Friends,
I have been thinking about change and growth and progress this week.
Our neighborhood is changing and growing. New homes are being built all around us. A new neighborhood is being developed right across the road from the church campus! Hamilton Pool Road is being widened, and as it becomes a basically a five-lane road, the experience of the landscape along the way will change. What was once a winding country road will become a major suburban thoroughfare for thousands of people who live and work and shop and play at either end of the road! Those who will move into new homes and neighborhoods next year will never know what the hill country landscape looked like ‘before the progress.’ For them, what is new and changed will be what has always been!
Our life together as a congregation is the same. Those who discover us now and in the days to come will never experience what this congregation used to be ‘before Covid,’ or ‘before the property was bought and the building was built.’ Those who have been called to be part of our congregation in these last four years don’t remember who the previous pastors were, because they never experienced them. All they know is who we are now, who God is calling us to be, and what God is calling us to do, today and tomorrow.
This is what it means to be a progressive church – to orient ourselves to the present and the future, not to the past; to listen for who God is calling us to be and to embrace the change and growth that is inevitable. As long as we exist, we are bound to change and grow; if not, we are bound to diminish and die.
We are constantly under construction and improvement in our personal discipleship and in our discipleship as a congregation every bit as much as Hamilton Pool Road is. And just like the road that runs past our church campus, for this moment, we are no longer what we were, and we are not yet what we will be. Unlike the road, though, the builder of our lives is not TXDOT; our builder is God!
We are being built. Thanks be to God.
Peace,
Pastor Jack
