Members and friends of First Churches. It has been my privilege to serve this congregation and
community for that last year and ¾. Together we have worked through some of the conflict of the past
and made important decisions for the future. We have grieved some losses of important members, and
we have welcomed with joy some wonderful new members. Each year at our annual meeting, when you
vote to pass a budget, I see that moment as an affirmation of this community and a renewing of my
covenant with you as pastor, that we will walk together in all God’s ways. With that said, the state of
the church is strong!
What makes us strong?
First Churches is a Great Commandment Church – Love your God will all your strength and love your
neighbor as yourself, all of them! You are a compassionate community. You warmly welcome to
people who attend worship, you care for one another in crisis and help and support each other. I have
experienced your generosity of spirit when many of you write supportive notes and when Jeanne broke
her shoulder and you cared for us, with food, help and even house cleaning. You live the Great
Commandment.
You also reach beyond yourselves in mission, justice and peacemaking. (just a few things)
 We have been working on passing immigration legislation in partnership with Iglesias Bautista
Quichau, who worship in our building. On Pentecost Sunday evening, June 8, we will worship
and share a meal with them. (They have offered to cook the main course!)
 Our Stewardship campaign will emphasize all the ways we reach out. May 18, we celebrate all
we do to stop hunger – serving meals Cathedral in the Night, Cot Shelter, CROP Walk, food for
the Survival Center and more.
 The Peace Prayer Vigil has met every week for 18 months to pray about peacemaking,
especially about military drone strikes, gun violence, and finding God’s presence beyond our
own sense of anger and powerlessness. I am pleased to share that the prayer vigil will be a
featured ministry of prayer at the UCC Massachusetts Conference Meeting this June.
 You sign up people to vote, write letters to your elected representatives, host numerous
educational and community events regarding the common good and peacemaking. This is also
living the Great Commandment.
We have some great assets: Our sanctuary, The Meeting House of Northampton is a place of light
and feels like sacred space when you walk in the door. It is located in the midst of an active and thriving
downtown, and we are a “go-to” destination for many events. First Night Concerts, Diana Butler Bass
last March, National Progressive Democrats are meeting this weekend and US Senator Bernie Sanders
of Vermont will speak here on Friday. Tour groups come to see be at the sight where Jonathan Edwards
preached and the First Great Awakening flourished.
We are working on a new relationship with our building and our space. The Sanctuary is not the only
sacred space we have. It is all sacred, from the classrooms, to boilers, the kitchen and especially our
front steps. This summer we want to complete a makeover of the building, including completion of the
downstairs education wing renovations, repainting the church offices, moving the junk out the basement,
getting a new church sign out front, plus signs in the building so people can figure out where they are
going. We are near submitting our application to the Massachusetts Historical Commission to sell the
Tiffany Window, selling one Great Treasure because our true treasure is this community. Vanessa and I
are working to make this building pay for itself, with more large events. We will double our weddings
in the coming 2015 fiscal year, from where we were in 2013. We will continue to be good stewards of
what we have.
The most important assets you have today are openness and the ability to engage in dialog and build
transparent trust. You are open to theological questions and inquiry, with more than 40 people engaging
in house churches last Fall to discuss Marcus Borg’s book “Speaking Christian. Through our work
with Margaret Keyser on conflict transformation and our solid process about the sale of the Tiffany
Window, you have become a community of wise discerners. This is important because any organization
must change and adapt in order to thrive when change is all around them. If you lived in an area
stricken by drought, you have to adapt, you have to either get more water or move. You can’t stay
where you are, doing what you did before and hope it all works out. Keeping an open and reflective
stance is perhaps your biggest asset right now.
Here’s why. The biggest challenge to the whole church right now is figuring out how to become a
progressive faith center for millions of people who see themselves as spiritual but not religious. Many
people who say their religion is “none of the above” are on a spiritual journey, they are theists, and in
some cases they left churches because they were spiritual and well-read about religion. They were not
finding connection to God in their congregations. We need to figure out how to be a faith-equipping
church where believers, questioners and questioning believers can grow their souls and be spiritually
empowered. Here is what I mean by faith equipping church:
1) We have a theological stance that takes the bible seriously but not literally, and we engage it with
passion and open dialog, so that it becomes a faith resource for people. When people think about
First Churches, I want them to say, “They believe and they haven’t thrown their brains out the
window.
2) We practice prayer as a primary resource for faith and life, and we provide opportunities to pray
and learn about a variety of spiritual practices. I want people to see this church and not just
religious, but spiritual. Here is a place where we learn to seek God together.
3) We empower people to discover meaning and purpose for their lives, so they change and grow
and change the world around them. I want every person who enters our church to discover that
they are created in the image of God, loved, and also that they are gifted for ministry for the
common good, and God calls them to shape the Beloved Community with their gifts.
The great challenge of the decade is to build out from being a Great Commandment Church to also
becoming a Great Commission Church. Our reading from Matthew’s Gospel says “Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations…” I am willing to use the word evangelism because I believe in growing
the Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God, the place where God’s will is done on earth as it is in
Heaven.
I have two things I want to say about this challenge: 1) Our problem is not about money, it is about
purpose. 2) They way we transmit our faith may not be how a new generation receives our faith. I am
not calling you just to add members so we have more pledge units and income. That would be selfish
and probably self-defeating. The more we worry about money problems, the less attention we give to
our true purpose. We are not here to survive. We are here to change lives. If we had all the money we
needed to run the church, we would still have the same problem-fewer people are finding meaning in our
churches. That’s the key issue. I think this congregation has a great deal to offer that people what from
a spiritual home, but here is the challenge: they may not be ready to receive it on a Sunday morning in
the form that we are currently offering it. They may need a different doorway, like a small discussion
group, a midweek service, a worship and prayer experience that looks very different than what we do on
Sunday. One fact, 26 percent of Americans regularly work on Sunday. That alone says we cannot count
on what we do on Sunday to be all things to all people.
We have an important opportunity before us to prayerfully consider. As you probably know we will
have a vacancy in the Christian Education program as Eric Frary is leaving due to the nature of being a
full-time teacher. We will miss him and wish him well. The search process has begun and I want to
explain how and why we have a potential candidate already. A few weeks ago Rev. Sarah Buteux, my
colleague who served the Hadley UCC Church and is currently in the Belchertown UCC Church,
approached me with an idea. She wants to start a mid-week worship ministry called Common Ground,
to reach out to people who may not come to a typical Sunday morning service. She already has a core of
over 20 participants and more than 50 people on her mailing list. My first response was, I only see this
working well if you are on staff at the church, and would you consider becoming working as a Christian
Educator on Sundays and launching Common Ground as our mid-week service.
As we talked we both became excited about the potential synergy of having two services. Common
Ground would have instant infrastructure and community and we would have new people worshiping
and working with us. I’ve spent time researching the great value of second worship services, and people
who come midweek often migrate to Sunday morning, especially if that is when Children’s Church
happens. Many congregations have two worship services and are still a unified community, especially
in our case when we have active Mission, Peace and Justice, and small group and educational
opportunities where we can intermingle together.
First Churches needs to be a worshipping community where average weekly worship attendance is over
150 to 200 people, where there are other weekly opportunities for worship and engagement beyond
Sunday morning, and there are two pastors and an engaged, multi-generational, younger and more multicultural congregation. The big question is how and when. Do we wait until there is enough growth, or
enough money to hire another pastor and expand our programming and outreach ministry? If this is a
future we believe in and want to have, why should we wait? Why not just go for it now?