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St. Helena's is a small church building. If the pews were filled I don't think the building would hold more than about 180 people, and that would be cramming them in. In the rest of the building, upstairs there's a couple of small offices and one small room we use for holding music and educational supplies; sometimes we have a few children in there. Downstairs there's a small kitchen and a room that's about 25' by 40'. That's it. On 5 acres of land that's probably worth about $2,000,000, given it's location.

We are a small parish, with about 40 pledges coming in. GC 2003 didn't help at all, let's just say. Our music program is strong - we have 8 in our choir (I sing Tenor or Bass as the occasion demands), but we practice a lot and our choirmaster, who is on the faculty at Roosevelt University downtown in Chicago and has his MA in Music is excellent. We are an Anglo-Catholic parish, but while the Offertory might be a 16th Century Latin piece one Sunday, it could be a contemporary Gospel piece the next.

Our membership may be down, but we are amazingly successful in getting people to join if we can just get them in the door. There are no strangers in our parish. There's so few of us that pretty much everyone does something, and we find reasons to get together outside of Sunday morning pretty often. Mens' Club, Womens' Club, spaghetti dinners (open to the community), etc.. We sponsor a Cub Scout Pack and a Boy Scout Troop, and there's no nonsense about maintaining the BSA's membership criteria.

We had a liberal priest, but his sermons concentrated on the Gospel of Jesus, not the gospel of social justice. If you asked him his opinions, he'd tell you, but he didn't cram them down people's throats. He had to leave when we could no longer afford to pay a full-time priest. Fortunately, he was able to find another full-time posting. So, we are using service priests and are looking for a part-time one.

Our next priest is bound to be liberal. We are in the Diocese of Chicago, where both bishops and the lay delegation voted for the ordination of V. Gene Robinson. I doubt the Diocese will recommend any conservative candidates. I'm on the search committee, so it'll be interesting to see. I'm more concerned with how whatever priest we get will work with the various people of the parish. Some of our parishioners are liberal, but many are not. Any priest who comes in here and tries to talk about injustice to gays and minorities every Sunday and wants to conduct same-sex blessings will be out pretty quick, because everyone in the parish, regardless of their feelings on the matter, recognizes that this would kill the parish.