Steady in the Storm

Pastor’s Annual Report, AD 2020

What has been the state of St Peter’s Lutheran over the Year of Our Lord 2019?

St Peter’s Youth (SPY) is going gangbusters. On the first Wednesday of every month, our parking lot is full and our parish building is bustling with both young people and adult leaders. It is a wonderful thing to see the next generation of our church so full of life.

Taize prayer became a regular part of our worship life both during the summer and for midweek Advent services. Thus far it’s been very well received by all who attend; one young person called it the closest they’d ever felt to God. Taize focuses on meditative and contemplative prayer—on chant and on silence—and offers a much-needed balm for our helter-skelter lives, normally so full of haste and noise. We will offer more opportunities for such prayer in 2020.

This autumn St Peter’s assembled our first ever prayer labyrinth, made entirely from donated pumpkins and volunteer labor. We made this available to our congregation and community during the Hallowtide, and had quite a few curious visitors stop by to check it out. Hopefully this may become an annual tradition that we can offer to New York Mills.

Educational opportunities abound for both adults and youth. I’ve been opening each Sunday School class with a children’s sermon or pastor’s message, and our adult education forums for 2019 covered topics ranging from philosophical proofs for God through folklore of the Spirit World to iconoclastic histories of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We also read four books together: Inspired, Halloween Tree, Wordy Shipmates, and The Man Who Invented Christmas. In the New Year we’ll be looking at some more traditional Bible Studies, though come spring I’m hoping that we can read Holy Envy together, a paperback about what Christians can learn from (and offer to) other faith traditions.

Worship, Confirmation, and Pub Theology all continue to go well, with the latter receiving a boost in popularity since we altered venue to Backwoods BBQ. We’ve brought back our healing service and graveyard vespers, introduced a new Lessons & Carols service, and purchased a new folk service that we’ll be using in 2020. And on top of all that, we’ve been blessed with more weddings and baptisms than funerals of late.

What about longer term trends? It’s no secret that institutional Christianity in the West faces significant challenges, and with them significant opportunities. While the Gospel continues to grow at a record rate worldwide, our own culture worships less, believes less, attends less, and gives less. This is not limited to religion. All of civil society is in bad shape, from Boy Scouts and bowling leagues to fraternal orders and the VFW. Folks simply don’t join organizations like they used to. Commitment is hard to come by.

Given this wider trend, St Peter’s has done remarkably well. We had a lot of shake-ups in 2019, losing families for various reasons—new jobs, new relationships, new diagnoses—but we’ve also gained some lovely and active new members. Giving dropped precipitously halfway through the year, giving us quite a scare, but the congregation then rose to the challenge and we ended 2019 well.

Because of your dedication and generosity, our ministry here continues to grow in so many ways. In fact, apart from our sister congregations in larger cities (Calvary in Perham, Immanuel in Wadena), St Peter’s is the only congregation in the conference not currently yoked to another parish. And that’s pretty impressive. That gives me hope for years to come.

So do me a favor: use the “Ask Pastor Anything” box. Sign up for a visit if you’d like one. Come to worship, to adult forum, to Pub Theology. Give Taize a try. In 2020, the Good News of Christ Jesus will be more important than ever for a society exhausted by consumerism, militarism, division and anxiety.

We are a sanctuary of peace in the midst of a storm. We are the Body of Christ, still hard at work healing, serving, and saving this world. The greater the need, the greater the challenge, the greater the opportunity.

Let us be the Resurrection for our community and our world.