Before she joined St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Laura Landsman was raised a Southern Baptist. She spent a summer as a missionary for the church and at one point served as a counselor for Billy Graham’s evangelical crusades.
The 74-year-old Weatherford native, as she tells it, was “devoted to fundamentalist Christianity.” Then her idea of what it means to be Christian started changing, and she found herself feeling lost.
That was several decades ago. On the third Sunday of this month, she sat with around a dozen congregants at a meet-the-ministers lunch at St. Andrew’s, discussing what brought her to the progressive church in North Austin that counts among its longtime members state Rep. James Talarico, a 36-year-old Democrat now running for U.S. Senate.
