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We are a church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America

Grace

We are redeemed by God’s grace alone; we have done, and can do nothing, to deserve or merit God’s unimaginable love for us. We have it—just as we are—through the life-giving life and death-defeating death and resurrection of Jesus. We can only respond to this great love by love for God and for each other. One expression of this grace is that ALL are welcome, just as they are, in our worship community.

Discipleship

Our response to God’s grace is to follow Jesus. We try to live as he lived: serving others, welcoming the outcasts, praying, gathering with our faith community to give God thanks—to sing, study Scripture, learn, and serve together. We try to love as Jesus loved: to love our neighbors as God loves us. Our service to neighbors focuses on food, basic needs, and supporting local arts.

Children

Christ calls us to be like children, and points to children as the way that we enter the Kingdom of God. At New Life, children are present, active, and intentionally included. They are respected, listened to, and valued.

Creation

We are thankful to be part of God’s creation—this wondrous ecosystem and cosmos. We experience the sacred in nature. We try to live in harmony with the natural world and care for the part of this Texas Hill Country with which we have been entrusted.

Faith: A living, daring confidence in God’s grace

When Lutherans talk about faith, we are talking about the relationship God’s Holy Spirit creates with us. It’s a relationship where God’s promise of steadfast love and mercy in Jesus opens us to a life of bold trust in God and joyful, generous service to everyone we know and meet in daily life.

Martin Luther was exuberant when he described the freedom of “a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that believers would stake their lives on it a thousand times.” He once wrote, “Oh, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good things unceasingly.”

Faith convictions expressed as statements of belief flow from this confident trust in God. ELCA Lutherans share in the faith expressed in the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, in the Lutheran confessional writings (collected as the Book of Concord), and in the ELCA Confession of Faith.

At the same time faith does not close our minds to the world and our hearts to others. We continue to listen to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. We listen to the witness of others and we watch for the ways God is active in the world around us. Faith opens a place for engaging others in conversation, for seeking the truth, for asking questions and speaking love in word and deed.

Faith is a full life, liberated for a living, daring confidence in God’s grace.

[Excerpt from the ELCA website. Read this and more.]