Remembering the Past

For you picture lovers, this is the view today outside my daughter Kelsey's dorm room at Concordia-Wisconsin, which is just north of Milwaukee.

The lines are the screen in her window, and the gray mass in the middle is Lake Michigan. Who's up for some sailing?

In Exodus 1:8, we read a phrase that has tremendous meaning to me. It states "Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt." At this point, the Israelites had been in Egypt around 400 years, and the special status that the pharaoh had granted Joseph and his family was long forgotten.

As some of you might be aware, I've been digging around in the archives of our church and unearthing some of our history. Given that the 141st anniversary of the establishment of our church was this past Sunday, I think it's incumbent upon us to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to us, that we forget about the history of the people who established and grew our church to what it is today, the largest church in the Iowa District East (by a fairly healthy margin) with the largest school (by a healthy and growing margin). These things didn't happen by accident, but by concerted effort and sacrifice by those who came before us. As I root around in the past (and I'm pretty much done with that--I'm in the collating phase now), there's some pretty significant milestones and achievements worthy of remembrance. 

In many ways, I'm doing the tiniest of initial planning for our sesquicentennial in 2020. It's only nine years away, and any church that makes it to that milestone is worthy of celebration. In the meantime, I've made a pictorial presentation of our church history and am working to figure out how to show it. I presented it in the Bible class I facilitated this past fall, and it seemed to go over well, and I'd like to show it to a wider audience. With a history as rich as ours, and with enough of the people still around who were significant parts of creating that history (and thus worthy of our thanks and appreciation), it would be sad if we were to forget our past.

I'll introduce one more theme which I will much more fully develop on December 27th. Every church on the face of the earth is ONE GENERATION away from extinction. Every church that doesn't prepare the next generation to continue to grow the church will run into problems. Having said that, churches close all the time--they come, fulfill their mission for their time and place, and sometimes circumstances dictate that mission is completed. It's not uncommon, and it's not sad--the big C Church didn't die, but the little c church did its part for the larger Church. It IS sad if this happens when it didn't have to--if a church in a vibrant area just dies because of apathy. Let us all do what we can to ensure that we never forget what we're doing and why we do it.

Scott