If you haven’t been to church lately, you are in for a big surprise! Our “new” sanctuary is nearly complete and church services will be back in there starting August 1 st . The new walls and ceiling are textured and painted and the new windows are all in. Not only are the windows on the creek side taller allowing more “nature” into the sanctuary, we have more windows on both sides of the sanctuary than we did before. Another obvious improvement is the new carpet which has been installed, thanks to some generous and anonymous donors. Behind the drywall is where the big improvement resides. We now have insulation in the ceiling and in all the walls. For the first time, I am actually hoping for a heat wave, just to see how much more comfortable the sanctuary will be during service! I suspect that it will be much better.

There are still some areas that are not complete. A couple of things will be finished within the next few weeks, such as the addition of window blinds and a new sound system. These items are already in progress and should be installed by the end of August. One area that the construction committee (Myself, Frank Satterwhite, Meg Jurich and Sherry Thomas) decided to hold off making any final decision is what we want to do with the lights and possibly fans in the ceiling area running down the center of the sanctuary.

Here, we thought it best to wait and see how comfortable the worship space will be during different parts of the year. I suspect that with the new insulation, we will experience a vast improvement without any fans. The question will be whether or not fans will provide further improvement or not. One aspect of the project has not been discussed much is lowering our energy consumption. This was an important goal of our Green Sanctuary action plan.

We have already noticed improvements in our energy bills with the completion of the new office and fellowship hall/classroom addition, and now with the sanctuary insulation, we should see further reduction of energy use. In the area of lighting, we had to make a short-term compromise; we decided to use recessed lighting, which had the benefit of being less obtrusive, but required the use of incandescent light bulbs. One of the advantages is that we can dim the lights, which adds flexibility, and perhaps produces a small bit of energy reduction.

Our long term goal is to be able to replace the incandescent with LED (Light Emitting Diode) lighting in the not too distant future when their cost and performance improve. A number of members of the congregation have been involved and have given input during the sanctuary upgrade. Besides the construction committee mentioned earlier, Dirk Dino has been a big help in pulling together information on the sound system, and we have had useful input from Kay Athos and Bob Stortz as well. Others, too many to mention, have also contributed and I would like to thank you for your help. Last but not least, I would like to thank Frank Satterwhite, for overseeing the day-to-day work on the project. Without his efforts, this project would not have happened.

Darryl, President Board of Trustees