This is a post that was initially shared with my congregation on June 14, in the days ahead of our Leave Taking Service:

There is strangeness to this moment for us as the congregation of Sherwood Park Lutheran Church in Winnipeg. 

We have been counting down the months, weeks and days until we say goodbye to our building. During these past few months and weeks, plans have been put into place to take with us what we need to bring with us and to leave behind what we need to leave behind. 

Just a few days ago, I was working on our final service. 

One of the final prayers before the blessing is called the ‘Declaration of Leave-Taking.’ In it, the Bishop says, “I declare this building to be vacated for the purposes of Sherwood Park Lutheran Church.” There is a certain finality to the statement. It is the conclusion of a service in which all the last things will take place: the final hymns, final prayers, final sermon, final communion and final blessing in this place. Now, of course, a new community of faith will begin many of those things anew this summer at 7 Tudor Crescent, but not as Sherwood Park. 

We don’t often talk about purposes so directly; in fact, it might be difficult at first to name our purposes if we were put on the spot. Yet, our purposes as a community, in the end, are the reasons we have been doing what we are doing as a community for 64 years in this building of ours. 

Last year, during one of my evening conversations while on the Reformation Tour in Germany with Dr. Gordon Jensen, we were talking about the purpose of the Gospel. “The Gospel is for the sake of community,” he said. The gospel⎯the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection that gives us new life⎯is given to us in order that we might be reconciled with God and be reconciled with one another. The Gospel is primarily given for us, not for me or for you, but for us. The Gospel is given for community because we need it together and in our relationships with one another, much more than individually or on our own. 

So the purpose of our community, as Sherwood Park Lutheran Church at 7 Tudor Crescent, has been to be a concrete place where the Gospel is found. Found in the Word preached, in Baptisms that welcomed new Christians into our community, in the Lord’s Supper that fed us so that we could be bread for the world. In those things a community was formed and shaped, a community that lived and worshipped together, that loved and cared for each other, that shared in all the moments of life together, from birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, in family life, work life, retirement, elder years and death together. A community was shaped and formed through the Gospel that lived out the joys and sorrows of life together. 

Now, those Gospel things that created community will happen for the last time in our building for this community. How we do them as a community going forward will be different afterwards. Where we gather, who we gather with, the community that is created will all be different and new.

That is what makes this moment strange, we know that this is a kind of ending for us, in the way we lived our Gospel callings together, and yet our calling to be a Gospel community remains. In fact, we are being called anew to the next thing, the next Gospel community that remains to be known… but is promised to us all the same.