Invite Welcome Connect Receives $15,000 Grant from St. Christopher Legacy Fund to Build a New Website
We are delighted to announce that the Legacy Fund of St. Christopher Episcopal Church in League City, Texas, has awarded Invite Welcome Connect a $15,000 grant to design and build a new, purpose-built website. The grant agreement was signed this month, and the one-year grant term began October 1, 2026.
To the trustees of the Legacy Fund and the people of St. Christopher, thank you. This gift arrives at exactly the right moment in the life of this ministry.
Why a new website, and why now
When the pandemic arrived, we did what many ministries did. We took a website designed as a static resource library and adapted it to host online, asynchronous training. It worked. But with the phenomenal growth of Invite Welcome Connect On Demand, we needed a new way to serve congregations around the church.
Since we launched Invite Welcome Connect On Demand on January 1, 2025, 23 dioceses and 47 individual congregations have become subscribers, with more joining all the time. Our library of teaching modules, guides, and curricula keeps growing, and the people who rely on it deserve a home that is easy to navigate and built for the work they are doing.
Invite Welcome Connect’s plans for new content growth include:
More Live Online Training
Invite Welcome Connect Small Congregations
Greeter Ministries and Post-Welcome Follow-Up
Youth and Children's Formation
Multicultural Ministry and Cross-Cultural Hospitality
LGBTQ+ Inclusion and Belonging
What the new site will make possible
With the support of this grant, we will build a site from the ground up. Our objectives are to:
Design a site architecture that can properly host our full library of teaching modules, guides, and curricula
Integrate a professional Learning Management System that lets people not only access resources but form interactive communities, working together to strengthen their ministries of evangelism, hospitality, and belonging
Migrate and reorganize our existing content so that it is easy to find and use
Launch the new site and move current On Demand subscribers over without disruption
This matters most for smaller congregations, which often do not have full-time clergy or large volunteer teams. An easily accessible, user-friendly online resource can make all the difference when a few committed people are carrying the whole load of a church’s welcome.
A shared vision
We are especially moved that this grant comes from St. Christopher. The congregation’s vision statement reads:
“The Vision of St. Christopher Episcopal Church is an inviting and welcoming community of Jesus’ followers who love and serve all people.”
If you know our work, you may already hear the echo. Everything Invite Welcome Connect teaches grows from a simple framework: how a congregation invites people in, how it welcomes them into community, and how it helps them connect deeply to God and to one another. St. Christopher’s vision names the same three movements in a single sentence. An inviting and welcoming community is the first two. A community of Jesus’ followers is the third, a people formed together in Christ, not simply a crowd that happens to share a building.
The closing phrase, “love and serve all people,” reaches toward what we call belonging: the work that begins when a visitor has been greeted warmly and now needs to be woven into the life of the congregation. It also reflects a conviction at the heart of our approach, that evangelism is not institutional recruitment but the natural overflow of a community living out its baptismal identity in love and service.
The vision is consistent with St. Christopher’s stated mission as well, to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. That is a remarkably close cousin to our own hope that people would connect deeply to God and to one another. Add a core value of acceptance, described on the parish’s About Us page as respecting the diversity of all God’s people, and it is easy to see why this partnership feels less like a coincidence and more like a shared calling.
What comes next
Over the coming year, we will design and build the new site, migrate our content, and prepare our current subscribers for a smooth transition. We will share updates here along the way, and we will be sure to let you know when the new home of Invite Welcome Connect is ready to welcome you.
The first step will be a series of listening sessions with the Invite Welcome Connect community. We will enter into conversation with the people who use our materials to learn better how a new web site can serve their needs. Let us know if you’d like to be part of the conversation. We’d like to hear from as many people as possible.
Invite Welcome Connect was founded in 2010 by Mary Foster Parmer and established as an independent nonprofit in 2023. Every step of our growth has depended on the generosity of the wider church. This grant is one more reminder that when congregations pay attention to the fundamentals of inviting, welcoming, and connecting, good things grow, and that includes ministries like ours.
Thank you, St. Christopher. We are honored to be in this work with you.
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