‘Coach Jason’ led successful ROF campaign at Holy Trinity Parish in Hudson

Why was the Re-Igniting Our Faith campaign so successful at Holy Trinity Parish in Hudson?

It had a lot to do with “Coach Jason,” “Team Faith” and the tireless work of the many volunteers.

Coach Jason is Rick Jason, a member of Holy Trinity parish since 1983, who also has served as lector and Eucharistic minister. Jason is also a retired school teacher in the New Lebanon Central School District and has run successful fund-raising campaigns for the Germantown School District and Germantown Library.

Team Faith, the concept Jason used to pitch the campaign, went 118 percent over its goal using his tried and true methods. As well as a lot of prayer.
But Jason originally didn’t know if he wanted to be chairperson of the ROF campaign the first time the committee met in the parish rectory on Oct. 16, 2018. But the next day, Jason’s birthday, he continued to be nagged by the idea.

“I have run campaigns before and I really don’t want to do this,” said Jason, recalling his thought process. “This is so much work (but the) bottom line was I woke up in the middle of the night wrestling with it. I don’t want to do it, but it’s God’s will that I am still thinking about this and the bottom line is I agreed to do it.”

Father Anthony Barratt and Father Winston Bath came up with case plan, what they wanted to spend the money on, and Jason then tweaked the 12-person committee list and the race was on!

“When I was a teacher everybody called me ‘Coach Jason,’ ” Jason said. “I became the coach for our 12 disciples, that’s what I called them; it was basically encouraging them and giving them the skills that they needed.

“I trained them … we went through a whole process of training; here’s the approach, the do’s and don’ts. On top of all that, we also looked at one of the aspects of what we are trying to do. Everybody’s situation is different and it takes each of us to make a difference for all of us.”

Father Barratt, Father Bath and Jason talked with the large donors, and two-person teams met everyone else. Jason had designed scripts to make sure everyone could answer any question that came up. The leadership and organization were hallmarks of the campaign’s success.

“You have to have leadership, somebody who is very organized, somebody who is willing to do anything and everything that somebody else can’t do,” Jason said. “Anything that I asked somebody on the committee to do, if they couldn’t do it, I would do it and they knew that. If they got in a bind, I would go meet with them.”

Another successful part of the campaign was lots of prayer.

“Prayer was important,” said Jason, who prayed before every meeting. “We felt that the Holy Spirit was leading us and we let the Holy Spirit work with whoever we were meeting with and it wasn’t us doing it, it was the will of God. That is the way that we felt.”

Jason said out of the 600 families between the Church of St. Mary in Hudson and the Church of the Resurrection in Germantown, 189 donor or donor families contributed to the ROF campaign. Jason added that having 31 percent of the parish supporting the campaign “is just remarkable.”

The money went to stained glass restoration in both churches, new heating and air conditioning at St. Mary’s Church and a new walkway, staircase and handicapped ramp in front of the church and leading to the parking lot at the Church of the Resurrection. The parish is also supporting 18 seminarians, as well as expanding its faith formation and evangelization.

In the end it was a big win for Holy Trinity Parish and Team Faith.