Keeping the Home Fires Burning at First Parish — A Special One-Time Request   [ 2010-03-11 ]

With the annual giving mailing set for the first week of February, members and friends of First Parish Church are asked to renew — or begin for the first time — financial support of this beautiful community.

Special One-Time Gift: This year, once you have decided on how you can continue to grow in generosity with your pledge for annual support of the church, all who can are being asked to dig even deeper and make a special one time pledge or gift (payable over two years) toward the cost of replacing our ancient and odd oil heating systems in the Meeting House and Parish House with entirely new, highly efficient, cost-saving gas systems.

Our New Gas Heating System: Up and running for several weeks now, these new systems are giving us cleaner air inside and outside, lower fuel and maintenance costs, extensive alarm systems, and greater ability to heat just the spaces we want to heat, as we use them. We are confident that the contractor chosen for the job — Weather Wise, of Brookline, NH — and the cost, $64,170, are the best possible. If you want to know more about the process, contractor, design, and equipment, please speak to any of the trustees; they can steer you to the experts.

A special orange pledge card for the Keeping the Home Fires Burning project will have been included along with the annual giving mailing (or you can download a copy here). We ask that you return this pledge card to the church office by February 15th.

The amazing news is that mostly by word of mouth 20 church households have already given or pledged to shoulder a percentage of total project cost amounting to almost 50% of what we need.

This is where you come in— we believe that we are going to need at least another 40 church households to commit to a percentage of the total cost that is right for them so we can reach our goal of raising the entire amount by February 15th.

See the chart showing our amazing progress so far in orange, and how with your help to fill in the green areas we can reach our goal.

We are asking that all members and friends who possibly can pledge or give a percentage (or fraction of a percentage) of the total project cost, to be paid over the next 2 years — over and above their annual pledge that helps support all we do. For example, 1% of the total cost is $641.70, payable over 2 years — this comes to $6.17 per week over that period.

Here’s a link to a table showing how taking on a percentage of the total project translates into weekly, monthly, or annual payments over the next 2 years.

With your help, we can literally keep the fires burning in our beloved church home.

Thank you from the Board of Trustees: Karen Johnson, Allen King, Dave Kimpton

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