St. Luke's United Methodist Church

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4851 S. Apopka-Vineland Road
Orlando, FL 32819
407.876.4991
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Vision Blog Post from Pastor Jenn-October 12, 2017

Posted on October 12, 2017 at 4:01 pm in .

Dear St. Lukers,

Walt Disney is quoted as saying, “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” Dreaming is where we begin to imagine the possibilities of what could be and how you could play a part. But too often we easily dismiss our dreams as impractical or too risky to pursue. But like Walt Disney, St. Luke’s has always followed dreams. Dreams and visions of faithful people who saw gaps in our community, injustice, brokenness, loneliness, and a longing for gospel vision to fill them. These dreams and visions have been empowered by the Holy Spirit and fulfilled by God’s work within and through our faithful congregation over the last 30 years. In many ways, we have leaned into Paul’s word in his letter to the Ephesians about giving all glory to our God “who is able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine by his power at work within us.”

But the work of dreaming is never finished. God accomplishing dreams and visions means it’s time to dream more dreams and envision more visions. Which is exactly what we have been doing over the last three weeks in worship. We have been dreaming about how our gifts and strengths can intersect with the needs and longings of people not here yet within our community, to help people meet Jesus, be loved by Jesus, know Jesus and in turn, be Christ to others.

This last Sunday we gave you four new or expanded ways to build disciples and four new or expanded ways to build God’s Kingdom. Want to see the movement of the Holy Spirit in our congregation?  Click here to see the results. What’s exciting is that each of these ministries work with each other, to create the greatest impact for the Kingdom as we live into being Christ’s Salt and Light in the world.

So let’s dream a little more. We invite you to spend time in prayer over the next few days in a very intentional way:

  1. Read over all the results, listen to the heartbeat of our congregation.
  2. Spend time in prayer over the scripture for Sunday from Jeremiah 33: 1-11. Read it from your translation and then look up on biblegateway.com and read it from other translations. Read it from the paraphrase The Message.
  3. Pray over it and imagine God restoring our city, restoring our world and using us as a part of the renovation work. Pray, smile, maybe even weep over the vision of what God could do in us, for us, and through us, by allowing God to grab hold of us and use our lives, our gifts, our resources, and our strengths as a body of Christ to help this community be a “center of joy and praise and glory “ for others communities so that everyone can “be in awe of the blessings God is pouring on her.”
  4. Then imagine, vision, dream….What would the title of our next chapter as a church say God accomplished through us?

As we dream about the next chapter, what vision do you see we will have successfully achieved for God’s Kingdom as salt and light? What would the title of this next chapter say God has accomplished, in and through St. Luke’s, to build disciples and build God’s Kingdom?

We can’t wait to see you on Sunday and see what you share. May God work in us and through us to draw us together as one heart and one body, for one common purpose.

Grace and Peace,

Jenn.


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