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All Saints - Legacy Sunday

Love Breaks Down Walls

The Prince of Egypt

The Sound of Music

Love Creates Community

Looking Forward Together

"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." We love to quote that verse — but notice what kind of light it actually promises. Not a floodlight. Not high beams. A lamp, in the ancient world, was a small clay dish of oil that lit the ground about two steps ahead of you. That's it. That's the promise. Nobody who gathered in 1966 could see 2026 from where they stood — no sixty-year floodlight, no master plan unrolled on the table. They just took the next faithful step, and then the next, and God kept lighting two steps ahead, and here we are. After last week's big celebration, this Sunday the anniversary gets personal — because sixty years of church is made of nothing but ordinary people taking one next step: the person who finally walked in the door, the one who joined the group, the one who said yes to serving, the one who came back after years away. Our own discipleship plan says choosing to become more like Jesus is "the first step of a disciple" — which means the life of faith isn't a destination you arrive at; it's a walk with a lamp. So the question this week isn't "what's the twenty-year plan for your soul?" It's smaller, kinder, and more demanding: what's the next step the lamp is lighting for you? Take that one. The path is built two steps at a time.

Leaning Forward: Loving Forward, Looking Back

Leaning Forward

Back to School - When Will We Ever Use This?

Welcoming New Classmates

Back to School- Class is in Session

70 Years of Women in Ministry

This sermon grows out of a challenge that has never fully let go: a conversation with a seasoned border activist — someone who had been accompanying immigrants and families through crisis for generations — who said plainly that as a faith leader, you do not have the right to give up hope. Not a comfort. A call. A weight. And an invitation to understand hope as something other than optimism or wishful thinking. Drawing on Walter Brueggemann's concept of prophetic imagination — the vocation of holding open a future the empire insists is closed, of conjuring and proposing alternatives to the single story power wants to tell — this sermon makes the case that hope is not a feeling you wait to have. It is a discipline you practice. It is what you do when the feeling isn't there. It is lament that refuses to become despair. It is action that refuses to wait for certainty. It is showing up anyway. The sermon names the cost of hope honestly — the exhaustion of holding it, the temptation to let it go, the grief that comes with caring about outcomes you cannot control. And it holds that alongside the long lineage of hope-practitioners in our tradition: the prophets who spoke to empty air, the women who came to the tomb on Sunday not knowing what they'd find, the activists and faith leaders who kept marching when there was no visible reason to. Hope, we learn, is the posture of people who believe the story isn't over. It doesn't require certainty. It requires practice. And like any practice — prayer, Sabbath, generosity — it is something we can get better at, together.

Our youth went to Boerne, Texas, to help a community recover from a flood — and while they were there, it flooded. Plans changed. Then they changed again. (And again.) But somewhere between the mops, the flood buckets, and a gym turned into a shelter, something remarkable happened: love just kept showing up. In this week's message, Pastor Jonathan shares what he learned from watching our students serve, pivot, and even preach — four lessons about love in real life: love is flexible, love can hold what can't be fixed, love stays for the long haul, and love does it together. Along the way: a sweet neighbor who learned our kids' names, a word from Paul about grace being sufficient, and the reminder we all need — wherever you are, grace is there too.