This is a letter sent on March 27th, 2026 by Fr. Josh Bowron after the 2026 Annual Meeting where the Parish Vision and Mural Announcement were given:

My Dear St. Martinites, 

I am writing to follow up from my address at the annual meeting on Sunday, March 15. This is long, so I’m making a podcast you can listen if you don’t have time to read through it. In any case, please take some time to read, or listen, and pray with what follows. Click HERE to listen.

At the annual meeting I outlined the current social situation we find ourselves in; a time that those who study these things call the VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. Justi and I have been talking about this for years, nothing new here. What is new is that I’d like for us to intentionally be the opposite of VUCA; to be stable, reliable, orderly, and clear. 

Further, I talked about how we are, by every measurable data point, a thriving parish: attendance, budget, engagement, etc. However, our thriving is in a declining environment; churches are shrinking in the United States. At a recent conference, I learned that the real dividing line between the churches that are and will thrive, are firmly in the above 200 Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) category. We are there, and have been for a long time, but now we need to choose to grow. If we don’t choose to grow, then we will go into a maintenance season which looks like, over a period of a few years: a winnowing of staff, possible clergy changes, then an attempt at growth with a new rector. Rinse and repeat. 

What if, instead of entering that maintenance season, we choose to grow? Usually when churches talk about growth, they only mean getting new members in the pews. There’s some sort of effort at invitation and a lot is put on the staff to attract new members by being relevant etc. etc. The growth that I am talking about will certainly include developing a culture of invitation that we will develop soon, but for now and firstly, St. Martin’s needs to focus our growth in two areas in particular: leadership and clarity of mission. 

It is a commonplace of the leadership literature that if you want to grow an organization you grow the leadership. There are three parts to this growth that I am calling “structural maturity.” The vestry and I are in our third iteration of a process of bringing the vestry more into direct leadership of the parish, less board-like and more responsible and responsive to the parish. That is going apace, which we hope you have noticed; and I’ve learned a lot lately about how to strengthen that work. The vestry will also be rethinking and learning about how to do our annual giving campaigns more effectively.

This summer we will launch a plan for how to more thoroughly share staff, vestry, and ministry goals with the wider parish so that the many resources: spiritual, material, relational, financial; can more easily find their way to those goals. The goal of any one ministry will now be the goal of the entire parish.

The third part of this structural maturity is turning every ministry of the parish from the vestry to the altar guild and every group in-between, into a learning Community of Practice. This is something I’m learning about through the diocese in my role as the dean of the Charlotte convocation. Communities of Practice are what we’ve always done in committee work, with the change that each ministry will be actively engaged with learning from other churches. We will be diversifying and improving our skills of being the church. 

All the above about vestry development, annual giving, staff and ministry goals, and our various groups becoming learning communities is how we are going to mature and strengthen St. Martin’s for decades to come. This was the first part of my address at the annual meeting. 

The second aspect of my address turned to clarity of ministry. Mother Justi is leading a parish-wide discernment of who we are fundamentally as a parish. This is why there has been such an emphasis on Matthew 25 as it was the scripture that converted St. Martin himself. We’ve been praying with this scripture through Lent. The vision of Matthew 25, of finding Christ in the poor is fundamental to who we are and our entire Be With approach that we’ve been cultivating for 11 years. Additionally, the image of the Good Shepherd is central to our identity: it is the image of the stained glass behind the altar, it is the emblem of our formation program for our children. We as a parish find our culture between these two images of finding Christ in the pain of the world and being found by Christ the Good Shepherd. 

What Justi is leading is a clear understanding, informed by those who invest in prayer with these scriptures, of our ministry to the city, especially the poor in our neighborhood. At the end of that discernment time it is my sincere hope that each and every member of our parish will know exactly what it is that we are doing in service and have a sense of ownership of the ministry of the parish. I expect by the fall we will be celebrating our renewed clarity of our ministry together.

So, I don’t know what we call this season of these two movements in our parish: growth in leadership and clarity of our purpose. If you have a good name for it, let me know because we need something to encapsulate what we are doing. 

Finally, at the annual meeting, I tried to bring all these threads together about the VUCA world, our strengthening structures of administration and leadership, and our clarity about our ministry into one image. This is when I floated the idea of the mural. Here’s our big exterior wall that faces Uptown: 

I propose that we paint a mural on that wall, facing the Powers and Principalities (Ephesians 6:12) with an evocative image that tells the city who we are, who we stand with, and who we follow. The below image is not what it will end up looking like exactly, its simply a sketch done in a few minutes, but it is meant to excite your imagination.

This image hints that we aren’t simply painting an icon, it will be art: it will not be instantly reducible to a message, but instead an invitation. Vestry member Heather Carty-Ward describes the mural as a resposnisbliity. A responsibility to be the kind of community that the mural describes. 

If you were at the annual meeting you know that the feeling in the room was electric. The next day, parishioner Katie Welch summarized what we are thinking with this: 

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Christian imagination. And how that is the remedy to so much despairing in the world, especially in the political realm. 

What a fantastic illustration of radical hope than a meeting that begins with all of the challenges of stewarding an old church and culmination of that meeting is a larger than life art project. It’s Biblical, hopeful, neighbor-first, foolish (in the very best way), and courageous. 

It seems like these projects happen less and less because there is a lot of ‘what about using that money for the poor.’ Which isn’t a dumb question. But it is a capitalistic question. 

Anyway, I love the Church. I love St. Martins. And I love our commitment to the visual arts. “

I share the concern about giving this money to the poor. Anything we raise above the cost of the mural is going to our newly clarified ministry that Justi is leading. What I think this mural does is it no longer allows us to hide. Putting this image on the building, larger than life, tells everyone what we are about and I expect our ministerial impact to only deepen with this mural. 

We’ve had some extremely encouraging early movement from the parish on this. It is my hope that every single parishioner gives something to this effort. The effort is not just the mural, it is a renewed season of prayer and commitment to the poor, a commitment by each of us to enter more deeply into this community and to join a ministry.

I expect that the matter of the funding of the mural will be settled very soon. We have a very generous lead gift and several early birds already. There’s a great deal of excitement. If you are motivated by this, give what you can in the next few days, I expect to give the parish an update on Wednesday next week. If you would like to be a part of that update, send in your gifts before Tuesday. Jane has set up a drop down menu for immediate gifts; choose the "outdoor mural” option. If you want to plan a gift, send Jane a note so she can include it in next week’s update. 

The design process is beginning right after Easter, Lillian Richards, our Director of Creative Engagement will be managing the project. She will be calling together folks from the parish to pray with images and scripture while working with our chosen artist to create the image that is authentic to who we are. Be on the lookout for those opportunities. Lillian is also putting together an FAQ that will go with the website for this project, you can send queries to her at lillian@stmclt.org. To learn more about our artist go here.

I’ve been your rector for eleven years. I’ve always been excited to be your rector, but this feels like the cusp of new life coming into our parish; with renewed clarity of mission and the structures to healthily facilitate whatever growth we experience along the way. 

Peace be with you, 

Josh+

Rev. Joshua D. Bowron

Rector, St. Martin’s Charlotte, NC