From the Pastor

Just think for a moment of how much the world has changed in the last 96 years.  In 1912, the Ford Model T was the new thing in showrooms and cost $690.  A Cadillac was hand-built and cost $1800 but didn't provide many more creature comforts. Nine years earlier, the Wright Brothers had made a contraption of wood and fabric fly at Kitty Hawk, and the first all-metal plane had just been made.  The first licensed female pilot in history, Harriett Quimby, died in a plane crash while flying around the Boston Harbor Lighthouse the same month that ground was broken on Trinity Moravian Church.  "The Great War" referred to the Civil War, because World War I was still two years off.  "The Net" was something you used to bring in a fish.

It was a slower time, a time of less mechanization and lots of hard work - but also quiet moments that are hard to find in our noisy, Blackberry® ingested world.  Today, a Ford Focus starts at $14,000 and the new Cadillacs are trying to appeal to 30-somethings who would otherwise buy a BMW.  The airline industry has almost self-destructed.  We've been through two World Wars, police action in Korea that seemed pretty warlike,Vietnam, and two Gulf conflicts.

Today we have cell phones and the internet and giant-screen TVs with hundreds of channels.  The world has changed a lot since 1912, when ground was broken on our sanctuary.  A lot of attitudes in culture and even about morality have changed in that time - perhaps most quickly encapsulated in the idea that one of the candidates for President was born of a white mother and black father.  The man who made a career out of the seven words you can't say on TV (and who strangely enough hosted Thomas the Tank Engine, the show for children) has gone to meet his Maker.  So have all the strong and faithful Moravians whose vision built Trinity.

Yes, things have changed a lot in 96 years, some for the better and some for the worse.  But some things haven't changed a bit.  Human nature is still the same, with its potential for love and goodness, hate and evil.  People still need to know that they are loved.  The eternal questions are still there.  And every person out there needs to find the love and reassurance of salvation that Christ brings.  We have a job to do here on the corner of Sunnyside and Sprague, just as those Moravians of 1912 did.  We must worship God, we must seek His will together and minister to one another and get out of our doors into the streets of Sunnyside and Waughtown to reach the hearts that most need to hear the Gospel.