40 years. 1973. While work went into this ministry well ahead of that time, on May 27, 1973 the official beginning of this mission station, of this community of faith was celebrated. Did the group of disciples that gathered there that day even envision that we would be sitting here in this facility forty years later and talking about them? That this group of people here today would be about Praising God, Serving Others? I think in many ways the answer to that question is yes. Because all the work that went into those moments were not just about those moments, it was more so for future moments, for a people that had yet to encounter the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was about mission. It was about sharing the Good News. It was about the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, which would come to the church, as Jesus announced in our text. It was about vision.
(From Pastor Randy's Sermon on 5/5/2013)
From Pamela: I recall a statement of one of the Native American Indian principles of decision making. It went something like this:
"Everything we decide to do today should be for the good of the next 10 generations".
That is about vision. It is about standing in the present, looking at all that we have before us, and using everything that we have with the future in our minds. It is about trusting that what and who is beyond the horizon is in some way dependent upon us.
I know that many of those who were present 10 or 15 or 30 or 40 years ago are no longer with us in "fact". However, we are the way we are because of the way they were. We at CRLC represent the current sum of the hopes and dreams and prayers of everybody who has been in this place.
However, we are but a subtotal of what will ultimately unfold in our mission.
So we celebrate the subtotal of 40 years of shared ministry, knowing that our commitment to the good news of Jesus Christ will affect all of the others who will praise God and serve others here long after we are, in a word, history!
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