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Hagans sets to work on parish projects

Washington Window
Vol. 79, No. 2, Mar-Apr 2010

In October, Bishop John Bryson Chane appointed the Rev. Michele Hagans to serve as Assistant to the Bishop for Special Projects. She will be involved in special projects as determined by the bishop and currently is providing advice to leaders of three parishes in the diocese on matters pertaining to facilities use and development. Here, she speaks with writer Diane Ney about her work with the diocese.

WW: What is it you enjoy about your job?

HAGANS: I’m privileged to have the opportunity to bring my secular skill set—I’ve been in the business of real estate development and management for about 30 years—to the diocese in an effort to assist parishes in areas of property and development and, also, with some generic real estate matters.

WW: How are you assisting St. Augustine’s Parish?

HAGANS: At St. Augustine’s, their intention is to demolish the existing church and its associated property and build a new sanctuary elsewhere on the site. And then a developer is going to build condominiums on another part of the site. My job is to work with congregations to help them through some very complicated transactions. For instance, I have met with St. Thomas’s, Dupont Circle, which is contemplating building a sanctuary in place of the one that burned many years ago. Hopefully, I can help the members understand the process, and make sure they have as much expertise on their side as needed in dealing with the community. We do not always realize all the tasks involved in doing complex real estate transactions. We have a tendency to think about it as being as simple as selling our family homes and it’s far more complicated than that. When you are trying to either build a new structure or add on a new structure to an existing facility, there’s a lot of pre-development work that needs to precede the construction of the facility.

WW: What other projects are you involved with?

HAGANS: I’m on the board of the Bishop John T. Walker School and co-chair the school’s building and grounds committee, trying to make sure we bring as much technical assistance as possible to the process of building a school. It’s more than just the actual construction of the building. It is the understanding of all the little nuances that go with it and the obstacles that come up from time to time.

WW: For example?

HAGANS: The Walker School bought the site next door and demolished it, not realizing there were things associated with completing that demolition that could cause complications. One of those has appeared: the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority wants them to replace a sanitary pipe in the street that was part of the demolition. That’s the kind of thing you need to anticipate. 

WW: So, you come to these situations as the team’s practical person.

HAGANS: Well, it’s asking ‘have you thought of this, have you thought of that’. When we have a vision and are wrapped up in our serving the people and the gospel, we need to realize there are a lot of practical matters that have to be addressed as well.

WW: How do you use your pastoral skills as a priest when you’re dealing with these situations?

HAGANS:  We need to always be reminded that it’s not about the building, it is about how we spread the gospel of Jesus Christ and that is first in what we’re doing. The rest sort of comes along. The sanctuary may be the vessel or the place where we do some of it, but our real and central purpose is proclamation of the gospel. I try to bring a sense of what we can realistically do in a situation, see if we can talk it through and get on the same page with the same goals.

WW: Are we entering a period when, economically, it will be necessary to combine parishes?

HAGANS:  It is a huge financial outpouring to keep a parish going. Clearly, where we have people who are relatively close together and where the actual facility of the church is burdening both of them, we need to consider how coming together may strengthen them as a community. It is hard to give up a church. And so we have to keep in mind that everything does not happen inside a sanctuary. We may become invested in our worship space, but we cannot be captive to that space. We’re called to bring the gospel out into the world, so we can’t always be so tied to a structure as who we are. A church is one place we gather. It is the worship place, but it is not the only place we do the business of the gospel.