First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Community...
"When your options are either
to revise your beliefs
or to reject a person,
look again.
Any formula for living
that is too cramped
for the human situation
cries for re-thinking.
Hard-cover catechisms
are a contradiction
to our loose-leaf lives." --Gerhard Frost
"When you look for salvation by yourself.... you are like a coal drawn out of the fire." --James Jones
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.
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
The ministries of First Congregational involve people who have a vision for creating community. We have been blessed by a huge facility, and we believe that God has called us to share this space in ways that bring healing to our entire community.
The congregation operates some ministries and programs on its own. We've developed partnerships with folks who wanted to work with First Congregational in four special collaborative ventures, our Shared Space Ministries: The Pilgrim Counseling Center, The MeDiA Co-op, Revolutions: A Community Bicycle Initiative and the Defense Depot Concerned Citizens' Committee.
We have two unique ministries of our own: The Global Goods store, which supports justice efforts around the world by selling "fair trade" coffee, chocolate, clothes, crafts and gifts. And the Pilgrim House Hostel, a ministry of hospitality which welcomes guests from around the world to Memphis in the tradition of hosteling.
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.