Called to Serve: Saying Goodbye and Looking Ahead

It is hard to believe that it is already the Fourth of July. We often view this holiday as the halfway point of summer. Hopefully we have many more beautiful days to enjoy, but we also have a lot of work to accomplish this summer. One of our main tasks is to complete some hiring. 

Recently we received the resignation of Antoinette Kaiser. Antoinette has been our Evangelization and Discipleship Coordinator. She originally was hired to lead our middle school youth and more recently has been involved in leading our high school youth and Confirmation program. She has also directed our pro-life activities. Antoinette is looking forward to moving to Kansas, where she can be closer to her family. We are grateful for the work Antoinette has done for us and the friendship she has forged with many of us. She brought a wonderful program called Evangelical Catholic into our parish and has helped many of us to be more missionary minded. We wish her God’s blessings on the next segment of her journey.

We also received the resignation of Brigitta Kaiser (Antoinette’s sister). Brigitta has been leading our middle school youth, live-streaming, and projection for Mass. She has been a regular sub at our school that included stints as a long-term sub. Brigitta will be with us until January but will be transitioning by this fall from leading our middle school youth. At that time, she will be moving and beginning a more formal period of discernment with the Salesian Sisters. We are also grateful for the work Brigitta has done for us, especially the versatility of picking up tasks wherever she was needed. We promise her our prayers during her time of discernment.  

Jack Todd, who has assisted with our cleaning duties at church, will also be moving along this summer. Jack started working for us as a high school student and now that he has graduated is looking forward to moving on to his next job. We thank Jack for doing the often unnoticed tasks of vacuuming, emptying garbage, washing windows, and vacuuming even more (we have a lot of carpeting in our church.) We also wish him God’s blessings for his future. 

We already bid farewell to Nancy Hoffman who kept our school office running during the very busy morning hours. Nancy has decided to start enjoying her well-deserved retirement that is sure to include playing tennis and pickle ball. We were blessed with the work she has done at our school, previously as our school’s athletic director and more recently as working in our school office. God’s blessings Nancy, and enjoy retirement. 

We also bid farewell to two of our school teachers at the end of the school year, Mrs. Austrum, one of our Kindergarten teachers and Mrs. Simkins, our Spanish teacher. We were blessed to have both of them serve at our school and wish them God’s blessings always.

This may seem like a lot of staff leaving, and it is. We also have over fifty employees. (We pay over $2 million in wages and salaries annually.) It is not surprising that we are often in a position where we need to hire. We have already posted for the school positions and will be posting the parish positions in the next week. We will post in the bulletin and online if you believe you may be called to serve our parish. 

As we bid particularly Antoinette and Brigitta farewell, we are looking at what we offer to our middle and high school youth and how we can enhance our programming for our kids, especially in light continuing to move from being maintenance focused to missionary. Our desire is to prepare future generations of Catholics to be missionary focused and apostolic in their zeal for our faith.

(For full job postings, click HERE)