Dear Edgeboro Friends & Family,

The fall calendar for the church is filling up quickly, reminding me of pre-pandemic years! In pre-pandemic September issues of The Envoy, I often wrote about what was coming up in our fall programming and invited you to be a part of it. In most recent issues, I’ve adopted a particular writing format that’s made up of three distinct sections – a prayer, an upcoming announcement, and something I learned in the last month. I’m very excited to invite you to what’s coming this fall at Edgeboro and about what I learned in the last month, so now I want to write about the former by way of the latter.

I’m learning a lot from a book that’s making my brain very happy called Making Numbers Count: The Art of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. The following is inspired by an example they used to communicate what the chances of one in a million feel like.

A core message from the church to its members that we’ve all heard before is that each person is unique. Every single one of us is “fearfully and wonderfully made” in the “image of God,” each “having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us“ which help us be “the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (Psalm 139:14, Genesis 1:27, Romans 12:6, 1 Corinthians 12:27)

If we are each uniquely made, nurtured, and shaped by God, then we are more than just one in a million – we are one in seven billion people in the world. But what does one in seven billion actually feel like? Buckle up!

Say someone picked up a pew Bible from Edgeboro’s sanctuary and wanted to play a game with you. The rules are simple. They would secretly pick out just one word in the entire Bible. Then they’d hand the Bible back to you. In order to win the game, you must point to the exact word in the exact place and page on the first try. The chances are very slim, but we’re just getting started.

On average, there are about 800,000 words in most English translations of the Bible. So your chances of pointing to the correct word in one Bible is one in 800,000 words.

In Edgeboro’s sanctuary, there are approximately 100 Bibles. Playing this same game with all the Bibles in the sanctuary means that your chances of pointing to the correct word is one in 80 million words.

How many Bibles would we need to reach seven billion words? All of the pew Bibles from all 83 Moravian churches in the entire Northern Province. Every. Single. Bible.

The chances of you correctly pointing to a single word chosen from all the pew Bibles from all the sanctuaries in all the Northern Province is one in seven billion words.

Remembering that we are uniquely made in the image of God sounds a bit different, doesn’t it? It’s got the weight of thousands of Bibles behind it now! There is no one else in the world that can do exactly what you do in the time and place that you’re in. This is how rare you are – or rather, how necessary, valued, loved, and cherished you are to God, your world, your community, and your church. And this is how necessary, valued, loved, and cherished our neighbors are too – the very people that Jesus asks us to love.

It’s in this context that I invite you, a cherished person, to be an active part of a faith community of cherished people looking to love and serve a cherished world.

Counting blessings with you,
Pastor Dan