Statement of Faith

I believe in God who is Love. I believe in a God whose Love is so big and wide and fierce and comforting that it touches every corner of the earth and makes up every fiber of creation. I believe this God who is Love yearns for us, listens to us, reaches out to us, and holds us. In wondrous awe and curious faith, I call this God “Creator”, “Holy One,” “Love,” “The More,” and I pray that my imagination for God  may always be bigger than my certainties about God.

I believe in Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-With-Us. I believe God sent God’s Love to us in a vulnerable baby, born to a teenage mother and a carpenter refugee. I believe that Jesus lived God’s Love out loud, showing us how loved we are and what it looks like to live with God’s Love as our compass. I believe Jesus healed people and flipped tables and advocated a new kind of world of abundance, compassion, justice, equity, and Love. This bold, out-loud, change things kind of Love scared people and upset them, and they killed Jesus in the most violent and humiliating way of the day. But as Jesus breathed his last and the tomb was sealed, the God who is Love was active still. Death, hatred, fear, and violence did not get the last word—Love did. A new kind of kingdom, God’s Kingdom, broke open upon the earth. Convicted by the hope of this new way of being, the Church was born to be agents of Love in a weary and broken world. 

And so, 2000 years later, we are the Church, imperfect and incomplete, but earnest and trying. Changed by the story of Love revealed in scripture and committed to reflecting God’s Love in the world, we gather to  care for and cherish, challenge and change one another. At our best, we are a place—a people—that affirms the image of God in each human being. We are a place and a people that acknowledges the injustice in our world and steps into the moment with a persevering faith that leads us to say this hatred is not of God. At our best, we are a place and a people that reach outside the walls of our building to be the church in the world, telling people a different kind of story: that God is Love and they are Loved-- the world needs more Love. 

As an imperfect people called into a world of deep brokenness, I believe in the sustaining, nourishing, all-enveloping power of the sacraments. The font that reminds us  that even before we could claim God, even before we could earn God’s love, God claimed us and loved us and chose us.  And, I believe in the power of the table—a table offered to the broken people Jesus loved, a table that says “when the going get’s tough,” eat, drink, and know--for I am with you always, until the end of the age. 

These are the tenets of my faith, the glory in which I choose to put my trust, and the call to which I offer my unfinished "yes". Amen.