Dear Editor,
My heart goes out to the pastor whose church died (Closure on a Closure? February en). We have just lived through the same experience, and it is heart-breaking.
But I feel he is too hard on himself, and I would have to take issue with that repeated word ‘defeat’. Surely the devil wins a battle when we choose to do something we know to be wrong, not when we’re prayerfully seeking to glorify Christ.
We held a closing thanksgiving service. Our preacher that day (we hadn’t succeeded in calling a pastor in recent years) reminded us from Philippians 1.6 that we can be ‘confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus’.
It’s true that closure could be a bad witness in the neighbourhood. But perhaps God will use even that? The removal of a caring, sharing community that shines the love of God into people’s lives may cause them to think.
Yours in Him,
