First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Community...
Each week at worship, we share this affirmation of our community life:
We will be together.
We will stand as brothers and sisters given life by one God.
We will be together. We will watch out for one another.
We will listen to what needs to be said in a spirit of compassion.
We will respect the power of silence. We will wait for the slowest.
We will sooner or later catch up with the fastest.
We will dry the tears of those who are weeping
and know that they will dry ours when the time comes.
We will let ourselves begin to feel at least a little of the pain
of those we have considered our enemies.
We will entrust our stories to each other.
We will not be skeptical that peace can come.
We will not forget the joy of life.
We will not forget to be grateful.
We will do our best to stir in each other hope, courage and faith.
--Mary Ann Bednarowski, adapted by First Congregational
One of the great strengths of First Congregational is that God has invited us, through the years, to move into a deep experience of community life. Many of us are people who felt "outside the lines" of traditional Christianity. Some of us felt like doctrinal Christianity left us empty when it came to finding meaning in life. Others of us were abandoned by our congregations when we started being honest about being gay or lesbian.
Revolutions
We come to First Congregational because we want a church which moves more quickly to welcome than to exclude, a church where the formulas for living are wide enough to include the whole of humanity. We believe that God loves us for who we are--not because we can repeat the right doctrines or force our lives into a particular cookie-cutter mold. We see in the Biblical accounts of the life of Jesus that God was able to love even beyond the boundaries of particular religious histories and traditions. We believe that we're called to love and to form community in the same way.
Cooper-Young Neighborhood Festival, 2005
All told, we share our space with 29 other organizations, all of whom have a calling to bring people together in an environment of healing, justice and reconciliation. We are midwives, language specialists, counselors, filmmakers, bicyclists, refugees, environmental activists, nutritional therapists, childcare workers....and we share space at 1000 South Cooper because we believe that community matters--and that our work is done better in shared space than on our own.