Photo: Hannah Busing | Unsplash
After serving the community for over a century, Grace Covenant Church -- a small church in Chicago -- closed down on Sunday, August 28, 2022. Since its inception in the early 1900s, the church had its fair share of challenges, including a major fire in the 1940s, and showed great resiliency by evolving and adapting to new realities. Despite being small, the congregation ran a local food pantry and touched many lives -- from seminary students, aspiring pastors and missionaries, to Sudanese refugees and members of a small Hispanic church whose leader was a former political prisoner. However, like many churches in America, Grace Covenant Church had been struggling with declining membership, a problem that was exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Out of concern for members who were worn out, pastor Amanda Olson and her congregation decided that it was time to close down the church and use its resources to support new ministries. During the final service, Olson said, “The reality is that we cannot experience resurrection, friends, without first having the courage and the guts to face death.” She reminds everyone that this is not the end of the story for the church and its mission. There is more work to be done.
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