FROM THE PASTOR

Listening to You

It should come as no surprise our listening season revealed a very diverse congregation with a multiplicity of viewpoints, needs, hopes, fears, and dreams.  How our church will emerge from the pandemic was a repeated context in our conversations, spoken with both hope and fear.  We were able to discern seven major themes, each of the themes holding a continuum of responses in what we believe is a dynamic tension.

1. Our major insight is that we are a congregation which feels disconnected on many levels, but also a deep longing for reconnection with one another and our community.
2. Worship is central to our life together and these is a continuum of desire to maintain our traditions with a desire to embrace new elements of worship.
3. There is a strong desire to engage in service to others, both inward (among our members) and outward (local\global community).
4. There are a variety of expectations of a lead pastor.  There is a strong longing for a “shepherd” to provide personal pastoral care for the membership, but also a recognition that our church will need a leader who can lead us through change and help us grow.
5. We have a great diversity in feelings and commitments around social justice issues.  The continuum embraced a desire for the church to be actively involved in these issues, to a desire that we leave these issue up to individual responses.  At the hearings there were many who hope our church can be a place where those with varying viewpoints on these issues can come together in honest dialogue.
6. Change and Growth was a major theme: from a desire to restore/maintain past success to a desire to grow in new ways.
7. Youth and family ministry is a major theme, both internally and in the community.

I share these with you in the hope that you will join the Vision Team in prayer and imagination as we seek the Holy Spirit’s wisdom for a renewal of our church’s life and ministry.  What kind of a church can embrace the diversity of these themes while growing in faith, outreach and discipleship?  How will we re-gather, re-connect, re-member the Body of Christ at St. Luke’s coming out of the pandemic?

Pastor Stephen Paul Bouman