My partner and I have been members at First Presbyterian Church for the past 12 years.  Upon finding First Pres, we were drawn to worship with others who were faithfully committed to working for peace and social justice.  In our church home, we have found a plethora of ways to be involved, both when sitting together in the sanctuary pews and when working side by side with others -- pounding nails for a Habitat project, writing letters to our state legislature, supporting wells drilled to bring fresh water to El Salvadoran communities, or serving meals to some of our local homeless folks.  Sunday morning promptings challenge us and nurture us with renewed energy to be active and visible in the community.  We feel loved and welcomed as a part of the First Pres family – fellow sojourners on the path to exploring our faith and developing deeper understanding of God’s creative spirit at work in us.

Our church’s mission is to make our personal witness and public work consistent with the prophet Micah’s challenge to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God”.   Our personal witness and public work, acting as co-creators with God.  We strive to live out this commitment in our corporate worship and in our calls to take action in serving the world around us.  We believe that we are all called to be lay worship leaders, elevated to be equal pastors in Christ’s ministry along side our ordained clergy.  This means we do not rely solely on church deacons and elders to care for our community and direct our church’s involvement in day to day missions.  Instead, we all share responsibility for caring for one another and opening our communal arms to welcome any person to prayer and worship with us.  Four statements further define who we are as a church, and provide grounding for meaningful, Christ-centered worship in these contemporary times:  a Sanctuary church, supporting refugees and conscientious objectors, a More Light church, welcoming gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons into full membership, a Peace and Justice church, working for human dignity and survival for all, and an Earth and Spirit church, loving the earth as God’s creation. 

Following Reformed tradition, we celebrate Communion emphasizing transformation of the people of God into the body of Christ.  On Communion Sundays, children are welcomed back into the sanctuary from church school so that they may join in sharing our common feast.  The Communion elements are served by our pastors and lay elders and deacons, who say “The body of Christ, broken for you” and “The Cup of hope, poured out for you”.  Thanks be to God!  And as we seek to follow Christ’s path in our own faith journeys, we also strive to share with our children our understandings of God’s imaginative and hopeful spirit, alive and at work within us.  We aspire to prepare our children for a life of service and commitment to social justice, both through our worship as the body of Christ and in our educational teachings. 

Our worship service is filled with music that imbues another plane of transformation for the soul.  Like our inclusive ministry, our range of musical offerings spans a wide-range of genre:  from classical organ and piano to scripturally-based choral anthems, spirituals and taize, the voices of our children and our collective singing of hymns in worship.  Liturgical dance brings our music to an even greater level of passion and expression. Nan reminded us that Calvin set psalms to music because he knew that the people would remember the Scripture more vividly if they sang the text. We are, of course, challenged to both sing those traditional words and phrases while also respecting inclusive language. This is one more way we feel God's changing and transformative spirit alive and stretching within us.

I am thankful for First Pres and the ways we are challenged to follow Micah’s call, while seeking to be a church that is personally and socially relevant in the world around us.  We center our communal life in worship, with liturgy, musical offerings, scripturally-based promptings and corporate prayer.  And we close our morning time of pastoral and communal prayer as I close my reflections on worship at First Pres as part of this morning’s sermon:  Thanks be to God.  God, we trust to your care.