Prayers of the
A Year in the Life of St. Simon’s Episcopal Church: Celebrating God’s Love, Embodying Christ in a Time of Pandemic
People, handing out cards with the names of individuals on our
prayer list to be voiced during the prayer. Now the chat feature in
Zoom allowed many voices to express many prayers that might
before have remained unspoken.
While there was initially hope that we would be back in church for
Easter in April (how naïve that seems in hindsight) that was not to
be. Instead we celebrated Palm Sunday and Easter at home. In the
mail we received a palm cross, lovingly made by members of our
Altar Guild, and a Prayer Book for Holy Week and the Three
Days, and then we gathered on Zoom for a Solemn Good Friday
service and a Festive Easter celebration. Also in the spring, St.
Simon’s Loves You signs began appearing in the front lawns of our
homebound parishioners and a sign at the back of our property
facing the hospital reminded patients and staff that we were
praying for them.
By May, we were beginning adjust to the new constraints on our
lives and continued experimenting with just what we could do. Jo Gantzer hosted a month-long Bible Study on the
Book of Acts via Zoom. Jessica Hauth organized a series of virtual
Happy Hours on Facebook Live. Our church school teachers
gathered our children on Zoom on Saturday afternoons for a story
and craft, to supplement the weekly mailings they were receiving
from the church. Our book groups met online. Amy Stomper
started Friday Night at the Movies, an opportunity to watch a
movie together from our homes and chat by text about it. Walter
Aldrich reconvened our music community for a time of listening
to and singing music together. Allison Newhouse continued to
meet with the youth group on Sunday afternoons via Zoom. Julie
Wood put together a video, featuring members of our community,
celebrating all of our high school, college and grad school
graduates. At the end of May, our children surprised us with a
special Pentecost pageant, pre-recorded from their homes.
By June, the shelter in place order had been lifted. While we were
still gathering via Zoom, we were ready to begin to experiment
with Adult Formation. In our first series, during Pride month, we
consider what it means to be an “affirming” congregation.
Members of our community shared what “affirming” meant to
them in Tuesday Reflections, and guest speakers and preachers
shared their experiences with the LGBTQ+ community. The pre-
pandemic plan had been to raise the Pride flag following the
Sunday service on Pride Sunday. We got it up there, just not with
the fanfare that we had anticipated. The Pride series was followed
by “Breathing Lessons,” a series on learning and action for Racial
Justice, led by Rene Schreiner and the Adult Formation Team.
Next, Mike Brue led us through “What do we owe each other?”, a
series on Economic Justice. Later in the fall we considered the role
of bishops in the Episcopal Church as we prepared to elect the
thirteenth Bishop of Chicago in December.
Gardens and a Food Truck were the focus of July outdoors at St.
Simon’s. The Green Team invited members of our community to
tend our flower and vegetable garden each week, and Kirsten
Krause invited people to a time of quiet prayer in the Memorial
Garden. Members of our community continued to gather on
Wednesday evenings via Zoom for a check-in and service of music
and prayer together as well. We partnered with the nursing staff at
the hospital to host the Toasty Cheese food truck for a delicious
mid-day meal.
St. Simon’s continued its ministry of helping to feed the homeless
during the summer months. In the spring we had provided meals
for PADS guests who were being housed in local hotels during the
pandemic. By August we were well seasoned at how to put
together a “Summer Supper” for neighbors in need of a hot meal.
After packaging up 25 or 30 meals to be delivered to PADS
guests, we provided a drive-thru pick-up of meals, open to anyone,
on one evenings in in each of July, August and September. In the
fall, we provided breakfast and lunch meal kits for the PADS
guests. These kits were designed to feed two people two meals a
day for a week and included cereal, milk, bread, pb&j, tuna, servings of fruits and veggies, as well as snacks. In
total, 84 members of our parish helped to provide meals for over
1200 people this year.
Additionally we continued our support of the ReVive Center for
Healing and Housing and their Christmas basket program. While
in previous years, we shopped in stores for gifts for individuals,
this year, we purchased gift cards from Kohl’s, Target, Walmart, or
Amazon, along with Jewel gift cards. Parishioners donated funds
as well, which allowed us to purchase more Jewel gift cards.
With the coming of September, the musical offerings on Sunday
mornings shifted. All summer long, our choir had been meeting
together via Zoom and perfecting the art of singing alone at home
to a microphone and camera so that Walter could then edit the
recorded tracks together – truly an example of the whole being
greater than the sum of the parts. After a premiere in August with
the virtual choir Fill Me Now, we enjoyed a variety of vocal and
instrumental solos and duets, offered by members of our
community. The choir did a recording of Come, Come unto Me, for
Pastor Jenny’s first Sunday in November, and two more pieces,
Christmas Sanctus and By Candlelight, for our Christmas services. All
of this music, as well as the musical reflections and hymns as
recorded by Walter are available on the St. Simon’s YouTube
channel.
Change came again in October as we said good-bye to our interim
rector, Bryan Cones. Good times were had by all as we gathered in
the parking lot for a Pet Blessing and Tail-gate Party in celebration
of his ministry with us. This was the second of our parking lot
picnics as we had gathered in September for our annual parish
picnic. Because of the restrictions over serving food communally,
we ordered individually packed sandwiches from Dave’s Specialty
Foods. Our community remained strong through “The Interval,”
with presiders and preachers drawn from within it, with the
support of Rev. Kate Spelman as needed, and Jo Gantzer keeping
the day to day workings of the parish humming along.
Our big news in the month of November was that our new
rector, Jenny Hulen, joined our community. She had met in-
person with the rector search team in July, and the vestry issued a
call to her to be our next rector in September. She transitioned
from her previous parish in October as she and her husband,
Peter, sold their house in St. Louis and purchased a home in
Palatine, moving to Chicago at the end of October. She began at
St. Simon’s on November 16.
The highlight of December was, as always, Christmas – and a
highlight of Christmas was the virtual children’s pageant, Be Not
Afraid. Videoed from home and over Zoom, our children brought
us the joy of Christmas in the retelling of the ancient story of
God’s gift to God’s beloved in a very 21st century fashion. Our
musicians brought us the beautiful music of the season with two
virtual choir presentations, and the Altar Guild decorated the
church as Pastor
Jenny presided over the Zoom Christmas services from inside the
church sanctuary for the first time since we ceased gathering
together in March.
And so we have come full-circle, with the memory of Christmas
lingering as we anticipate what 2021 will bring. With the rollout of
multiple vaccines offering protection against the COVID-19 virus,
we look forward to the point at which we will be able to gather
in-person. Throughout this past year, we have had to learn a new
way to stay connected via Zoom for worship and prayer, education
and planning, fellowship and fun, while still practicing the old ways
of connection by writing notes and cards, making phone calls,
delivering meals and gifts. We look forward moving into the new
normal, taking with us the values that we have added over the past
year. We have new skills and capabilities and a determination to be
God’s hands and face to each other and the community around us.
717 W. Kirchhoff Road, Arlington Heights, Illinois 60005
847.259.2930—[email protected]—www.saintsimons.org
Parish Office Hours—M-Th, 9am-3pm
Jenny Hulen, Rector