This year Community Wesleyan Church is celebrating its 50th Anniversary. With God’s help, we have worked hard to use this event, not just to celebrate the past or have a party, though we will do those too, but also to launch our church forward into its next decade with momentum and clarity of vision. Our aim is not only to celebrate God’s faithfulness in the past, but also to look forward with faith to his future acts through and on behalf of his people.
Since we have been complimented on how well this celebration is going so far, I thought I would write a couple articles about how it has happened. What have we done right that helped it happen?
Set a precedent at lesser anniversaries
As I reflect, the first ingredient of the success of this celebration plan has actually been the precedent that we set in previous anniversaries. No one argued, as sometimes happen, about whether we should celebrate; it was a given. The only question was how. We had in varied ways marked every five year anniversary since I arrived as pastor 21 years ago. In fact, as I look back, the variety in itself was a helpful part of the precedent we had set. Many of the activities for the celebration had been tested before. For example, for the 45th anniversary, we had decided to send a short term missions team to Romania. It was a big goal for us. But it was a success and so it was natural to decide a few years later to include sending another missions team as one of the ministries that would mark the 50th. As a part of the 40th we had a great feast. That idea will be part of this celebration as well, though it will be carried out a little differently. If we had not set a precedent by celebrating lesser anniversaries, I do not think we would have been ready to create the excitement and energy that have gathered around this celebration.
Start early
