The witness of this community of believers, our grateful response to the experience of affirmation and redemption experienced as we even begin to grasp the depth of that compassion and the breadth of that invitation, has been a legacy of outreach and service in a vibrant and wonderfully diverse community. This is a tradition and legacy that we have always felt honored the Denomination we continue to represent.
We have come to understand that like all human institutions, the church has succumbed to defining itself by lines of exclusion rather than by the grace and forgiveness of the Christ who is our foundation. We have more often than not gold plated the cross of compassion with self righteous judgment, and selectively scalped tickets to a banquet that God has given for free. We have stifled the gift and qualified the invitation.
We have also experienced the glory of those moments when by the grace of its Founder the churches' curtains of division and rejection have been torn. And for those who have hidden in its sanctuaries and for those whose faith has sustained them at the doorstep, wholeness has been found and healing has occurred. And the light of God's love and mercy shining through the newly open doors of our sanctuary has brought newness and hope and the taste of a vision the completeness for which we long.
And so, moved by grace toward this vision:
We declare that God's call to discipleship will be honored and nurtured at Westminster Hills Presbyterian Church. And that all those who hear this call will be welcomed to full participation in the life of the congregation, including and especially those who have suffered exclusion for their sexual orientation, race, nationality, disability, marital status, gender or any other category that is held up as a target of the ignorance and hatred the shackles from which we are freed as we approach again and again that table at the foot of that cross.
Such a declaration in this country in the 1860's might have established the congregation as Abolitionist. Such a declaration in Germany in the 1930's might have established the congregation as a member of the Confessing Church.
This declaration now, on Passion Sunday March 23, 1997 does establish the congregation of Westminster Hills Presbyterian Church, Hayward, CA as a More Light Church. To God be the glory.