Tangibles

Pastor’s Annual Report, AD 2021

How does one assess a year in ministry?

There are the usual statistics, I suppose: membership, attendance, budgets met or missed. But even in a good and stable year, these are just numbers. They quantify what can be quantified, but of course our life in Christ is so much more than that which we can count. How does one measure discipleship, faithfulness, dark nights of the soul, or salvation?

2020 has made mockery of our numberings: a year of global pandemic, political division, and civil unrest; of closed schools, closed churches, and closed businesses; a year of frustration and loss and fear. How does one measure the life of faith in such situations as these? How does one quantify the chaos?

When we first shut down the sanctuary to in-person worship back in March—nearly a year ago now—I fretted that we might not recover from a fortnight without worship. I hoped that we would be back for Holy Week, surely for Easter. I couldn’t imagine the crisis stretching into months, into a whole new year.

At home we wired up the wireless, navigated our way through distance learning, and finally switched from TV to streaming. We began posting videos: morning prayer, evening prayer, sermons, Faith5 reflections. With little more than a laptop and a smartphone, we expanded our repertoire to half a dozen videos per week, some live-streamed, some prerecorded. We peppered them all over Facebook and YouTube. It seems we’re all televangelists now.

Online ministry is a funny thing, full of smoke and mirrors. There’s no doubt that our efforts in cyberspace have expanded our ministry’s reach to corners heretofore undreamt of. Many of our homilies, the ones that get shared a bit, garner hundreds of views. Even matins in the morning reaches a few dozen people each day.

So on paper—or on screen, rather—our numbers look amazing. ELCA guidelines for recording worship attendance recommend multiplying the number of online views each video receives by 2.5, in order to reflect families watching worship together. If we did that we’d look like a megachurch, or the small-town equivalent, at least.

Yet whenever the numbers start to go to my head, I need only check the statistical breakdown to see just how few watch for more than a minute or three. Do passing glances of videos help? Do snippets of sermons allow time enough for the Word of God to take root and grow? Lord only knows. Maybe folks find comfort in seeing that we’re praying for them even when they don’t have time to watch.

But where even two or three are gathered in Jesus’ Name, He is there with us. So to those who join us for worship and prayer online—even if only sporadically, even if only for a moment—and to those who share our sermons with their friends, I thank God for you.

The real assessment will be next year, I expect. After the covid crisis has finally passed, what will be the state of our congregations? Will people come back, having seen how empty are the promises of politics, consumerism, and entertainment? Will we return to deeper and higher things, mysterious, eternal, and divine? Or will all this simply have accelerated the apathetic decline of organized religion so obvious in the United States and Europe? I cannot scry the future, nor in any way limit the workings of the Holy Spirit who raises up the dead.

Here’s what I can say about St Peter’s in 2020. People were generous. People were faithful. People were patient and loving and understanding. People brought Christ into their homes when we could not gather as a body. People lived out love of neighbor, the last command of Christ, by following the guidance of our state, synod, and CDC. We masked, we socially distanced, we shut down when we needed to, and we opened back up in a limited capacity, all to keep safe the most vulnerable among us.

And we can be proud of that. We can boast of that in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We’re still here, praying and preaching and serving our community. Plague hasn’t stopped us. Politics haven’t stopped us. Toilet paper shortages and school closures and business restrictions haven’t stopped us. By the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we are still His Body in this place, here in New York Mills.

He has seen us through the worst of this crisis. He is now seeing us through to its end. And He will see us all into a bright new future, a dawning Easter morn now just visible upon the horizon. The world needs the gifts and grace of God Almighty now more than ever, and here we stand, offering freely what has been given freely to us: Word and water, bread and wine, the Spirit and Body and Blood of our Lord.

The grave has no dominion here, for Christ is our eternal life.

In Jesus. Amen.