Building Community
Dear Church,
You’ve heard me say our mission here at St. John’s is to cover this valley with love like snow covers it in the wintertime. I’m proud and humbled to say I see you doing just that. In spite of the challenge of the last few years, your work in spreading love around this community has been creative, innovative, generous, and inspiring. Way to go!
Though the majority of the love-spreading work we do here often happens well beyond the boundaries of our church campus, the leadership has worked for years to make this campus a love factory for our common mission. As many of you know, we’ve planned for years to replace the Browse ‘N Buy building with a structure that will support our mission and our community at the highest level and maximize our ability to spread God’s love and care in our valley. Though transition and pandemic may have slowed our process, nothing stops the forward progress of our Kingdom building efforts.
Leadership here at St. John’s—vestry, staff, and many of you—have worked with architects, planners and community leaders to plan and design a building for the present-future work of St. John’s. Browse ‘N Buy will have expanded sales and sorting space to help us maximize our ability to receive donations and put that resource into the hands of those in our valley who so desperately need the high-quality, low-cost clothing and housewares we provide. On the ground floor of our new building, we will have a significant space designed to welcome the Jackson Cupboard giving its hungry clients a clean, above grade, shopping experience that supports their need and their dignity. The second floor of the new building will support more Browse retail space, offices for our team, and two units of housing to support our staff in the long term. A basement space with 10-foot ceilings will house a series of rooms dedicated to the Jackson Hole Recovery Community enabling concurrent meetings to support the whole family. Our project is both wonderfully bold and exceedingly loving.
During the month of August, you will have the opportunity to join one of many focus group meetings intended to help us get sharper focus on the planning process we’ve already engaged, confirm the needs we have to support our mission, view and comment on initial architectural renderings, and answer any emerging questions around our process. We need your attendance, support, and feedback to move the work forward.
As a start in communicating our schedule, we plan to hold focus group meetings following our church services on August 7, August 14, August 21, August 24 (Wednesday), September 4 and September 11.
Focus Group Study
Thank you for your participation! You are welcome to join in the youth room downstairs after the 8 AM or the 10 AM service. See you there.
For those of you unable to attend a Sunday morning group, we will most certainly schedule alternative meeting times. We plan to cap the meeting attendance at each of those meetings to around 25 folks, so that everyone’s thoughts might be heard and questions can be answered. We will post a schedule of all meetings on our website: stjohnsjackson.org and refresh meeting schedules on our social media.
Please mark your calendars for one of these meetings. Your feedback is essential. Each meeting will last about a half hour, and you will be asked to complete a questionnaire at the end of your session. Childcare can be scheduled for each meeting if you need it.
You don’t have to spend much time around St. John’s to know we are a strong and loving bunch committed to an over a century’s long tradition of spreading love in this community and well beyond. Thank you in advance for your help and support of this bold and loving project.
Love,
Jimmy
