The year 2020 presented St. Simon’s, along with the rest of the world, with unique challenges, forcing us to think

and act creatively to work with and around the restrictions imposed on us by the COVID-19 pandemic. What

follows is a look back at the past year with the question “How did we celebrate God’s love and embody Christ in

2020?”

January began as most Januarys do . . . fond memories of

Christmas past and anticipation of the new year to come. 2020

held particular significance in that it marked an arrival point in the

21st century . . . by 2020 we will . . . sort of thing. And St.

Simon’s was looking forward with great anticipation to the calling

of its new rector, maybe even by summer. There was a virus

circulating in Wuhan, China, but we weren’t worried about it. We

celebrated the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ with a baptism of

our own. We greeted Ryann eagerly at the door, welcoming her

into our community, and gathered around her as our Interim

Rector, Bryan Cones, sat her in the middle of the baptismal font

and poured water over her head! Surrounding the altar, we

celebrated Eucharist with Ryann and each other.

February was a

busy month –

good thing it had

an extra day. We

held our Annual Meeting on February 23 and elected new

Wardens and Vestry members. We gathered for Table Tennis

Tuesday, and enjoyed a meal together followed by prayer at Walk-

In Wednesday. Our book groups met in member’s homes or at the

church to discuss their chosen book of the month and the

Centering Prayer group met in the St. John Room on Saturday

mornings to pray together. On a cold and snowy February

morning, we reached out to our Arlington Heights community,

bringing them Ashes To Go at the Arlington Heights Metra

Station.

March. It turned

out that our last

Sunday together was Sunday, March 8. Bishop Lee called upon us

“to help slow the spread of the disease . . . this is among our most

pressing Lenten disciplines.” That first Sunday, Bryan provided us

with a worship bulletin and a pre-recorded homily. By the next

week, we had begun our experiments of worship on Zoom! We

began with a bare-bones Liturgy of the Word with pre-recorded

offertories and a cappella hymns. Easter Day was our first

experience of accompanied, live music, as Walter had been able to

access a piano. Over the summer we experimented with an Agape

Blessing of Food and Drink, before settling into a pattern of

Morning Prayer. With each iteration, we deepened our experience

of prayer together, leaning into the practice of praying for each

other. Pre-pandemic, we had experimented with the Prayers of the

A Year in the Life of St. Simon’s Episcopal Church: Celebrating God’s Love, Embodying Christ in a Time of Pandemic

People, handing out cards with the names of individuals on our

prayer list to be voiced during the prayer. Now the chat feature in

Zoom allowed many voices to express many prayers that might

before have remained unspoken.

While there was initially hope that we would be back in church for

Easter in April (how naïve that seems in hindsight) that was not to

be. Instead we celebrated Palm Sunday and Easter at home. In the

mail we received a palm cross, lovingly made by members of our

Altar Guild, and a Prayer Book for Holy Week and the Three

Days, and then we gathered on Zoom for a Solemn Good Friday

service and a Festive Easter celebration. Also in the spring, St.

Simon’s Loves You signs began appearing in the front lawns of our

homebound parishioners and a sign at the back of our property

facing the hospital reminded patients and staff that we were

praying for them.

By May, we were beginning adjust to the new constraints on our

lives and continued experimenting with just what we could do. Jo Gantzer hosted a month-long Bible Study on the

Book of Acts via Zoom. Jessica Hauth organized a series of virtual

Happy Hours on Facebook Live. Our church school teachers

gathered our children on Zoom on Saturday afternoons for a story

and craft, to supplement the weekly mailings they were receiving

from the church. Our book groups met online. Amy Stomper

started Friday Night at the Movies, an opportunity to watch a

movie together from our homes and chat by text about it. Walter

Aldrich reconvened our music community for a time of listening

to and singing music together. Allison Newhouse continued to

meet with the youth group on Sunday afternoons via Zoom. Julie

Wood put together a video, featuring members of our community,

celebrating all of our high school, college and grad school

graduates. At the end of May, our children surprised us with a

special Pentecost pageant, pre-recorded from their homes.

By June, the shelter in place order had been lifted. While we were

still gathering via Zoom, we were ready to begin to experiment

with Adult Formation. In our first series, during Pride month, we

consider what it means to be an “affirming” congregation.

Members of our community shared what “affirming” meant to

them in Tuesday Reflections, and guest speakers and preachers

shared their experiences with the LGBTQ+ community. The pre-

pandemic plan had been to raise the Pride flag following the

Sunday service on Pride Sunday. We got it up there, just not with

the fanfare that we had anticipated. The Pride series was followed

by “Breathing Lessons,” a series on learning and action for Racial

Justice, led by Rene Schreiner and the Adult Formation Team.

Next, Mike Brue led us through “What do we owe each other?”, a

series on Economic Justice. Later in the fall we considered the role

of bishops in the Episcopal Church as we prepared to elect the

thirteenth Bishop of Chicago in December.

Gardens and a Food Truck were the focus of July outdoors at St.

Simon’s. The Green Team invited members of our community to

tend our flower and vegetable garden each week, and Kirsten

Krause invited people to a time of quiet prayer in the Memorial

Garden. Members of our community continued to gather on

Wednesday evenings via Zoom for a check-in and service of music

and prayer together as well. We partnered with the nursing staff at

the hospital to host the Toasty Cheese food truck for a delicious

mid-day meal.

St. Simon’s continued its ministry of helping to feed the homeless

during the summer months. In the spring we had provided meals

for PADS guests who were being housed in local hotels during the

pandemic. By August we were well seasoned at how to put

together a “Summer Supper” for neighbors in need of a hot meal.

After packaging up 25 or 30 meals to be delivered to PADS

guests, we provided a drive-thru pick-up of meals, open to anyone,

on one evenings in in each of July, August and September. In the

fall, we provided breakfast and lunch meal kits for the PADS

guests. These kits were designed to feed two people two meals a

day for a week and included cereal, milk, bread, pb&j, tuna, servings of fruits and veggies, as well as snacks. In

total, 84 members of our parish helped to provide meals for over

1200 people this year.

Additionally we continued our support of the ReVive Center for

Healing and Housing and their Christmas basket program. While

in previous years, we shopped in stores for gifts for individuals,

this year, we purchased gift cards from Kohl’s, Target, Walmart, or

Amazon, along with Jewel gift cards. Parishioners donated funds

as well, which allowed us to purchase more Jewel gift cards.

With the coming of September, the musical offerings on Sunday

mornings shifted. All summer long, our choir had been meeting

together via Zoom and perfecting the art of singing alone at home

to a microphone and camera so that Walter could then edit the

recorded tracks together – truly an example of the whole being

greater than the sum of the parts. After a premiere in August with

the virtual choir Fill Me Now, we enjoyed a variety of vocal and

instrumental solos and duets, offered by members of our

community. The choir did a recording of Come, Come unto Me, for

Pastor Jenny’s first Sunday in November, and two more pieces,

Christmas Sanctus and By Candlelight, for our Christmas services. All

of this music, as well as the musical reflections and hymns as

recorded by Walter are available on the St. Simon’s YouTube

channel.

Change came again in October as we said good-bye to our interim

rector, Bryan Cones. Good times were had by all as we gathered in

the parking lot for a Pet Blessing and Tail-gate Party in celebration

of his ministry with us. This was the second of our parking lot

picnics as we had gathered in September for our annual parish

picnic. Because of the restrictions over serving food communally,

we ordered individually packed sandwiches from Dave’s Specialty

Foods. Our community remained strong through “The Interval,”

with presiders and preachers drawn from within it, with the

support of Rev. Kate Spelman as needed, and Jo Gantzer keeping

the day to day workings of the parish humming along.

Our big news in the month of November was that our new

rector, Jenny Hulen, joined our community. She had met in-

person with the rector search team in July, and the vestry issued a

call to her to be our next rector in September. She transitioned

from her previous parish in October as she and her husband,

Peter, sold their house in St. Louis and purchased a home in

Palatine, moving to Chicago at the end of October. She began at

St. Simon’s on November 16.

The highlight of December was, as always, Christmas – and a

highlight of Christmas was the virtual children’s pageant, Be Not

Afraid. Videoed from home and over Zoom, our children brought

us the joy of Christmas in the retelling of the ancient story of

God’s gift to God’s beloved in a very 21st century fashion. Our

musicians brought us the beautiful music of the season with two

virtual choir presentations, and the Altar Guild decorated the

church as Pastor

Jenny presided over the Zoom Christmas services from inside the

church sanctuary for the first time since we ceased gathering

together in March.

And so we have come full-circle, with the memory of Christmas

lingering as we anticipate what 2021 will bring. With the rollout of

multiple vaccines offering protection against the COVID-19 virus,

we look forward to the point at which we will be able to gather

in-person. Throughout this past year, we have had to learn a new

way to stay connected via Zoom for worship and prayer, education

and planning, fellowship and fun, while still practicing the old ways

of connection by writing notes and cards, making phone calls,

delivering meals and gifts. We look forward moving into the new

normal, taking with us the values that we have added over the past

year. We have new skills and capabilities and a determination to be

God’s hands and face to each other and the community around us.

717 W. Kirchhoff Road, Arlington Heights, Illinois 60005

847.259.2930—office@saintsimons.org—www.saintsimons.org

Parish Office Hours—M-Th, 9am-3pm

Jenny Hulen, Rector