To those of you who attended BC24, to those of you who sent and supported this gathering, to all of the CLB—I greet you as partners in mission!  Indeed, I am so very grateful that we are “in this together.”

As baptism and communion, rest and life, God come near in Christ—all in the new covenant are anticipated in the old, signaled by such things as circumcision, Passover, promised land, Jerusalem, temple; so while less obvious yet as profound is Jesus’ commission to go make disciples pre-echoed in the very first commission of the Old Testament.