Dear Redeemer Family,
There are so many good, missional movements happening within the life of our parish. Consider what we are participating in together just in the month of November:
WELCOME: This past Sunday, November 6, we witnessed the baptisms of 12 children and adults. In the baptisms of these dear people, we joyfully welcomed them into the fellowship of the Church.
FORM: This coming Sunday, November 13, we will celebrate 29 adults (bringing with them 14 children, 43 total people) into membership through Confirmation. Having completed the 7-week Foundations Class, passed their membership interview, and made the threefold commitment to Small Group participation, volunteering, and financial giving—these households have been engaged in gospel formation and are prepared to actively follow Jesus here as members of Redeemer’s Parish.
SEND: The following Sunday, November 20, we will commission 60 people (36 adults and 24 children) to leave Redeemer in order to plant All Souls Anglican Church in the Manchester neighborhood, South of the River.
Now pause with me for a moment and consider these movements.
WELCOME & FORM
New people are coming into our parish and making their home in Christ and His Church here at Redeemer. Our family is growing. As with any growing family, this is both a thrilling joy and a difficult change. When a new baby is born and a family of four becomes a family of five, everyone must adjust. Old ways and habits are exchanged for new ones. Rooms are rearranged. Space is created for the new humans that are present.
All growth means change, all change means loss, all loss is painful.
So growth is painful. I feel this. Do you?
I used to know every single person in our parish. I knew most of your middle names. I knew a lot of your birth dates. I knew details about your jobs, homes, families, hopes, dreams, and disappointments. I didn’t have to ask how to pray for you because I just knew. We didn’t have to catch up, we were always caught up.
Now I struggle to get my brain to remember a new person’s name because there are So. Many. New. People!
Now, this may cause some of us to think (or even say out loud!) things like, “Redeemer is getting too big, I miss the days when it was smaller…”
I hear you, but growth is not only painful, it is also a great joy! Remember when you first arrived here? I do. It was a great day. I’m so glad that you are here! I wouldn’t have wanted the doors to be close to you. We need you and we wouldn’t be us without you.
And so as we witness baptisms and confirmations, we may appropriately reminisce about the good old days when Redeemer was a small parish of 100 people who all knew each other. I’m a nostalgic kind-of-guy and you have permission to be nostalgic as well!
However, we can also rejoice at the good, healthy growth and the wonderful new people it brings to us. Let’s not stop being the warm, good-hearted, hospitable people that we know we are called to be in Christ. Let’s not only welcome these new people in the liturgies of baptism and confirmation, let’s welcome them into our homes and lives.
SEND
Just as Jesus gathered the disciples to Himself in order to send them out to minister to others, so we welcome in people only to turn around and commission them to go forth into the world proclaiming and embodying the good news of the Gospel.
We do this every week in our worship liturgy, where we are all sent to our homes, our jobs, our neighborhoods, and our small groups as bearers of the good news of God’s love in Jesus.
When we commission the team of 60 people to leave Redeemer to plant All Souls Anglican, we are doing this in a heightened form. Church Planting is simply a more extreme and intense form of the week-in-week-out commissioning that we do together every Sunday.
As we send friends, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters - we will all feel the bittersweetness of living as missionaries here in the city of Richmond. There is a real bitterness to planting new churches. The challenges of raising money and drafting strategy pale in comparison to the challenge of saying farewell to people we love so dearly.
And so to everyone who is going with All Souls, we love you and we will miss you!
But in the bitterness there is also a note of honey. This is not an eternal farewell. We shall all be reunited sooner or later, and we know that the parting of ways is necessary and good. It is the tree that lets go of the apple so that it might fall to the ground, roll a little ways down the hill, sink into the soil, sprout, take root, grow up, and bear new fruit.
Just as the first church we helped plant, Church of the Incarnation in the West End, is bearing new fruit that Redeemer could never cultivate, so we have every expectation and hope that our second plant, All Souls Anglican, will produce wonderful new fruit for the glory of God and the common good of the city.
Redeemer family, I’m so grateful for these missional movements within the life of our parish. Let’s participate in all of this together, the highs and lows, the bitter and the sweet.
In the Father’s love,
