This past Sunday, we celebrated Graduate Sunday. Graduate Sunday is always a little bittersweet. We celebrate our youth graduating from high school and college and moving on to the next stage of their life. We are so happy for them and what they’ve accomplished but sorry to see them leave their parish family behind as they launch into the next part of their lives.
This time I had the distinct pleasure of presenting our two graduating acolytes with scholarship checks for $1000 each as the first recipients of the Gilbert Acolyte Scholarship. Reagan Schluter and Jenna Penco are the epitome of servant leaders. At St. Dunstan’s, they were active in parish life as acolyte trainers, VBS volunteers, Sunday school and Camp Eagle youth mission trips. At school they excelled collectively in academics, FFA, football, National Honor Society—their resumes were packed. And the icing on the cake is that they are genuinely good people—polite, interesting, eager to pitch in, and fun to be around. Jenna and Reagan were each asked to give a senior reflection at the service. I hope you can take the time to listen to each of them talk about what St. Dunstan’s means to them as they move on to the next chapter of their lives.
The Gilbert Acolyte Scholarship Fund, so named because of Doug and Helen Gilbert’s generous foundational donation, is designated as a scholarship for current acolytes who have actively served for at least 4 years. They can use those funds for any expense: tuition, books, board, supplies, whatever they need to get ready for the next step in life. I would like the Gilbert Acolyte Scholarship to be a blessing on scores of acolytes to come over the next 50 years. The goal is for the fund to become self-sustaining so that we never have to touch the corpus of the original funds and instead can award the interest earned to the eligible and worthy acolytes of that year. We need about another $25,000 to make that a reality, which sounds like a huge amount until you hear that we’ve already raised over $72,000!! If you would like to donate to the Gilbert Acolyte Scholarship fund to honor the service that these youth acolytes do for the life of St. Dunstan’s and make the fund self-sustainable, please contact the office or you can simply write a check and put Acolyte Scholarship in the memo line.
