Wow – what a busy Sunday! Today was the day that Mike spoke in all three services about the upcoming changes. My first glimmer of things to come was a group of Catholic women outside the chapel crying when we arrived. Father Jim was doing the same at all the masses today. It was a hard day. Change is always frightening and I think even more so when there have been so many changes made so quickly that are totally out of local control. As expected several are not happy. The Protestant side of the chapel lost a total of 3 contracts when AETC cut appropriated funds. For those non-military types….in the chapel it’s usually been expected that the military would pay for the “chapel service” and the tithing funds were used for extras to run those programs. Musicians, Religious Education Coordinators, Parish coordinators etc were paid by the government. This funding ended quite suddenly for our maj com. Tithing must now cover it all – and frankly – in the military many, many continue to tithe to their “home church” because they see the chapel as a “employment bennie”. {G}
We were so impressed with the growth in the contemporary service (student service) in the last few months. Both their chaplains will be leaving in the next month or so. In addition to all the new manning changes the normal PCS season will bring changes to the chapel as well.
I’ve been asking people to let me know when their churches had a service of just worship. I have so missed contemporary worship…who would have believed that this was available all the time at our very own chapel. The service began with *Jesus Freaks* and those kids can rock. Then we went into about 30 minutes of really wonderful worship. Mike preached and he loved the feed back from the students. They closed the service and then they stay and worship AFTER church too! Very fun. After service we went out to eat with another family. Mike was about to order a Chicken BLT for us to split when I told him that I didn’t feel like eating the devil’s meat. :::snort::: We split a chicken salad wrap and it was very good.
Stacia is incredibly stuffed up. I have thrown together a SAGE (co-op) brochure and am now going to go to bed.
3 comments:
DeEtta,
I may be wrong but I think the Army hasn't paid for contracts with Approp funds in quite a while (and we are all surviving) I am in the process now of bidding on the Catholic DRE&parish coordinator posistion at our new location.
By the army model of the chaplaincy we'd have 6 chaplains here - they cut us to 3. That is just to give you an idea of how deep the manning cuts are.
As for the contracts...it will depend on the chapel as to how bad this will initially hurt. One chapel we know of will simply cut one men's and one women's trip out and have enough to pay their youth and RE director...for both our catholic and protestant programs it is very different here. I think that is because this is basically a student base...so we have lots of students who are wonderful but not the tithing base of say E5's and O5's.....{G} Mike does think it will force folks to take ownership of the programs instead of thinking "ah well the Air Force will pay for that". {G}
You can imagine how hard it is for ALL not just the chaplaincy as we begin a 30% downsizing while still depoying in 3 areas around the world....
Yikes, those are deep cuts. I think you are right about the student base being part of the reason. Heck even where we are going in Germany there isn't a Catholic chaplain... they have a contract priest.
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