To Grow in Faith Together our Whole Life Long
God is present and active in the world, embodying life-giving love. Love is central to who we are and what we do. Our deepest desire is for all to know they are God’s beloved – precious, treasured, and loved. We believe everyone is made in God’s image, with unique gifts to be developed for the common good. Immersed in God’s love, we listen for the Spirit’s guidance. Together as a church, we are called to live out God’s love as a life-long journey, growing through worship, learning, service, advocacy, giving, and prayer, working for the wellbeing of all creation.
Our Principles
Faith Formation is a wide welcome and a lifelong journey.
Our commitment to the extravagant love of Jesus makes the words “All are Welcome” as inclusive as they sound. As we often say in worship, “Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” The journey of faith is an ongoing, never-ending, lifelong adventure of learning and discovery.
Faith is formed in inter-generational community.
Faith is formed and grows in the midst of relationships of trust, including across generations, as people get to hear each other’s stories, share experiences, offer support, celebrate joys, and honor life’s transitions and milestones. Every person of every age is a student as well as a teacher, and there is wisdom to share between the generations of faithful people.
Faith formation engages all the senses.
Our worship and our whole life together as a congregation are a school for learning how to see and hear more clearly, to become more aware of God’s presence in our lives and the needs of the world, and more able to discern the movement of the Spirit, so that we can align our prayers and our commitments to God’s good purposes. Our worship and all the activities of our life together in the church train us to notice how God is present and at work everywhere.
Faith is formed and practiced everywhere.
Faith is formed in the context of church life, but also in settings beyond our congregation. The wider community and the natural world we interact with every day give us opportunities to practice and experience God’s love. Our households are essential and powerful learning laboratories for being formed in faith on a daily basis.
Faith is formed through shared personal stories and God’s story.
We are a narrative people. Faith is formed through sharing personal stories with one another and by putting our individual experiences in conversation with the largest story there is, the one about God’s life-giving and transforming power found in Scripture. It’s a story that links us to a wide circle, the generations of faithful people who have gone before us and the millions around the world seeking to follow the way of Christ, and who, like us, find in God’s story the love that gives our lives meaning, purpose, identity, comfort, and courage.
The story is unfinished, which means that our still-speaking God is continually inviting us to become part of it, allowing our lives to be subplots of the grand narrative, and making our own contributions to its ongoing epic unfolding.
Our Practices
We seek to know more and more about each other’s stories and the larger story of God’s love as we experience it in our lives, as we study and learn about the Christian faith and the needs of the world, as we lift them in worship, explore them in forums, share them in small groups and fellowship events, and engage them in the wider community.
We seek to be Spirit led, leaning joyfully into practices of discernment, attending to the Spirit’s movement and energy, and following where she leads us, embracing experiments, and viewing mistakes as opportunities to learn, pivot, and refine.
We seek to help people of all ages identify, develop, and use their God-given gifts, to celebrate them, and to honor and support their callings – both their individual callings and the callings we share as a congregation, including our ministries for mental health, racial justice, gun violence prevention, and climate action, and our congregation’s covenants – Open and Affirming, Inclusive Language, Just Peace, Creation Justice, Accessible to All, and WISE (Welcoming, Inclusive, Supportive, and Engaged for Mental Health).
We seek opportunities to grow in faith together, sing and pray together, study and talk together, make music and art together, serve together, and play together. In the words of our behavioral covenant, “we honor each person as a sibling in Christ, maintaining an atmosphere where people feel safe to express differences, listening with respect, interest, and curiosity, seeking understanding, and sharing our thoughts and ideas in ways that bring positive energy to groups and projects.”
We seek to dwell in God’s presence, enjoy each other’s company and friendship, get to know and support each other, and look for ways to be of service, to make a difference in other people’s lives, and to contribute to building a more just, more loving community and world for everyone.