The founding congregation for St. Luke United Lutheran Church will be 100 years old in 2012, and we, its descendants, are planning a year’s worth of celebrations, coordinated each month by one of the church’s committees or auxiliaries. We already have a splendid new pictorial directory to stir our focus and excitement for the coming year. We salute the members of the 100th Anniversary Committee for spearheading this project; the talents of the committee members are evident on each page. We have been told by the Lifetouch company that they are using our directory as an example to hold up to other congregations that are considering printing a new pictorial directory – that’s how impressed they were with our in-house designers.
That’s just one example of how St. Luke United has been blessed to be a blessing to others. That IS the most basic promise of God that is as old as father Abraham, and as young as each new Christian who embraces the call to discipleship: We are blessed by God to be blessings – to our church family, to our community, to the wider church, and to the wider world. To that end, God’s Spirit equips us with talents, passions, resources, and the will and wisdom to bring those blessing to fruition in people’s lives. So the Christian faith is a blessing with a responsibility built into it. We are part of a history of salvation; we have a heritage of salvation; and we are given the holy task of promoting a legacy of salvation: in the ministry we share and the love we give and the Gospel hope we hold so dear.
For 100 years, the founders of our present congregation and the generations that have come after them have defined the salvation ministry of St. Luke’s as a self-supporting family of faith with a full-time staff of paid professionals guiding the congregation to fulfill its ministry out of the home base of a building consecrated for worship, Christian education, fellowship, and outreach. In short, we are a Church that is part of a larger, Lutheran denomination, but is also responsible for its own Gospel witness, untied to any other local congregation. I found it interesting that one of the “Did you know?” facts printed in our new directory states that the name “St. Luke” was suggested for our congregation because the intent of its founders was for our congregation to function with regards to St. Paul Lutheran Church – from which our founders came – in a similar relationship to what the biblical Paul and Luke were for each other: co-workers in the Gospel who nonethe-less had their own distinct contributions to the establishment and the spread of the Christian faith. And for a century the greater
However, with the new century that begins next year, a new challenge rises before us. When we compare our projected income with our budgeted expenses, 2012 becomes the last year St. Luke’s will be able to define its salvation ministry as we have in the past: as a self-supporting family of faith maintaining its own ministry and church building. Our offerings for the past number of years have not kept up with the operating expenses necessary for our congregation to exist as we currently understand ourselves. We have continued to meet our financial obligations due in large part to the monies we received when St. Luke merged with
We face 2012 with no new identifiable source of extra income that we can rely on except the continued generosity of our members and our thank offerings to God for the blessings we receive from God in order to be a blessing for others. There is more than enough money in our assets to make up the projected shortfall in 2012; there is not enough money in our assets to continue at the present rate to the end of 2013.
An anniversary year is an important time that lends itself to remembrances of the past, reflection on the present, and commitment for the future. We need to decide and acknowledge just what it is we’ll be celebrating in 2012. Certainly this includes the dimension of the past. The memorial pages in our new directory speak eloquently to that past, by linking it to the loved ones that breathed life into that past. We see their photographs; some of them we remember as if it were yesterday that they were worshiping among us, serving our congregation and our community by their Christian witness, receiving spiritual strength and guidance from their pastors and their fellow members. Other photos take us back beyond the scope of our personal memories and link us to an earlier time, when they were the faces of St. Luke’s for their generation and their community. All these saints in Christ helped us to get where we are right now. We are the legacy they entrusted to us.
Certainly our anniversary celebration includes the present. We are more than the legacy of our spiritual parents and grandparents. We are the faces of St. Luke’s for our generation and our community. People know us here as part of this place; we have a spiritual reputation and character that are uniquely ours. Our witness to Jesus Christ may stand as complementary to other Christian communities in
For it is that belief that will make our anniversary celebration include the future. If we believe in the definition of who we are as it has been defined for 100 years, we must do what we can to ensure that St. Luke’s continues as a vibrant thread of the faith fabric of
People of God, we are faced with a choice, and we must be proactive about it, for if we do nothing, the choice will be made for us in an unsustainable congregation that we will be forced to close. If it is true that the resources needed to define St. Luke’s as a family of faith with its own membership, its own building, and its own pastor are simply beyond us, there is no shame in celebrating 2012 as the climax and the conclusion of a ministry that mattered, that touched the lives of thousands of people with the love and mercy of God. And we thank God for giving us the privilege of being part of that ministry for our own generation. But if that is not true – if the resources are here and we choose to offer them in faith and determination – then there will be glory in celebrating 2012’s anniversary as a touchstone to our past and a steppingstone for a future that will touch the lives of thousands more with the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Savior. Christ’s ministry is necessary; may we rediscover ourselves as a necessary part of it.
In Christ,
Pastor John Mikenas
