100 year celebration!!!

This weekend the Bridgewater family celebrated 100 years in our current worship center (our church)

We had two services a 3:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. service with a dinner to follow on Saturday and an 11:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. service on Sunday with a light lunch to follow.

I can not believe it has been a 100 years in a single building for Bridgewater United Methodist Church. I had a great time leading the celebration this last weekend and we had great weather on top of it.

It was extremely encouraging to have guest speakers like Rev. Frank Sherman, Rev. Jim Treusel, Rev. Bonnie Rupp-Fisher, and Rev. Jeff Bobin come and share memories of their time serving here at Bridgewater as well as from the many congregational stories.

Our Scripture celebration set the tone with Matthew 7:18 through verse 29. The celebration was not about miracles, prophecies, or works of wonder, but rather relationships and faith building experiences that were focused on Jesus and the peoples response to Him.

We heard stories of people coming to faith because of Jesus’ love shining through certain members. We heard stories of object lessons that have stuck with people for at least 30 years like the worm story.

The worm story is about a person who always taught the worm lesson once a month. This person would bring in two worms and two tubes of clear liquid. The person would drop a worm in one tube and the worm would be fine and then drop the other worm in the other container and it would immediately shrivel up and die. Then there would be a follow up message explaining the other liquid was, I am going to call a similar substance to, grain alcohol. Now that is quite a lesson and on top of it they did it over and over again for possibly years.

As I was leading both services I realized that Bridgewater had their first Pastor appointed in 1808 which was only 24 after the first two Bishops Coke and Asbury where commissioned. For me it is much more of a big deal that Bridgewater has been faithfully serving the community and sharing Christ as a group of people for 199 years, and as of 2008 a full 200 years of service. I can still appreciate the 100 year celebration in one building especially since the focus was on relationships and sharing Jesus love instead of things that happened in this particular building.

With this said I am still blown away by almost 200 years of Pastoral care and support to a single group that has been together almost as long as the origin of Methodism that has become our modern denomination as a whole.