Holy God:
Our hearts are full today--a day that is bittersweet. We have gathered once again in this sacred space, a place of worship in which you have met us again and again. We have found your grace here. We have been family together here. We have mourned those who have died in the Lord, those now in your presence with whom we will be united, but we see no more. We have made promises to you at these altars and you have made promises to us. We have broken the bread and poured the wine, we have been nourished by your sacraments. We have laughed and danced and cried and sung. We have grown up here and grown old here. This place has been a spiritual home to us--You are our only home, and yet we have found you here, and so it feels so very much like home to us.
We celebrate that we will soon have a new place where new disciples will be made and new prayers prayed, where children will learn to love Jesus and where the Gospel will be proclaimed. A place where the scriptures will be read and understood and lived. A place for which we have given and sacrificed and labored and dreamed and fought.
But today, we remember. And we thank you. We thank you for our visionary forefathers and mothers who built this place so that we could be the people of God together here. We thank you for all who prayed and sweated and struggled to bring this place in to being for us, those who fixed and renovated and scrubbed and vacuumed this house that we might know your love when we arrived. We thank you for those who have walked the floor in prayer and worn out the kneeling cushions when no one was here, begging you that we might sense your touch and have our hearts transformed when we arrived for worship.
We thank you for all you will yet do in this place--For children and youth and adults who will first learn to love your name here. For water that will be poured for baptism, for bread broken to feed hungry souls. We ask you, Holy God, that you will do more in this room to draw your kingdom near in the next fifty years than you have done in the past fifty years.
Pour out your spirit today. Pour out your spirit in this place. Pour out your grace. Let us know your presence. May your church be born afresh. May we be empowered to go from this place with boldness, not in our own power, but powered by your spirit, to make disciples of all people.
Amen.
