Happy feast day, brothers and sisters! St. Barnabas is always welcome here in Antioch, even if this version is in California and not the middle east. We are also grateful for a day of rain here in drought stricken Northern California yesterday. Today has been hot and steamy in its aftermath.  At least I do not need to water the garden this evening! Instead I have just enough time to put out this entry before settling down for the evening.

Ruth took me to Santa Cruz yesterday, which we both agree was a mistake, but who could have predicted this weather? Archie and Veronica didn’t mind and happily ran up and down the beach while Ruth worried about her hair. We came home early and I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the car.

Sadly no responses from the emails to Pleasanton’s entire Parish Council looking for a copy of their strategic plan.  One can only hope those good people are more responsive to their own community. Which brings out my bias to suspicion. Why no response and why no plan? Logically only a couple of reasons are possible:

1.  There is no actual plan. Unlikely, as a parishioner who is a friend there told me it was repeatedly referenced at a town hall meeting.

2. The plan contains confidential data. Again unlikely. Parishes should be an open book and the parish website already has quite a bit of data on things like finances already there.

3. The plan is proprietary. This is my hunch.  As I have said before, the group that supposedly made the plan are all silicon valley executives. These people love to develop secret plans and insist things like non-disclosure agreements be signed etc. They show up for meetings and insist on confidentiality being maintained. Strategic Plans are seen as game-theory and meetings are held in “war rooms”; i.e. they are an asset to be jealously guarded. My guess is that said strategic plan is suffering from church-as-business syndrome which I talked about earlier this week.

If I am right, then the management (and yes, I will call them that), has decided that not sharing is some kind of advantage.

Which is a shame and does no good for the whole of Dioecesis Quercopolitana.