Did you know that the City of San Diego City Council is currently reviewing a plan that could increase the population living in the Hillcrest, University Heights, Mission Hills and Bankers Hill by over 50,000 persons by 2050?1 The beginnings of this plan can already be seen in the new apartment buildings along 6th Ave. from University Ave. all the way to 525 Olive, next door.
When I was a child growing up in the South, Sunday morning was TV time and full of Gospel Shows, Christian-themed cartoons and church. Everyone was expected to go to worship and there were far fewer distractions than today. We all know that demographics, the COVID pandemic, and competition from other Sunday morning activities like kids’ sports, have led to a general decline in participation in organized religion. St. Paul’s Cathedral has not been immune to these trends.
A committee of your Chapter is creating a Strategic Plan to help guide the Cathedral into the future to ensure our focus serves our mission to Love Christ, Serve Others and Welcome All. We are guided by the saying “Those Who Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail”. As we do our planning, we must make sure our programs meet the spiritual needs of our congregation, the Diocese and the City of San Diego. They must also support membership, increase participation by all, and ensure the meeting of our financial needs.
The creation of the St. Paul’s Strategic Plan will be a multi-phase project over the next few months. Your participation will be critical to this process. In September we will launch the process by asking you to take some of your very valuable time to fill out a Congregational Assessment Tool (CAT Survey). This is a very well validated and benchmarked survey that St. Paul’s members took in 2013 and again in 2017. You may have participated in past CAT Surveys at St. Paul’s. We will be able to see how attitudes, expectations and ideas are now and may have changed over time. The results will provide a baseline for the rest of the plan. The CAT Survey is necessarily somewhat long, with about 100 questions. It will be very important that everyone in the congregation fill out the questionnaire. It must be done by each participant in one sitting, so be sure to allow about 30 minutes or so to complete. Because of the potential complexity, we will schedule a series of events where “computer literate” members of the congregation will help those of us who are “less facile” with online surveys. After the surveys are completed, the results will be analyzed by the CAT creators at Holy Cow Consulting. We will then be helped in our interpretation of the complex results by Canon Gwynn Lynch, Canon to the Ordinary for Bishop Susan Brown Snook, whom many of you know. She is a trained interpreter of CAT Surveys and knows both St. Paul’s and the Diocese of San Diego.
Once satisfied that we know our baseline and where you want the Cathedral’s focus to be over the next few years, we will schedule a series of “Focus Groups” and other small group conversations to focus on the details. It is our goal to have the results ready to report at the 2025 Annual Parish Meeting. It will then serve as a roadmap for what the newly elected Chapter will implement over the next few years.
Your participation in the CAT Survey and following sessions is crucial to the future of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Please direct any questions or comments you might have about the strategic planning process to me at stratplan@stpaulcathedral.org.
– Blair Shamel
Blair,
Good luck with your work! It might be helpful to keep in mind the quote by either Marshall or Eisenhower, something like “while essential, all good battle plans are problematic once the first shot is fired.” It’s been my observation over a reasonably long life that the well-considered plans of all leaders are frequently set aside in order to deal with the unexpected realities of the moment. It’s not an argument against planning only a suggestion that brilliant leadership is more vital than planning or at least equally essential. So, planning for leadership needs and successions is vital.
But more to the point, PLEASE support your plan with realistic projections of SPC’s financial needs over the period of the plan’s life and how you will fund them. Not only current operations but the additional programming called for in the Plan, the maintenance and in some cases the major renovations of ageing buildings as well as growing our endowment funds.
I agree with the comments by Jim Greer