Our series looking back twenty years enters its third month. Last month I shared the February 2006 issue of The Messenger, the one with "Welcome Home!" splashed across the cover and a photo collage of parishioners scraping, hauling and trimming to get our new Shoreline building into shape.

By March 2006, the parish has been in the building for a month. The cover photo of the March issue features Fr. Tom with his arm around his dear friend Fr. Evan Armatas, both of them in the new building for its first Divine Liturgy. Twenty years on, Fr. Evan has become one of the more recognizable voices in American Orthodoxy, with several published books and popular podcasts, and a thriving parish in Loveland, Colorado. At the time this photo was taken he was a relatively recently-ordained Priest! What another gift of timing that Fr. Evan was able to serve that first Divine Liturgy alongside Fr. Tom.

Fr. Tom uses the freshly-painted walls and upgraded light fixtures of the new building as a metaphor for entering Great Lent. He borrows an image from Henri Nouwen that many of us know: each of us was created as a masterpiece by God's own hands, but over time other people paint over our canvas with their own colors, their own ideas of who we should be. The spiritual work of Great Lent, Fr. Tom writes, isn't to paint over the mess with something prettier. It's to faithfully scrape off the old paint, the old definitions, and the old stories that have come to define us in negative ways, so God's original beauty can shine through.

Meanwhile in 2026, concrete is getting poured and new spaces are slowly starting to take shape. We started this building project by ripping down and pulling apart, and now what's usually hidden — rebar, piping, plumbing stacks — is all exposed. There are still debris piles and places where "it has to look worse before it looks better." Fr. Tom's twenty-year-old comparison of renewing a building and renewing the soul still describes both kinds of building work pretty well.

Two articles I'll draw to your attention. The first is Mark Powell's "What's So Great About Orthros?" article. If you're like me and don't understand nearly enough about the musical traditions of our faith, it's a gem. Mark walks through what Orthros actually is, why it's structured the way it is, and what it's for. "Orthros is a service that is first meant to be listened to, so that the hymns can really speak to you directly as you hear them." If you've ever wondered why the chanters are doing what they're doing, or felt vaguely intimidated by the service, or just want to deepen your Sunday worship, this is a great piece.

The second is Richard Mosher's stewardship article, "Good News from the Vineyard," on page 9. He's writing as the parish's stewardship chairman, just weeks after the first Liturgy in the new building, and he opens with this:

Many years of prayers and hard work. So many voices and hands have gotten us to this stage. Taso Chrisafis. Tom Themelis. Fr. Tom. Alex White. Aina Braxton. Mary Barber. A string of dedicated Parish Councils. Dozens more whose names I don't even know: people who served on committees, made phone calls, wrote checks, asked hard questions, prayed quietly. Prayer and hard work mostly doesn't get photographed. A lot of what it takes to bring a parish into the future happens in planning sessions nobody remembers or in fundraising phone calls no one overhears. But it accumulates, year over year, until one day a building gets blessed.

The full PDF is below. Click on the cover image to download. Enjoy and I'll see you next month for April.

Warmly,

Erica