Year-Ending and Year-Beginning

For our reflection as we embark on a new year of grace and salvation, and as we celebrate the Mystery of the Incarnation, Nativity and Manifestation of Our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ! Saint Barnabas has grown in remarkable and inspirational ways since its inception on 11^th June 1979 – we celebrated this year our 33^rd Anniversary and we note with thanksgiving to Almighty God what He has done in our midst. Beginning with rented space and a small faithful group of people, today Saint Barnabas has its new building complex and an official membership of 487 people. The actual number is higher, for many have not officially registered with the parish. Please do register your membership with the parish office if you have never done so before! Since 2008 we have grown 24% in membership. We are moving to a new level spiritually and numerically, as we have progressed from being a small parish to a larger parish. Saint Barnabas is one of the top five of the largest Continuing Churches in North America and one of the largest in the southeastern United States. We remain in the midst of a critical time of growth and expansion. I want to turn our gaze to what lies ahead and what opportunities exist for our future ministry and service. We are definitely entering the next phase of the life and witness of Saint Barnabas Church, and today we begin to look afresh at the challenges before us. A true axiom is that a Church that is not growing is dying; a Church can do only one of two things, move forward or fall behind. We are definitely growing, and we are called to keep up the momentum. The membership growth of our parish has in recent years been so significant that the time has come to evaluate that growth and develop a new plan for our future together.

In September 2012, the new ‘Planning for Growth’ Committee of Saint Barnabas chaired by Rette Ledbetter first met to begin its work on behalf of the parish: as our Church continues to grow in spiritual formation and membership, we are planning for the future! We have a fantastic collection of volunteers for this committee. We shall in the coming weeks and months create a strategic vision and plan for future development. We shall consider our needs for building space and facilities; yes, we need more space, for Sunday school, Christian education, social events, music, administration, and so forth. The time is soon coming when we shall need to contemplate another building programme. We are running out of room, a great problem to have! But we shall also consider how best to use our current resources and abilities to accommodate our increasing needs and challenges. Our strategic plan will not only consider our physical plant requirements, but most importantly, it will identify those areas of spiritual, pastoral, ministerial and theological growth which call for greater attention and the creation of new ways to address them. Saint Barnabas is graduating to a new stage in our corporate life together. Please watch our publications in the coming months for news of our progress and proposals to come.

The youth are our future, the future of the parish and of the Church at large. We have established and expanded our youth ministry, especially ministry to teenagers and young adults. In time we hope to expand our Sunday school classes as the anticipated need demands. We should make this expansion a priority for future service. Associated with the concern for greater opportunities for youth ministry is the need to increase the involvement of younger families in every aspect of Church life. To this end, we hope to see more social events geared toward younger families in the months ahead. Greater participation and involvement of young families will propel our efforts to see more Christian education and formation programmes for the young fill up. On a related note, I have been appointed director of the Diocesan summer camp, the Anglican Life Adventure Camp, in North Carolina! More information on that to come…

We continue our mission to support charitable work throughout the Church and the world; the Pregnancy Resources of Doraville, the Anglican Church in the Philippines, the Anglican Church in Haiti, the Norcross Cooperative Ministry, the Dunwoody-Sandy Springs Community Assistance Centre, the APA Dalit School in India operated by Operation Mobilisation, and Saint Peter’s Church in Nigeria have all been beneficiaries of our mission ministry. We continue in-house voluntary work at the Cooperative Ministry, PROD and the Assistance Centre as part of our outreach. May our future goal be a more vigorous, active and visible participation in these and other outreach ministries. Let us strive to obtain more personal involvement and interaction with outreach ministry – it would be wonderful if we could in the future boast that 10%, 20% or 30% of our membership were personally volunteering in the service of others. We need volunteers to join with us, and we ask you today to consider giving of yourself, your time, talent and energy to the service of those in need, those around us in our community. Ministry, service, the love of Christ in action, belongs not just to clergy or to a specialised group of lay-people, it belongs to all of us, to every baptised person. The early days of the Continuing Church understandably saw a concern and a need to preserve our heritage and to defend the catholic and orthodox faith. That focus was and is certainly right. But our parish, and the Continuing Church as a whole, has now matured and grown to the stage where our focus should not be solely inward, but outward. The authenticity of a Church is revealed by how she ministers to others outside the Church in the Name of Christ. We are the hands and feet of Christ in the world. Please join us in the exhilarating newer phase of our life as a parish family. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. As the great 20^th century Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, declared:  ‘The Church is the only organisation that exists for the wellbeing and fraternity of its non-members.'

The Year of Grace 2013 will be a rousing year for our parish as we look to the future, just as 2012 has been a year truly filled with God’s graces and blessings. May the Lord Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Lord, the true God born of Mary, bless and keep you all during this holy season!

+Chad