After initial reluctance, campaign takes off

Sometimes when a congregation has given and given, both of their money and themselves, it becomes a real challenge to ask them to do more.

That was the dilemma facing the Rev. Kim McArthur, incumbent of St. Andrew, Alliston, with the Our Faith-Our Hope campaign. The parish’s target was $160,000—yet the parishioners of St. Andrew’s had already given so much.

Alliston is a small community and St. Andrew’s congregation numbers about 100 people on Sundays. “We’re not a church with a lot of money, but people have a real heart,” says Ms. McArthur.

Over the course of the past several years, the congregation has raised more than $250,000 to restore and renovate three buildings. One century-old home is rented out by the church as two apartments. It needed to be gutted, insulated, rewired, roofed and brought up to code. Another home was the rectory, similarly rented out. It also needed to be roofed and renovated to become a retreat centre. The church itself received a new roof, along with many upgrades.

The parishioners accomplished it all. “When Our Faith-Our Hope came out, I was really reluctant to raise it, because the people had given so much, not just in money but in time, in help and in so many ways,” says Ms. McArthur.

In fact, she was so reluctant, she wrote a five-page letter to Archbishop Colin Johnson, explaining that the time was just not right for St. Andrew’s and asking that the parish be absolved of the task for a few years.

However, her own area bishop, George Elliott, asked her to reconsider, as Archbishop Colin Johnson would like every Anglican to be asked.

So Ms. McArthur launched the campaign. She got up in the church the following Sunday and was tentative in what she said. “I’ve never done fundraising before and I was very uncomfortable asking people for money,” she recalls.

But later, she had lunch with one of the parishioners, and he called her out for being so reluctant. He told her she was not asking for herself. She was asking people who already believe in their church whether they would invest in its future, if they are able.

She responded by asking if he knew how much the church wanted her to ask from him. “I gave a really large number,” she says, “and he said he’d have to think about that, but offered to help me on the campaign.”

A few days later, the parishioner phoned and told her he would make the pledge. “It made my heart soar,” she says.

Then she went to her husband and pointed out that she pays $2 a day for Tim Horton’s coffee. She suggested she put that money aside and he match it. “We could do $10,000,” she told her husband. “I want to do it.”

Then Ms. McArthur phoned a member of the church’s corporation and relayed the good news, and that member matched Ms. McArthur and her husband for another $10,000. So with just a handful of people, St. Andrew’s was well on its way to meeting its goal.

Ms. McArthur and the major donor booked four days of visiting, saw 14 people, and achieved their goal of $160,000. “Then the team just kept going,” she says. The end result of the campaign? St. Andrew’s has raised $207,000.

Ms. McArthur praises the congregation for its devotion. “I would like people to know how wonderful this congregation is, how much they have given already,” she says. “They love their church and want it to be there for the generations that follow.”