PETERBOROUGH, ON—When Celebration 2005 wraps up three weeks of festivities on June 12, the climax event will be a live, televised, national worship celebration, originating from Peterborough’s Del Crary Park.
While other communities will participate in the broadcast via satellite, Peterborough will act as the host.
In choosing the venue for the celebration, planners had to find a location that could accommodate both the large number of people expected to attend, and the required technical facilities it will take to host the broadcast.
But there were other considerations, says Glenn Duncan, of Peterborough’s association of churches known as Church in the City. “They were looking for a place somewhere in Canada that was large enough that it was starting to have a good connection going on already between congregations,” he says.
The “good connection” that exists between the 18 churches and additional Christian ministries that form Church in the City dates back to 1996 when Duncan (a Baptist pastor) and two other local pastors from churches of different denominations began meeting on a regular basis, to share and learn from one another.
By 2000, the group was meeting monthly for prayer and support, and had grown to include 18 churches from at least nine different denominations.
“It’s technically not an organization,” says Duncan. “It’s a relationship. It started with pastors in Peterborough, and then moved to include congregations as well. But we’re trying very hard not to be an organization.
“The body of Christ is based on relationship with God,” he adds. “When we’re one in Christ, then we’re to be one with each other as well. We’re just looking to see what it means to live out being the body of Christ. We don’t have any assets and we don’t primarily plan projects. We plan to develop and build relationship with one another.”
Duncan says he and the others who constitute Church in the City believe that building and maintaining such relationship is critical if the body of Christ is to have an impact on society.
“For the church to have a healthy influence in a town or city, there are some requirements,” he says. “One is that the church live in unity. It’s more than cooperating. It’s that they actually start to invest in each other and care deeply about each other, so that congregations don’t just live for themselves, but they recognize that they’re part of the larger body and live for each other.”
Such recognition proved fruitful last summer for victims of the worst flooding in Peterborough’s history, when Church in the City volunteers were a vital supplier of clean-up assistance.
Church in the City leadership team member Tim Coles said at the time that the group had “put together a prayer covenant relationship based on Ephesians four” and was looking for opportunities to serve the city when the flooding occurred.
“We were working with EFC’s Celebration 2005, so we had several things being planned,” explains Karl House, a member of Church in the City and pastor of Living Hope Christian Reformed Church, “but those were all things that were scheduled for June, 2005. The flood basically just said, ‘now! Don’t miss this opportunity.’ Because we had that relational network we could move pretty fast.”
Plans for how the group will mark Celebration 2005 are still being finalized, but Duncan says their first priority will be to collectively raise $40,000 in order to fund and build a house for a local family in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity.
Duncan says many people express disbelief at the level of cooperation they are seeing occur between so many local churches from diverse denominations. But he is convinced God is at work. “When people start to enter healthy relationships with each other, they find it’s something they’ve always wanted,” says Duncan.
“I think it’s a God-given longing. We’re made for community.”
