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What's left when a church closes

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Some skills are God-given. Some are acquired through hard work.  Through years of practice and hard work, I have learned to spot a garage sale sign at great distances.  Driving through the city recently my eye caught a big one.   Not only was it a going out of business sign, it was at a church.

I drove to a big old church building that backed up to a high school in one of the older parts of the city.  It was a mainline protestant church, and as I entered the old gym, the sights and smells were familiar.  It looked and felt like almost every older church I have been in.  Like my church, even.  I wandered around the building some, and it had all the problems older buildings have. Dated decor, lots of stairs, and it was probably difficult to direct people in the maze of hallways.  One table in the back had a picture of the congregation taken a few years back. The church shared little demographically with the high school you could see out the window.  I talked to a few of the ladies work…
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He Passed me the plate

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It was something that had happened to me hundreds of times before.  I stood in front of the church leading in the Lord's Supper.  Taking the plates, leading in prayer, and doing it all in remembrance of the work and sacrifice of Jesus.

I had prepared and prayed and was ready to lead.  As the music started and I walked out I was reminded again of how grateful I was to be able to lead the church in this remembrance.  I think this is one the great privileiges I have as a pastor, and I have tried to never take it for granted.

Our human mind though, often forgets, even when it needs to remember.  My desk that is littered with post-it notes is a testament to that.  It is because God knows that we are prone to forget that we are told to "do this in remembrance of me."  Every time  your church partakes in this remembrance, it helps to remind us, so that we don't forget the sacrifice of Christ for us, His body broken and his blood shed.

The deacons who had served the bread…
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The true meaning of Revitalization.

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Four times a year the Oxford English Dictionary updates its entries, adding hundreds of words each year.  Long the gold standard of the dictionary world, the OED has to update quarterly because of the massive influx of words today.   Words or phrases that 20 years ago would be nonsense are now part of every day language, even used in newspapers and on the nightly news.  This past December 2016, words such as Brexit, fulled, hakbut of crochet, Fulfulde (n. and adj.), glam-ma, YouTuber, and upstander were added to the list.  (No I don’t know what all those mean)
Every so often in the Christian subculture there are new words and phrases that catch on and become buzzwords.  You might remember when words like missional, emergent, emerging, church planting, or more first began to be circulated.  Often due to influential books, authors, or preachers, these words help put a point on something that need to be expressed in the current moment. 
In the last few years the phrase “church revitalizati…
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