A year-end report is in some ways a kind of magical thinking. It makes the assumption that we can push a cosmic pause button that gives us time to both reflect on and tie up the happenings of the previous year in a neat package that can then be filed away. But time didn’t stop on December 31, 2020 and what we accomplished or failed to achieve this past year is all part of the information that we are still working with and adding to in 2021. In light of this, the most important thing I have to report with respect the life of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in 2020 is that God is faithful; God’s mercies are new every morning and we can expect that to continue into 2021.
When the world went into lock-down in early March because of the pandemic, our life together was up-ended and we had to figure out some way to meet without actually being in the same room. We’ve done pretty well with that adjustment. It has been both an exhausting and energizing thing to go through this process. It is never easy to be dispossessed of what you think are normal expectations. Yet when this happens there is a corresponding call to innovation and adaptation. The former depletes us; the latter restores us.
We have known both of these states of being over the last 11 months. We have lost some folks due to lack of connectivity to the internet. We have lost others due to their fatigue and frustration with a church that is choosing not to come together in our sanctuary for worship. We have lost others because of life circumstances related to Covid-19 that have caused them to move away from Bothell. Some of these folks we will see again when we return to the practice of gathering in our sanctuary for worship, but some won’t be returning. Yet that said, we have also welcomed a number of new people into our fellowship at this time. For a variety of reasons Emmanuel has become a welcoming place for folks even in this time when our gathering place is virtual. On most Sundays 90-100 devices log into our Zoom worship service and many of these screens have more than one person sitting before them. And that means that our worship attendance has actually grown.
Pastors joke that the standard metric of success for a congregation is “Butts in the pews and bucks in the plate.” The absence of both pews and plates makes for potentially very bad news for a congregation. Yet not so for us. Our giving and our attendance have remained steady this past year. Not only is God faithful, but so are you. You are hanging in there and working to show up even when you can’t meet together in our sanctuary and narthex. Thank you for your faithfulness that is born of the faithfulness of God.
I can’t say this with absolute certainty, but I suspect that the congregation of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church has been asked to go through more change this past year than it has ever been asked to endure before. I have heard it said that all change is often initially experienced as loss. Indeed, the loss of meeting together in our sanctuary is a big one. By all rights, it should have killed us. Losing the place where we expect to live our life together feels life threatening. It requires enormous adaptation. It is like asking fish to develop lungs and legs so they can live on land or asking us terrestrial mammals to grow bigger lungs and fins so that we can join our cousins in the sea. That’s a tall order!
Yet what makes adaptation possible is that there are still points that do not change. One of those is God’s faithfulness to us. The big, big heart of God has not stopped being the place in which we primarily dwell. My prayer for 2021 is that we can spend more time resting in this truth than being anxious about the yet unknown ways in which we will be invited to adapt. It is hard to know what is before us, but we can rest in the truth of where we are. We’re fixed firmly on the rock of Jesus Christ and this foundation is one from which we can’t be shaken loose.
Dave Rohrer—January 31, 2021