New Beginning

... from the 2012 Annual Report

At the beginning of December, the people of St. Paul’s voted to call me as their pastor, a call that began with the new year.  As we start this adventure together in faith and hope, join me in thanking God for the wonderful way God works among God’s people. As 2012 ended and the new year turned over, I think we share an eagerness and excitement to see what God has planned for us next. Even now, as we prepare for this annual meeting (January 27, 2013), we are just starting to get to know each other, but God is good, faithful and generous, and because Christ is risen, we can trust God and hope for new life in God’s future.    

Resurrection: God’s Power to Change

• The God who raised Jesus from the dead has claimed us as God’s own children in baptism and gathered us together into the body of Christ. As Christ’s body in the world, God calls and empowers us to live out God’s mission to love, heal and bless the world – as individual members, but also as a community.
  
• Worship is the most important thing we do each week, as individuals and as a body of Christ. It is when we gather around God’s Word and the Sacraments; when we experience God’s grace in words of forgiveness, life and salvation; when we comfort each other with good news and the certain knowledge that we belong to Christ and to each other in such a way that we are never alone in this world; when we are all together in one place. Out of worship, all other ministries flow as we go out into God’s world to love and serve Christ by loving and serving our neighbor.
  
• This is an incredibly gifted community. God has given each one of us a variety of gifts --different gifts, suited to different people, yet each individual is powered and energized by one Holy Spirit. God has already given us everything we need to live out God’s mission in the world; and God will continue to provide, grace, gift and empower us as that mission changes and grows.
  
• We need each other. Each gifted member of this community is important. When we are all together, united in Christ, in the power of the Spirit, we will witness God do some amazing things.
  
• Things will be different this year, but that’s a good thing. The God who created us in Christ is a living, dynamic God, as we follow Christ into the future, we will change – as individuals and as a community.  Christ Jesus is our center. That’s a constant, but as the living body of Christ, we will change.
  

Known by Our Love
In the year ahead, we will gather as God’s people to worship, pray, learn and serve. I hope this year will also be a year of listening to God, to each other, to our neighbors in the community to hear what God is doing among us and how God is calling us to be a part of Christ’s redeeming work. Gifted as we are, the “more excellent way” that St. Paul writes about is the way of Christ’s unconditional love. In all we do, in all we say, in all we give, I pray we may strive to be a “most excellent community,” a group of people known for the way they love – each other and their community – in Jesus name.