Fall 2026 Chimes
Pastor’s
Letter
Dear siblings in Christ,
August always seems to carry two different feelings for me. Summer is not quite over, but the signs of a new school year are everywhere: school supplies appearing in stores, backpacks being packed, calendars filling up again, and families shifting back toward fall routines.
Here at St. Paul’s, this season of learning has felt especially appropriate because of the work happening in our church library. Over the past several weeks, I’ve spent quite a bit of time sorting shelves, reorganizing books, deciding what we should keep, and thinking about what new resources might make our library more useful and inviting. One unexpected consequence has been that a project that was supposed to involve organizing books has also involved getting distracted by them.
I keep pulling things off the shelves and thinking, “I ought to read this.”
So, in honor of back-to-school season, instead of offering a traditional reflection this month, I thought I would share a few new titles in our library that I’m excited to read soon.
One that I actually read last month was Freeing Jesus by Diana Butler Bass. Its subtitle is Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence, and that gives you a pretty good sense of the book. Bass looks back over different stages of her own life and the different ways she has understood Jesus along the way.
What I especially appreciate is her insistence that our understanding of Jesus does not have to remain frozen in the form we first learned as children—or even in the form we learned in confirmation class. Faith can deepen, stretch, and change as we do. Sometimes an image or understanding of Jesus that was meaningful at one stage of life becomes less helpful at another, and something new emerges.
That feels particularly important in a world where many people assume that having questions means losing faith. Bass suggests almost the opposite: questions can be part of a living faith. We keep meeting Jesus again.
Another book I’m excited to get to is Barking to the Choir by Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest and the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, which works with people affected by gangs and incarceration. The follow-up to his book Tattoos on the Heart, which our Stephen Ministry group read many years ago, Boyle tells story after story about people he has known through that ministry—stories that can be hilarious one moment and heartbreaking the next.
Boyle writes about compassion not as feeling sorry for someone, but as discovering our kinship with one another. The goal is not to stand at a safe distance and help “those people.” It is to recognize that there really are no “those people.” There is only us.
That is a message the church probably cannot hear too often.
And then I returned to a book I have read before: Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr. It is a collection of sermons, many written and preached during the Civil Rights Movement, and I was struck again by how pastoral they are. King was, of course, a great public leader, but he was also a preacher speaking to Christian communities about fear, courage, enemies, suffering, justice, and hope.
Some passages feel startlingly contemporary. King refuses both a faith that retreats from the problems of the world and a politics that forgets the humanity of the people we oppose. Again and again, he returns to the difficult Christian calling to resist evil without surrendering ourselves to hatred.
These three books are very different, but I realized that they have been having something of a conversation with one another as I read.
Who is Jesus to us now? Who belongs within the circle of our concern? And what kind of people does Christ call us to become in a divided world?
Those seem like pretty good back-to-school questions—not only for children returning to classrooms, but for all of us.
One hope behind our library renovation is that the space will become more than simply a room where books happen to live. I hope it can become a place of curiosity: somewhere to discover a writer you have never encountered, revisit an old favorite, wrestle with a question, or find language for something you have been wondering about.
Because Christians never really graduate from learning.
We keep reading. We keep asking questions. We keep listening to one another. And, throughout a lifetime of faith, we keep discovering new things about God, our neighbors, and ourselves.
In Christ,
Pastor Laura
Read the full Chimes HERE.