Annual Report
Every year tells a story.
At the center of Gethsemane’s story in every year is God’s presence: enlivening, challenging, comforting. Our story this year includes people choosing to remain connected, even when connection looks different than it has in the past. It’s about being church as a community listening for what neighbors need, learning new rhythms, and discovering over and again that faith is most vibrant when it engages real life.
In 2025 we continued to organize ourselves in three emphases– Life Together, Faith & Ministry, and Resources. These overlap like strands of a braid: community, mission, and stewardship holding one another and always drawing us more deeply into another aspect.
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Life Together
Sunday mornings remain the heartbeat of our community. Gathered in pews and joined through online footage, worship connects and centers us. Online services have carried many through illness, distance, and complicated schedules. Still, we remember ancient truth that faith is embodied. It comes alive in hugs and handshakes as we share Christ’s peace; it is felt in the weight of communion bread in our hands and the resonance of voices singing together.
Recognizing the value of both, the question is not whether to connect digitally or physically, but how to do both with integrity in 2026 and beyond. Attendance patterns have changed; expectations have shifted. While mourning what has ended, we ask what might be next – wondering about afternoon worship, new forms of gathering, and online spaces designed more for conversation than observation.
One of the year’s brightest moments was an intergenerational journey through Manna and Mercy by Daniel Erlander. During the season of Lent, the chapel filled with questions, art projects, laughter, and honest wrestling with Scripture guided by Pr Mary Lindberg. Paired with weekly reflections by Jon McClung and the Rhythms of Humanity podcast he produced with Pr Joanne Engquist, the series created multiple doorways into the same story. Many shared that it changed how they read the Bible – not as distant history, but as a lens for today.
We rejoiced to receive into our community's life these newly baptized members: Leslie McSpadden, Zoe Sorto, and Ben Ballinger Tartakoff.
In 2025, our community also changed as we experienced the deaths of Elizabeth Steele, Barbara Chamberland, Mary Foster, and Dick Ellison. None had been able to be physically present in worship in recent years, but each leaves marks on our community through their faithful lives among us across the years.
Worship centers us, and mission sends us.
Give.Share.Eat – Nine Events, nearly 700K Meals
In 2025, Gethsemane again partnered with Hope Center for its ninth meal-packaging event, approaching 700,000 meals assembled by hands young and old. What began as an uncertain experiment has become a consistent lifeline. In May, 54,000 meals were distributed within a single week – demand higher than ever amid economic strain and increased fears that keep many away from traditional food pantries. A second event was rescheduled from September to late January 2026 when another 54,000 meals were packaged by about 150 church members and community volunteers.
The work is both beautiful and heartbreaking: beautiful because neighbors show up; heartbreaking because they’re needed. Still, we take literally these words of Jesus in the gospel: “You give them something to eat.”
Faith & Ministry
Rhythms of Humanity
The podcast grew in unexpected ways. Listeners – many with no direct connection to Gethsemane – found a space beyond the building where faith meets headlines, doubt, and ordinary life. In a time when Christian nationalism dominates the airwaves, this quieter, compassionate witness matters. Even though direct engagement and responses are few, the stories travel farther than we see. The impact is notable as a means of reaching out to a community beyond the building, offering a perspective to be shared with no strings attached.
Immigration Accompaniment
Over the years, policies have grown harsher. Intensifying fears prevent some from coming to church or going to work. Many can’t make ends meet and worry about safety when seeking assistance. Our calling is simple and costly: to be present together, using whatever privilege each of us has to protect the human dignity of all. The singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer’s words call to us, wondering if we’ll be sanctuary: “Will you be my refuge? My haven in the storm? Will you keep the embers warm when my fire's all but gone?”
In 2025 we grieved to pray farewell and godspeed to one family who gave up on seeking asylum to establish a home in a third country. We continue in close connection with many others who continue on the way, inviting us into their lives as they seek to “carry on.”
On April 9, 2017 Gethsemane declared itself a sanctuary congregation, beginning a journey that has reshaped us. Neighbors once unknown are deeply loved community members and friends. We try to learn how to speak the languages of each other, in prayer and over shared refreshments. More than 60 individuals (from 17+ families) have sojourned among us – accompanied to court, detention, school registrations, life passages, immigration check-ins, and the daily labor of processing all that it means to leave home and make new homes.
Offrenda from 2024
Resources
The heading of resources might seem uninteresting when compared to how we tend life together or reach out to the wider community, but at the heart of this is space, people, and possibility. In 2025 that was marked by several key decisions.
We spent a year listening—to each other and to the needs of our wider community by way of partners, key leaders, and marginalized populations. We engaged consultants from Relèven to work with us in devising a plan to take next steps after the spring closure of Mary’s Place Women’s Day Center.
Through the summer, the lower level continued to be used by the re-forming Church of Mary Magdalene (now housed at St. James Cathedral). In September, Council received a final report from Relèven about next steps and chose not to engage a real estate broker initially, but to seel ways to deepen relationships based in shared values as we explore new uses of the building.
In October, the congregation called Pr Kari Lipke to return in 2026 to part-time pastoral ministry at GLC in order to allow Pr Joanne Engquist to increase attention on the creation of a community hub in the building’s lower level. Two organizations already are committed to sharing space.
Petra Bistro moved its catering operations into the downstairs kitchen, bringing new energy – and more than a few delicious meals into the church – while also creating possibilities for food-justice collaboration and job training.
Dacha Theatre will rehearse in a large community room downstairs through spring, drawn by rooms large enough for imagination. This description of their emphasis on the playful inspires: “We believe that tomorrow could be the best day yet. The worlds we create are full of hope, connection, and empathy. We use laughter as a way to open up to big, maybe scary new ideas.”
These first steps barely touch the potential of our downtown space, yet they show something of what can happen when a church chooses to connect its building in service to a community, not simply to collect rent.
Volunteers
With busier households and longer commutes, to share time as a volunteer is often harder now than in years past. Yet it may be more important, as well. Community is not mostly something to receive; it is something we create. And each offering of one’s abilities is more than a service the budget doesn’t have to cover, it’s a giving of self and a means of building connection. Gethsemane is graced with the gifts of many who serve – often behind the scenes – extending welcome, enhancing the beauty of our space, and serving the needs of so many week in and out.
Stewardship with Integrity
A treasurer’s report will offer detail of the year’s finances. But in summary, 54 households gave offerings between $10 and $14,000 this year. In late December, GLC received a nearly $80,000 legacy gift from the estate of Barbara Chamberland! These resources combine with return on investments (ELCA Foundation and Mission Investment Funds) and several grants to fund the ministries of Gethsemane. Careful bookkeeping and independent financial review continue to safeguard trust.
While costs of staffing and facility maintenance remain a significant challenge – especially given a 100-year partnership with Compass Housing Alliance for shared expenses related to the onsite 50 units of affordable housing – Gethsemane is committed to ongoing honest evaluation of what is needed and what is possible as we build a sustainable model for the years ahead.
The Year Ahead
The year ahead invites courage as we:
• center ourselves in the good news of God’s love for all
• explore and reimagine worship that is both embodied and accessible
• deepen faith formation practices for all ages – exploring how to think, not what to think
• expand our work of advocacy for justice
• continue GiveShareEat as a food resource
• accompany and learn from immigrant neighbors
• create hope and joy through new and renewed building partnerships
• explore staffing models that expand community connections and provide sustainability
We do not know every outcome. But we know whose we are and what we feel called to be: a sanctuary tending the sick, feeding the hungry, and embodying welcome.
Time and again, we commit to this as ones who question honestly, laugh often, and dare to believe that tomorrow may be the best day yet.
Let’s do this – together.