ANNUAL REPORT 2020
In the book of 2 Chronicles in the Old Testament, Jehoshaphat and his team are surrounded by all kinds of challenges. Like so many families, organizations and churches, this past year has felt like being under pressure from all sides! Yet the message to Jehoshaphat is the same for us: remember that the battle is God’s and not ours! Our invitation is to go and stand in our place, and let God do His work. And that is exacty what we have seen this year!
Highlights:
A thriving downtown church and space sharing ministry despite COVID-19!
Our second year in a row with a financial surplus
A sober view of the continuing capital requirements of our building
I hope you will enjoy this year’s annual report and celebrate all of the ministry, financial, capital and wider ministry blessings we have received. May this year of COVID-19 be one which deepens our character and points us not just to the ‘re-starting’ of church in 2021 but truly, an opportunity to think again and afresh about how we can reach Montreal by playing our part in sharing again the good news about Jesus and the transformation of society.
Yours in Christ
The Rev’d Graham Singh
Incumbent
TEACHING AND PASTORAL CARE
At the heart of St Jax is our teaching and study of the Bible. Our Sunday services are always full of life and teaching from a varied slate of speakers from our congregation and from guests invited from our network of ministry relationships around the world. It is so enriching to hear from different perspectives to enrich our growth as followers of Christ. As with all other ministries in the church, lockdown moved us to adapt our teaching to an online format. As a result, we have developed new skills with video messages, sourcing valuable content from trusted sources as well as producing our own! It’s proving to be a key capacity for the future of church. We will likely never stop broadcasting our services online even when things return back to “normal.”
Pastoral care in our church has also shown adaptability in the new conditions brought on by the pandemic. We are focusing our team efforts on regular phoning, sending of video greetings, essentially using online media to foster connections and a sense of caring.
A huge thanks to our teaching and pastoral care teams!
WORSHIP
2020 demanded a certain amount of flexibility to be sure. Jouvence was an opportunity to teach some new songs to the church which we enjoyed together and singing them in subsequent weeks helped us remember the warm intimacy of our winter retreat. In March, when lockdown began, we moved to online services where the ministry of music was relegated to video song choices to compliment our Sunday Zoom church. Despite these changes, the team continued to grow, allowing various members to select the Sunday song lists which brought a freshness and also served to expand our live repertoire. The team re-convened in September for our live services through to the end of the year. The Christmas Carol service was an enjoyable project and featured several original songs from the team as well as allowing a number of our young musicians the opportunity to participate: a real win for the church! Our St Jax flavour worship continues to be a positive component that contributes to the uniqueness and warmth of our community.
A huge thanks to our worship & technical teams!
ALPHA
Alpha continues to be intrinsic to St Jax, providing the ideal opportunity for training and experience in ministry and leadership. We have had Alpha running continuously throughout 2020, lockdown notwithstanding! Our Iranian community has adopted it as a vital component of their growth together in Christ. It has been a joy to work with them and get to know this beautiful part of the fabric of St Jax! Our dear Mahasti has been a stalwart leader here, and you really ought to taste her amazing Iranian food!
As with other ministries in the church, we adapted to the online format because of COVID, and we discovered along with many churches around the world that Alpha works just as effectively online as in person, perhaps even moreso! The online format seems to allow people to open up to each other more easily in the discussion groups.
Alpha has once again been a rich and beautiful experience for us at St Jax in 2020. And 2021 will surely be more of the same. Why not pray about who you can invite to attend?
A huge thanks to our amazing Alpha volunteers!!
DATE NIGHTS
Date Nights, our St Jax-named version of the Marriage Course has become a staple in the annual program at church. Once again, our course was well-attended and proved to be important in the lives of the 15 couples who attended. Date Nights also is proving to be a point of entry into the church for couples in the city. We love that!
This year, we began with our customary fine hospitality and romantic and intimate atmosphere; this ran for ⅔ of the duration until we had to adapt to an online format when lockdown came into place. Despite the dramatic change, the quality and impact of the course continued and we finished strong. We are looking forward to a strong and much-expanded online session in 2021!
Thank you to our awesome DATE NIGHTS team!
KIDS
With the pandemic, we faced many changes in our children’s ministry. On average, we had the opportunity to serve at least five families a week. Due to government restrictions, we were unable to provide toddler or youth ministry after the month of February. We used around 200 hours of volunteer work, from a pool of seven volunteers. We did have the privilege of welcoming two new families this year. We adjusted our ministry to deliver Sunday services on Zoom, often simultaneously with in-person church. We were able to stay connected with opportunities like Zoom and pastoral calls. Throughout the pandemic and various changing circumstances in our church and city, the children have continued to be resilient and grow in their faith.
THANK YOU to our creative, inspiring and energetic youth and childrens’ teams!
PRAYER
What a blessing Prayer was throughout 2020 leading up to and covering the covid pandemic. We started off the year with a day of prayer in January when we sought The LORD for insights and signposts to lead us through the year. We continued with approximately 4 hours of prayer each week, along with a monthly day of prayer, until covid started. We also had occasional “Praying Sundays” where the Sunday service was dedicated to learning about prayer and praying for each other and timely situations.
As the pandemic impacted our abilities to meet, all prayer meetings moved seamlessly online to Zoom. While the children were in lockdown, we started up a weekly children’s prayer time that continued until the end of July. The children have continued with one “Praying Sunday” per month.
From the end of March to the beginning of May we held the Prayer Course online with over 20 participants for 7 weeks. Many of these participants now join our weekly prayer times. What a joy to join in community as we pray for one another and exchange worries and concerns for Our Father’s peace that transcends all understanding.
THY KINGDOM COME led up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, allowed us to focus prayers on loved ones and acquaintances to come to know JESUS. This included a daily early evening prayer time on Zoom for the 11 days between Ascension and Pentecost along side our regular prayer times. What a rich time to meet daily to focus our affections on our LORD and King!
Alpha was also supported with prayer this year with several St. Jax members coming together weekly praying for those who were participating in the online course. It was a blessed time as we gathered to pray for others to experience a deeper connection with GOD and for expanding faith. Thank You LORD! You are teaching us how to pray!
Thank you to our faithful team of prayer warriors!
CENTRE ST JAX
Years from now, when we look back on 2020, we may notice that under the camouflage of the pandemic, we quietly underwent a major transformation: This eventful year will mark the moment when we ceased to simply be a church with a bunch of tenants, and transformed into a fully formed community that cooperatively shares this space which we now call the Centre St-Jax, dedicated to its Christian mission, to social impact, and to the arts. What began as a wild startup events business where much depended on a lot of ad hoc scrambling and bandaid solutions has been structured into a well-oiled machine capable of managing the many moving parts of this community.
This progress didn't happen because Covid afforded us a break. On the contrary, one of the great surprises of 2020 was how busy we were. After we were allowed to partially reopen at the end of June, the Centre came alive with new (safe and socially distant) activities.
Our resident circus company, le Monastère, took advantage of the absence of other activities in the building to open up more spaces to regular circus training, and it's now common on any given weekday to see tens of different circus performers training in different parts of the building, each in their own 400 square foot space. Monastère also did a beautiful renovation of the basement gym. The goal is for it to remain a training space during the week, and a circus-themed event space on weekends.
Our garden underwent a radical transformation this summer after we partnered with XP_Montréal to install a stage, decorations, lighting, and various lawn furniture. Multiple circus and other artistic performances were held every week throughout the summer. Expect even greater things next summer!
Hosting different congregations
We welcomed new Christian congregations. On any given Sunday, we now play host to 5 services.
Church 21 is a network of evangelical Christian congregations in Montreal, who now have their headquarters at the Centre St-Jax, in the Mackay Gallery. Church 21 currently hosts a small Sunday evening service in the gym. The longer term plan is for St-Jax to co-develop a young-adult-centred evening service with them.
Snowball Church is the Montreal branch of an extremely popular and fast-growing evangelical movement in Brazil. They are passionate worshipers and oriented towards sports. Their very young congregation has just made the transition from being a house church and they don't have a full time pastor, but they don't lack energy and the bring a wonderful new presence to our community.
Among the major changes around here, the Centre will no longer be managing most of the events business, which has been transferred to le Monastère. The conditions of this new arrangement ensure that our spaces will continue to be made available at generous discounts to events which have a positive social impact, including events which further our Christian mission.
Many faces have changed, with most of the original Centre St-Jax team leaving for other project, and new members joining. Paul Bode has gone from a temporary contractual position to being the full time Operations Manager. Emma Drinnan is taking on more responsibilities in event hosting and site management. Manuel Acevedo is our new technical director and Apo Papadopoulos is our secondary technician.
FINANCIAL REPORT
CONCLUSION & 2021!
Looking ahead, 2021 is a year of keep our belt tightened, continuing to innovate in ministry and hoping that we can return to sharing our building more as COVID-19 restrictions lift (we pray!) We are currently submitting a number of plans for the use of our garden along with our partners at Cirque Le Monastere.
Perhaps the most significant change to look forward to in 2021 is the possible sale of some part of the church lands. With $4-5 million of deferred maintenance on our building and after 5 years of this last chapter of tireless capital fundraising, plans are being drawn up now to look at the very hard decisions surrounding our capital. St Jax continues to be a project balancing the church ministry, community impact and heritage building challenges and finances. Although we have tried a number of methods for sealign off one aspect from another, the simple fact is that these pressures have all become harder and will need serious attention in 2021. We delight at our ongoing support of the work of the Trinity Centres Foundation helping ask these same questions around Canada and the simple answer we come across consistently is: this is time of major change for the church in Canada and the great news is: God has seen His church through such seasons before and He will provide again here, we pray in faith!