Respice aspice prospice. (Look to the past, look to the present,
look to the future.)
Motto
of the Borough of Bootle
Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in
heaven.
Matthew,
chapter 6, verse 10.
A century and a half ago the Revd Richard Walker, our first vicar, must have looked towards the consecration of St Luke’s on 26 December 1853 with mingled hope, apprehension and excitement. Now we at St Luke’s are looking forward to our celebrations of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of that event with thankfulness and admiration. Coinciding with St Luke’s Day 2003, there will be a flower festival involving, appropriately, other churches. The Bishop of Liverpool will come to preach on the Sunday next before Boxing Day and then we shall be giving thanks for yet another dedicated ministry at St Luke’s (the second longest in its history) when the Revd David Trollope will leave and someone else will take up the torch in the race.
As we look into the past, we can marvel and feel proud of the progress Great Crosby has made over the years and the part that St Luke’s has played in it. The vicars, all of whom excepting the first two have been able to devote at least ten years to their ministry to the parish, have maintained an enviable continuity undisturbed by arguments or differences. Congregation and minister have worked together harmoniously in worship and evangelism. The life of the church has spread out into work and leisure, touching the community in countless ways. The new Crossroads Centre, completed in the summer of 2003, is a visible symbol of how the churches in Crosby are working together. The graveyard bears witness to the thousands who have thought of St Luke’s as their church. What seemed at first to be a disastrous fire in 1972, like persecution, actually strengthened the church’s resolve and generosity. The mission churches of St Michael’s and All Saints’, planted by St Luke’s, still flourish and bear witness to the faith which created them. Many a battle has been fought, as in 1904, against ‘wickedness in high places’, which ensured that, when St Luke’s Boys’ School closed after more than one hundred years’ service, the church still has St Luke’s Halsall to strengthen the church and be strengthened by it. ‘The real history of the Church of England is mostly made in its parish churches, and the parish priest is the pivot on which that history turns. The life of the parish is Church History’.
The new Crossroads Centre, completed in the summer of 2003, is a visible symbol of how the churches in Crosby are working together.
As for the future, like Richard Walker, we cannot possibly foresee the part that St Luke’s is to play in the history of Crosby during the next one hundred and fifty years. But the past and present tell us that the church will continue with a ‘vision of the hand of Christ stretched out in blessing over a world quarrelling, fighting, starving and dying for lack of what God could do through a regenerated Church to redeem and save’. In the immediate future this will mean working more closely with the other churches in the area to see the values of God’s Kingdom permeate and transform our community of Crosby; discovering new ways of being church that will relate to our fast changing world; and always holding before us Christ’s great commission ‘to go to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples’.