For the Love of St. Olave’s
In February 2017, St. Olave’s Vestry passed a motion to establish a committee to look at our giving habits, with the eventual goal of increasing annual offerings and eliminating our deficit. (For the Love of St. Olave’s opening presentation.) The three-year campaign was led by Don Weston and was successful in increasing giving, engagement and attendance, until the pandemic arrived.
2019 Narrative Budget | 2018 Narrative Budget
The Halo Report describes the socio-economic impact St. Olave’s has on the community.
In 2020, Martha Drake became chair of the stewardship team and despite the pandemic, our parishioners and supporters helped us achieve our highest givings to date. Martha updates the parish on stewardship news in a separate e-blast each month.
In 2021, a collection of parishioner testimonials was published in a booklet entitled What St. Olave’s Means to Me. The booklets were mailed to parishioners with Advent appeal letter.
In 2022, we set a target to increase our givings by 10% and exceeded it, raising 18% more than in 2021. Read our impact report.
In 2023, as we continued to renew our routines traditions after the pandemic, we set a modest givings increase of 5% over 2022.
We also supported initiatives to encourage people to return to worship and targeted an average attendance increase of 15 people per Sunday (all Sunday services) in 2023, and 2024. This will return us to our average Sunday attendance in 2019.
To encourage people to meet our spiritual goals, we presented a Rule of Life, six spiritual disciplines that are found at the end of the Catechism or Confirmation teaching in the Book of Common Prayer (p. 555):
- Attending church
- Praying at home
- Following Jesus
- Talking about faith
- Serving the church
- Giving to the church
These rules were further explained on a bookmark and in a video series, with Martha Drake interviewing various members of the congregation. View the videos on our YouTube channel.
In 2024, Paul Scrivener became the chair of the Stewardship Committee. He follows Martha Drake’s lead in continuing email updates (quarterly) and overseeing appeal campaigns. We continue to see an increase in average weekly attendance.
In 2025, we set a modest givings increase of 2.5% over 2024 actual givings.