Priest Scheduling
Two weeks ago, Liliana Marshall (already ½ time Coordinator of Children’s Faith Formation at Assumption) agreed to move to full time and spend 20 hours/week as our Executive Assistant for Clergy. Internally, the staff likes to refer to her as the “Priest Wrangler,” which I think is absolutely apt.
This means that we can now move to a centralized source for all priest scheduling. If you need to schedule with a priest for whatever reason (e.g. pastoral counseling, Anointing of the Sick, a house blessing), please e-mail priests@whatcomcatholic.org and Liliana will do her best to accommodate you. This is true for general requests, or to meet with a specific priest.
I am still not ready to take pastoral counseling appointments (i.e. “I need to talk with a priest”), so please continue to plan to meet with Fr. Thumbi or Fr. Stephan. But this week Liliana and I are finally beginning to work on setting up meetings with our various Pastoral Councils, and I expect I will start to meet with a few more volunteer or program coordinators in the weeks to come.
Regional Office in Lynden
Over the years, the church in Lynden has purchased the three residential houses that share its city block. One of these is used as the rectory for Fr. Thumbi, one is used to house Missionary Servants of the Word (young, normally Hispanic Catholics who serve as missionaries for a year), and one is currently a rental house.
The tenants are leaving the rental before the end of September, but we have decided not to rent it out again. Instead, we have an unexpectedly high number of regional staff members (4) who live in Lynden or Nugents Corner, and the Lynden parish has very little office space, so we are going to convert one of our Lynden houses into a regional office annex. Of course our regional staff will strive to serve all of our communities proportionate to their needs, but we want to make sure they can do office work close to home. Decreasing their commutes is one of the soft benefits we can try to offer to make up for the salary hit that comes from working for a non-profit. The expenses related to this office will be covered proportionally by all of our communities.
Priest Bios
This week, I am presenting my own little bio, which can be found on the homepage of my website (https://frmoore.com/).
Fr. Moore 
Thank you for your exceptional communication pastoral leadership, Father Moore.
We are fortunate to have servant-leader Liliana Marshall, who we met at St Joseph Catholic Church in Lynden. She is a light!
She is a light indeed!