Undergraduates
Undergraduates
Undergraduates
Come Away...
If your heart needs mending, come away.
When a soul needs tending, come away.
Come away with me, to a place where you can be
in a quiet, sacred time, in a simple state of mind.
Come away with me and rest now, come away.
Our Story
DaySpring Baptist Church was begun in October of 1993 by seven families who were seeking and needing a new church experience to be borne out of pain and difficulty in their lives. While their decision to worship together and ultimately to start a church is certainly not unusual, what became of it seems to be.
WHAT MIGHT WE DO DIFFERENTLY IF IT WERE JUST UP TO US?
The first families of DaySpring made choices early on and also happened into some ways of being together as a community that have become central to our mission as a church. Perhaps most significant was the decision to not even consider calling a pastor in the first year. They wanted to rely on one another to carry out the traditional pastoral functions of worship leadership, teaching, planning, and care giving.
They wanted to learn, but they also saw this as a kind of experiment;
“What might we do differently
if it were just up to us?”
These first months of being together and shaping church without pastoral leadership proved to be very important.
They felt challenged and unencumbered.
They listened.
A Place Of Rest
This New Testament kind of experience of being together and experiencing God in worship became their primary reason for being. They did not move to create traditional programming and church structures. Although some of this was a natural result of being a new and smaller congregation, it also, in their infancy, was a kind of philosophical premise.
They began to sense that, in their past church experiences, other things had become too important. Their collective suspicion was that too much “church busyness” would impact the quality of their worship.
"THE SUNRISE"
Immediately they began to experience the community they were building as a healing and renewing one. This soon became an identity and eventually an articulated mission. The name “DaySpring,” the Sunrise, had been chosen from Luke’s birth narratives and this name was naming their experience. This was fresh. Church was the place to experience hope, the place to be filled up and sent out, not the place to be consumed.
DaySpring wasn’t an end in itself. This was the thrust of their ongoing conversation about who they were and who they would become. They were convicted that institutional maintenance was not spiritually transforming.
SACRED, SIMPLE
This is the ecclesiology that they discovered together and which was articulated informally and eventually formally as the church's life developed. Now the philosophy is appropriately reflected in the slogan and mission statement, “DaySpring... Sacred, Simple.”
We have become for many in the Central Texas area, a place of rest and renewal. While DaySpring has continued to evolve and grow and change, the identity and values that developed during these early days is still central to all we do and believe.