Grace and peace to you.  In this post I’d like to share with you two items that I hope to bring with us from our current church to the new church.  Today I will focus on two very important items.  In future postings, I'll touch on furhter developments in this area.  We are faced with the challenge of furnishing a new church with a budget line that reads, for all intents and purposes, 'zero'.  That's OK - it's brining out in us some wonderful creativity and ingenuity - signs of the work of the Holy Spirit!

We will bring along the tabernacle, also known as an ambry.  What is it?  It’s the small ‘box’ mounted to the wall to the right of where I sit in church.  Part of our heritage as members of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion is that we believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion.  Because we believe in that real presence, we need a sacred, set-apart place to keep that sacramental presence.  You will notice that a small vigil candle is suspended from the ceiling and burns above the tabernacle.   This candle is a sign and reminder to us of that sacramental presence.   What do we do with the reserved communion?  We bring it to sick and homebound, we use it during worship if we run out of communion bread or wine, and we keep it with us in our church as a sign of that on-going spiritual presence of Christ in our midst and within us when we receive Holy Communion.  Along with the reserved sacrament, our tabernacle contains two different types of blessed oils – oil for anointing the sick and the chrism oil we use when we baptize someone.  It will be important to bring this sacramental presence with us to our new church.  It will also be a nice link between the current church and the new one.

We will bring along with baptismal font.  Our baptismal font is a sacred item in our church.  If you look at the base, you will see an inscription on one side, “From the Lambs of the Flock 1866”.  Many generations of people have been baptized Christians here at St. Mary’s in that baptismal font.  It would make good sense that we bring the font with us to the new church where will continue, in the name of Christ, to baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  We will see to it that there is still a baptismal font in our current church when we move to the new one. 

As beautiful as our little church is, the action and activity all around us is a powerful reminder that something dreamed and prayed about for a long time is happening – we are building a new church!  The excitement of new life and inviting more members and having more space for worship will, in some cases, be tempered by the struggles that come with adjustment, change, letting go, and beginning anew.  It is a blessing that we are not physically moving, as is often the case when a congregation builds a new church.  Our land allows us to stay right here, offering many creative possibilities as we continue to proclaim the gospel on this corner.  God bless you.