How connected do you feel to other people at church? If you wish you felt a bit more connected, there are many ways to get there – and I want to give a shout-out for the Tuesday’s Welcome Table weekly dinners as one delicious, delightful way to feed your body and your spirit while getting … Continue reading Tuesday’s Welcome Table
This play on the Rumi lyrics to hymn #188 (Come, Come Whoever You Are) is not only the theme for our auction (Sunday, June 11 @ noon), but also the core of my invitation, my appeal, my plea to you all. I love that we have enabled all our spaces for remote access. That was, … Continue reading Come, Come, Wherever You’ve Been
Our theme for worship and faith development this month asks us to explore this question – and I encourage you to think about how you will explore it intellectually, how you will explore it emotionally, how you could incorporate the question into your personal spiritual practices, and how you might act as an agent of … Continue reading What Does It Mean to Be a People of Healing?
Our mission has never felt as relevant as today: Connecting in love and service, growing spiritually, transforming ourselves and the world. In record time, we’ve had to transform ourselves from a brick & mortar, relish-in-person-proximity, love-to-share-food-and-hold-hands kind of congregation into an online, phone-line, keep your physical distance kind of community. None of us know the … Continue reading Church in a Time of Pandemic
October’s themes of Belonging and Commitment are a serendipitous pairing. Our Children’s Sunday School theme is Belonging while our worship theme is Commitment, and that raises some deep questions for me and maybe for you. What does it look like to be a congregation committed to the idea that children belong to the congregation? What … Continue reading Belonging and Committment
“We stopped coming and no one ever said a word.” “The only call I ever got from the church was about my pledge.” “I went through a rough time but the church didn’t seem to notice.” In other words: You didn’t care about me as a person. Hearing the disappointment and hurt expressed in … Continue reading Staying in Touch
As we say each Sunday: “Let this be our covenant: … and to help one another.” These words have been at the core of so much of our ministry this winter. I don’t recall another time since my arrival in Concord with so many of us in need of care or involved in providing care. … Continue reading Circles of Care: Comfort in, Dump out
Connecting in Love and Service Growing Spiritually Transforming Ourselves and the World This is the mission statement we created together and adopted in 2013. In all we do together as a community, these are the words that we revisit to evaluate how we’re doing. These are the words that we look to when we ask, “Could … Continue reading Big changes coming this fall, for worship and for faith development for both children and adults
The future of any community is in large part a reflection of the culture it shares and values. Our congregational culture is what gives me hope and faith in a future worthy of our dreams. Does that mean we have all the volunteers we need? No. Does it mean we have all the resources we … Continue reading Our Congregation’s Culture – Now and in the Future
Last March, we circulated our first annual Ends Survey. Ends are statements that talk about the impact we want to see as a result of our ministry together. These ends were adopted by the Board of Trustees with broad-based input from the congregation a number of years ago. For the past few months, the board … Continue reading Survey Results #1 – Connection
