On Sunday, September twenty ninth, 2024, my church gathered to worship collectively for the ultimate time. It was a day we knew was coming, and I don’t simply imply within the sense that we’d made the announcement a number of weeks earlier.
All through 2024, our congregation prayed about what the Lord would have us do as we sought to maneuver previous a season of residing in survival mode. Maybe we have been to replant or merge with one other congregation sooner or later. Presumably, the Lord was getting ready to ship extra folks hungry for deep fellowship. Or, maybe, he would make it clear to us that the works he had ready for us (Ephesians 2:20) had been achieved. After months of prayer, that was the place we concluded the Lord was main us.
Embracing the Finish
There have been a number of methods he made it clear to us; some have been extraordinarily sensible whereas others have been a bit more durable to place into phrases. However what inspired us all was how God saved us united by way of the method—and thru all of the years of our ministry right here. Whereas no church is freed from battle, we have been blessed to keep away from main blowouts or drama. The pandemic years and the discord sown by contentious and unending election cycles didn’t destroy us. There was no looming cut up on the horizon. We have been all all in till the very finish.
Our remaining gathering was what we anticipated:
- Songs celebrating the gospel.
- A pastoral encouragement to remain targeted on the gospel as we scatter.
- A remaining baptism.
- Congregational prayer as we thanked God for all he had accomplished and commissioned each other out on to be blessings to our subsequent native church buildings.
Grief and Gratitude
In all of it, all of us skilled a mixture of grief and gratitude. To see the Lord clearly at work in all of this and to see our whole church faithfully observe God’s main is one thing I do know we’re all grateful for.
Nevertheless it’s additionally not simple, which is the place the grief is available in. For Emily and me, this church has been our de facto household, grieving, celebrating, crying, and laughing collectively by way of many good and difficult seasons. I’ve been blessed to play a job in pointing them to Jesus in kids’s ministry, as a group group chief, and as one of many church’s academics. And although the relationships we’ve got received’t finish, we all know they’ll change. They’ll’t not.
So right here we’re: grateful for the place we’ve been, grieving what we’re shedding, and searching towards what’s subsequent.
The A part of a Church’s Life We Don’t Speak About Sufficient
I do know our congregation isn’t the one one to expertise this. Nevertheless it isn’t one thing we discuss a lot, particularly amongst North American evangelicals. We focus nearly completely on longevity, numerical progress, and multiplication. We laud the idea of a church lasting 10, 20, 50, 100 years or extra. The identical is true of church buildings that draw massive congregations or spawn a number of crops and satellite tv for pc areas. We take a look at all these and take a look at to determine their secrets and techniques and replicate their strategies.
We have a tendency to not discuss this as a result of, sometimes, we equate a church ending with a church failing. And we’ve received loads of examples of church buildings dying due to sin.
However not each ending is a failure as a result of longevity will not be God’s intention for each church. Some are solely meant to exist for what would possibly seem to be a quick time frame. And whereas their lifespan is likely to be quick, their impact on the folks, the group, and the broader church is not any much less significant. God was at work in and thru them. What he got down to do, he achieved, even when we will solely see it partly.
There’s a lot to be thankful for in that, if we’re prepared to see it. It simply would possibly take a while.
Photograph by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash
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