Like many liturgical terms that have stood the test of time, sacristy has had its share of meanings and connotations.

The term comes form the Latin sacrastia, meaning vestry and refers to the room, usually behind or on either side of the sanctuary, where the vestments, church furnishings, sacred vessels, and other sacred odds and ends are kept.

It is obvious from this long laundry list of their contents that sacristies are typically much more capacious entities than our sacristy here at Trinity, Port Credit.

In churches with more diminutive sacristies like ours, typically only the sacred vessels, and other sanctuary appointments, such as altar cloths, are kept.

Other liturgical flotsam and jetsam, like vestments, are kept in a different room called the vestry.

In our church the vestry, if you want to call it that, is actually the closet in my office and therefore is no larger than the sacristy.

This arrangement suits us well, since we haven't much need for a sprawling sacristy, or a vaulted vestry for that matter.

However, in the early church these rooms were one and the same and functioned as meeting places as well.

This explains where the term vestry, referring to our annual general meeting, originates.

In the early church the sacristy, or vestry, became the place where meetings, typically of clergy, were held to make decisions surrounding issues of governance in a given parish.

In a similar manner, we have our vestry, to discern how God is calling us to offer our time, talents and treasure for the upcoming year.

In recent years, vestry meetings in most churches have tended to be fairly small.

However, the attendance has not been sufficiently poor, thanks be to God, so as to warrant a return to the former practice of holding the vestry meeting in the sacristy.

Since only two people can fit comfortably in our sacristy, a vestry meeting would have the advantages of being expeditious and uneventful, but would perhaps lack something in content and representation.