Dear friends, as we continue our journey through Easter, it's a privilege to be here in Terrace, British Columbia, with clergy and laypeople from our diocese, with clergy and laypeople all across our ecclesiastical province who are joining in this congregational development program. The program's philosophy is that churches of any size, even relatively small ones like St. Matthias, can be vibrant and outward-looking and grow in mission and in membership. Indeed, as we look across this ecclesiastical province and across our own diocese, most of our places are growing. I was talking to Jessica in the airport last night from the Diocese of New Westminster, and they just had a banner year for confirmations in their diocese, just as we did in ours.
So many people are rediscovering faith, coming afresh to living out the baptismal covenant, seeing that in this beautiful and broken world, the Christian faith has so much to offer, and it makes sense to go deeper into our faith, deeper into living out our baptismal covenant, deeper into publicly proclaiming our faith to the world and inviting others to join us.
I'm filled with encouragement and hope for our church, for our diocese, for our province. I know that God is breathing new life into us, helping us to see the old problems in new ways, helping us more than that to see new possibilities in our midst, new people that we can reach out to and invite into the life of transformation that Christ offers.
And so, my friends, blessings for Easter. Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed, and he is alive and at work all across our beautiful diocese and our beautiful ecclesiastical province and our beautiful world. Amen.