Jul 8, 2021

PCLT Family and Friends,

 

Our most recent Visioning process for our congregation began more than 18 months ago. In January, 2020, we were nearing the one-year anniversary of my arrival as your pastor. It was a good time to start looking forward. Then, just six weeks later, on March 12, 2020, the COVID pandemic closed our doors and many things slowed down, changed, or stopped. It was summer, 2020, before we picked up the Visioning process again, with Zoom Town Hall listening sessions. Those conversations were distilled by Session as they spent the winter months discerning what it all meant for our congregation, and how we might emerge from the pandemic with a stronger, clearer sense of who God is calling us to be and what God is calling us to do as a Christian congregation in the greater Lake Travis community.

 

Along the way, as steps toward clarity and discernment, your Session voted to become a More Light Church – recognizing that God’s love is an ever-widening circle, and stating explicitly and unequivocally that we welcome LGBTQIA persons into our congregation at all levels of participation and leadership. Your Session also voted to become a Matthew 25 Congregation – focusing on the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 25, “When you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.”

 

After several more discussions and months of prayer and discernment, the Session crafted a Vision Statement for PCLT.

 

PCLT is called to be a progressive voice for Christian engagement in the Lake Travis community.

 

Key to this vision is our understanding that God’s voice calls us to lift up our voices, both as individual witnesses and as a congregation, to share what God is doing in our world and through us. In this statement, progressive is not a political term; it indicates a future-forward orientation, noting that God is doing new things, still creating, and we participate in God’s new creation when we focus on justice, equity, and peacemaking. A third emphasis acknowledges that God calls us to engage our community in ways that specifically share our Christian commitments and values of inclusion, hospitality, welcome, and compassion for the most vulnerable and those whose voices have been long silenced.

 

As a vision statement, this is aspirational for us; it is a vision of who we are called to become and who we hope to be at our most faithful. I invite you to lean in to this Vision Statement and see what ideas and commitments it inspires in you.

 

Peace,

 

Pastor Jack