Hello and Welcome!
Our beloved founding pastor, Rev. Ellen Guice Sims, was an ordained American Baptist minister who retired after eleven years of service to our congregation. We emerged from the pandemic under the care of Rev. Joshua Noah, an ordained Presbyterian minister who lovingly walked with us through two and a half years of transition.
After a period of prayerful discernment, we have chosen to continue as a lay-led church.
Our congregation recognizes that we are part of an emerging church movement that seeks to live our faith more authentically — a faith that in its 2000 years of existence has “swept out the attic” and reformed several times. We believe some of those reformations took us further away from the teachings of Jesus and the practices of the followers of The Way who lived in the time between the crucifixion of Jesus and the absorption of the church into the Roman Empire.
We also are a part of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that believes “God is still speaking….” We believe that God did not begin speaking only when the first words of the Hebrew scriptures were written down a thousand years prior to Jesus’ birth, nor did God quit speaking when the last word of the New Testament was recorded over a hundred years after his death. Our incredible expanding universe attests to an ever-creating, ever-evolving God who invites us to co-create with God in our own lives and work to bring the promised Kin*dom (Beloved Community) to earth. We believe that nature itself is God’s first Bible, and that the ancient Hebrew people’s experiences of God moved them to record their experiences on tablets and scrolls that were later gathered, redacted, and chosen for the scriptural canon. We also believe that God is still speaking today through our own experiences, through art, through science, through nature, and through the political and social struggles of our time.
We know that God is not finished with us yet! God is not finished with our church or our world or even finished letting us know more about God’s own compassion, restorative justice, hope, and truth. There is more good news to be heard!
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At Open Table worship, our lay-leaders will guide us to:
- Be still and listen
- Share our burdens and joys — those in our own lives, in our community, in our nation, and in our world
- Reflect, discuss, pray, meditate, question, and consider new possibilities for loving God and loving our neighbor
