[Back home in Wisconsin this morning. This old post, at least fifteen years old, should suffice. I'll cut it up into two parts. What's absent here is some measure of my fidelity to the denomination into which I was born and have almost always been a part of because, quite frankly, it's part of me. I had a significant role in the celebrations, but here, well, I have to smile at my youthful contrariness--I was not even sixty years old!]
Yesterday, 3500 people showed up in a local gym to commemorate 150 years of history of the denomination of which I am a part--the Christian Reformed Church of North America. The size of the crowd was reassuring to the skeptic in me. I've thought long and hard about the future of the CRC--and denominationalism in general--and I'm quite sure there are many good arguments to assert its imminent demise.
See http://www.dordt.edu/publications/pro_rege/crcpi/Pro_Rege_Sept_2007.pdf
But there are also good reasons to believe that the CRC will continue--maybe even grow--and yesterday's packed house was just one of them. The music was very, very good and the sermon was fine, but the grace abounding yesterday afternoon was in the fellowship, not the coffee and cookies afterward but the sheer size of the crowd who chose to celebrate together on a beautiful fall Sabbath afternoon. It was good to be there together--it was very good.
An Ethiopian choir
from meat-packing Worthington, MN, was the show-stopper. The beat of their
music was electric. A couple dozen bulky male deacons delivered the offerings
to the front of the gym, and just for a moment I thought they were infected
themselves. It would have been an unforgettable moment had the deacons been
transformed into a conga line. I swear it almost happened--a handful of bulky
Dutch-American males just about two-stepped right in front of a couple thousand
worshippers.
And then we had communion.
[Continued, and ending, tomorrow]
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