Update of our Merger

July, 2011

Beginning in March, a group of parishioners, staff members and Msgr. Tom have been meeting bi-weekly via phone conferences with Eric Schiedermayer.  Eric is the Director of Planning for the diocese.  The members of this group are Anne Kman, Ron Rueckert, Bill Morehead, Bonnie Moschkau and Msgr. Tom.

The discussions have focused on three areas that we need to accomplish in the process of officially merging and forming the Good Shepherd Parish.  These three areas include doing a complete inventory of all properties at our St. Joseph site and our St. James site including the school, converting our software programs to ParishSOFT (a database that the diocese is asking all parishes to use) and QuickBooks, and the registration of all of our parishioners to our new Good Shepherd Parish.

We have designed a process to complete our inventory, hopefully, by the middle of October.  This process involves dividing our two sites into many separate areas.  We are asking many of our parishioners to help do the inventorying so that no one person is asked to inventory too great an area.  We will be photographing and cataloging all of our properties and equipment in this process.  An electronic copy of the photos and catalog will then be sent to the diocese after we complete the process.

A second step in the process of merger is the registration of all of our parishioners.  We have prepared a registration form and we will begin this process of registering parish members in September.   We cannot simply move everyone who is presently registered at our St. Joseph site and our St. James site to our new parish.  We plan to begin the registration process in September.  This will help us in organizing the membership of our Good Shepherd Parish.

Perhaps, the greatest part of our discussions have centered on the transfer of our present software systems to ParishSOFT and QuickBooks.   We have also needed to address the telephone setup that will enable smooth communication to the different offices of the new parish as well as between staff members who will be working in different offices.

We continue to meet via telephone conferencing bi-weekly on Thursdays. 

If you have any thoughts that you would like to share with any of us who are working on this part of the merger, you can contact us via e-mail or phone.  See the listings below.