Happy New Year everybody! And Happy Anniversary!

This coming Sunday morning we are going to have a fifteen-year anniversary celebration as a part of our worship. What better day to have this celebration than on the Day of Epiphany? The last time January 6^th, the actual Day of Epiphany, fell on a Sunday was 2008.   The time before that was 2002. And you have to go back to January 6, 1991 to find the previous time. The next time it happens will be 2019.

Getting its name from this liturgical day, Epiphany Lutheran Church was born in 1998. This is the year that this congregation became officially organized as a member congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Please do not confuse the word, "organized," here. (I'll let you draw your own conclusions about whether Epiphany is truly "organized.") What that word means in the world of the ELCA is that the congregation reached a critical mass of people and enjoyed a stream of gifts to support it so that the ELCA gave it a charter and said, "You're in." The charter is like a birth certificate. The ELCA records say that the congregation was conceived as a new mission start on July 15, 1996 when a group of people first began meeting in Terri Schroader's home. (The scriptures tell us that God conceived this congregation many ages before the ELCA did, but that's another discussion.) This means that there was about a two-year gestation period. In an age in which too many ELCA congregations (and those from other church bodies) get conceived yet never reach a critical mass to enable them to be "organized," that Epiphany did in fact get "organized" and born is a tribute to its mission developer and first pastor, Nancy Padgett, and to the good people who first gathered to do the hard work of launching a new church. Click here to continue reading

pastorrick@epiphanysuwanee.org