THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO MADE OUR RUSSIAN ORTHODOX FESTIVAL SUCH A HUGE SUCCESS!
“This was great – I can’t wait for next year!”
“We’re so glad you had the festival again!”
“Everything was just wonderful – everyone should come tomorrow!”
Just a few positive pieces of feedback above from those who attended our festival this weekend. The last one was mentioned on Saturday of course. :) We got many, many more such positive pieces of feedback. And thank God for that. Negative feedback was essentially nil. We don’t do politics at STV, and our insistence on that seemed to shine through to our visitors. Some of our detractors had lots to say before the festival, but that didn’t seem to keep folks from coming, having a great time, and being introduced to our Orthodox faith in a positive way.
We named it “Russian Orthodox” this year for a very good reason: the Russian Orthodox Church exists throughout the world and has within it almost every possible nationality, ethnicity, skin color, etc. This was all about the universality of our Orthodox Faith. And it seems this was the right message to send! Because LOTS of folks visited us, many for the first time, and the vast majority were Americans of no particular Orthodox background.
Income was strong. We’ll give you more details when we know them, and especially when we understand all our expenses. We’ll have a meeting with the parish as we always do in this regard. Please be patient – lots of folks who worked all week and moving slowly today. :) And those are the same folks that are going to do the accounting for the festival too.
Volunteer turnout was great! Of course, we hope even more folks from our parish will join in next year, but we had a good turnout from our parishioners, others who are not parishioners, and even several Muslims originally from Russia who felt strongly that they should help us out!
To me the most important metric was this: we had more people at our Church Tours than ever before. It wasn’t even close. Traditionally the first tour, at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, is the best attended. Then there are less folks at all other tours, and almost no one at the Sunday 5:00 p.m. tour. NOT THIS YEAR! Every tour, including Vespers on Saturday night, had strong attendance, and the Sunday 5:00 p.m. tour had by far the longest and most dynamic question and answer period of them all! A HUGE thank you to our incredible choir who performed at every tour, plus sang Liturgy early on Sunday morning (to a full church in fact!). It isn’t like people come to the Church Tour to hear Fr. Gregory talk. :) They are they for the choir, and the talking afterwards is our opportunity to engage folks after they have been enveloped our heavenly Orthodox hymnography.
This was a festival like no other in all metrics. We will need to try to figure some of that out of course, so we can do it better next time – we always try to improve year over year. BUT – this was a GREAT FESTIVAL! Perhaps our best ever, even if it didn’t follow past patterns exactly. The pandemic changed lots of things I suppose, but it didn’t change the zeal of our parish family to welcome new people to our campus and to give them a taste of our life at STV, and it didn’t change the interest that those outside our parish family have in us. THIS IS ALL GOOD!
Pictures and videos are going up on our photo album now, and that will take a few days to get everything set. You can see a TON of pictures our Facebook page at this point. And lots of videos there too.
Honestly, I just can’t wait for next year’s festival! Thank you all again for all you did to make our festival a success and our parish family a dynamic expression to our neighbors of our Orthodox Faith!
See you soon at STV!
Fr. Gregory
