So, here’s my logic. I’m assuming that no one is coming to the annual meeting who won’t be in church today, but there may be some people who aren’t staying for the annual meeting who are here right now. On that assumption, I’m going to both preach and give the “State of St. Dunstan’s address now,” and then if you don’t stick around for the annual meeting, you’ll mostly be missing out on the business part of the meeting. I’m not advising that you leave, but I am warning you that this might be a bit longer sermon than usual. Maybe not as last week, though. 

One of the things that surprise me when I hear some people talk about the early church is often how idyllic their descriptions are. They speak about the first several decades, even centuries, as if Jesus ascended, the Spirit was poured out, the Apostles learned everything that we would come to know as confessional Christian theology, and everything was perfect. But the careful reader of the New Testament will know that things in the first century of the early church were far from ideal. Even in Corinth, a city that Paul had visited personally and a church that he had founded, there were lots of problems, including divisions and descensions among the people. 

Now, I’m well aware that when a person in any position of authority stands up in front of a group of people and says, “I want you all to agree” or “I don’t want there to be any divisions among us,” what it often sounds like is, “I want you all to agree with me” and “I don’t want there to be any divisions among us, so you all need to start doing what I say.” As we’ll see, however, what Paul has in mind is something entirely different, but more on that in a moment. 

For now, I want to talk about us as a church. It was at the very end of December in 2017 that Bishop Morales made me priest-in-charge of St. Dunstan’s. That means that I’ve been “in charge” here (a term I’m not comfortable with, as some of you well know) for about two years, and in those two years, we’ve made some significant changes, especially more recently. Change is always difficult for people. Some people, especially at the very beginning, although not many, chose to leave this community and attend another church, and that’s ok. All that truly matters is that they are still attending somewhere and still actively participate in the worship of Jesus Christ. Others passed away, or their spouse did, and that meant a move or change for them that took them away from St. Dunstan’s. We’ve lost some very precious people over the past two years, either because they’ve decided to move on or because the Lord has called them into his presence, but that’s not the whole story of the past two years. 

I remember a few months back, a senior member of this church came to me and said, “Father, can we start asking people to wear name tags again because there are so many new people and I can’t remember all their names.” Now that’s the kind of thing a priest wants to hear. Look around. Not necessarily right now, especially later today at the picnic, and look at all the new faces that Lord has brought to this church over the past two years. Every service has new people who have joined over the past few years, and several of those new people are plugged in, teaching Sunday school, serving in different capacities, and even being or becoming members of the vestry. 

Not only have we been blessed with great people, both like time members and new saints to our community, but we’ve also been moving in the right direction. We’ve been, slowly but surely for two years, fixing problems that needed to be fixed, in some cases, urgently needed to be fixed. And now, as the Bishop likes to say, in my humble and correct opinion, we are ready to move forward into the future that God wills for us, and that’s primarily what ReVive! was all about. It was about asking what the marks of a healthy church are, what we are doing well, and what we could be doing better. For those of you who w