“Rejoice and Be Glad… A Musical Journey”
Heidi Hawkinson-Penny’s CD is available for purchase!
Click on the CD tab for complete details! To order your copy of this CD for $20, including shipping and handling, please click here or call the church office at 785-233-1786.
Embrace the Questions at
First Congregational Church!
As a member congregation of the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United Church of Christ and with other UCC congregations around the U.S., we strive to live by the message:
“No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here!”
Faith is a journey, and all of us are never in exactly the same place at the same time. This is why, when we gather for the worship and work of the church, we respect, value, and celebrate the diversity of those present and the experiences they bring with them to our communal life. Our gatherings, therefore, are an exploration and discovery of faith’s richness.
From our different perspectives, “we unite,” in the words of our church’s covenant, “for the worship of God and the service of humankind.” In doing so, we attend to the witness of our ancestors in the faith. We listen for and study what they heard and learned in their encounters with the living God, as we seek to make sense of ours.
The opposite of faith, someone once said, is certainty, not doubt. We do not pretend to have all the answers. We pray for faith enough to explore the questions that arise on life’s journey, for faith enough to go wherever it is that they will lead us because, in the end, life’s questions are God’s gifts for the journey! We should seek, therefore, to embrace them.
Together, we turn to the witness of our ancestors in the faith, recorded in the library of faith known as the Bible. As we seek to understand their witness, we are guided by the teaching and example of Jesus the Christ, in whom we recognize and celebrate God’s self-giving love.
As we seek to understand their witness, we open ourselves to the ways in which God, through the Holy Spirit, still speaks to us today.
As we seek to understand their witness, we affirm God’s transforming power, then and now.
In all of this, we learn that God’s self-giving love calls us not to judge but to offer each other every encouragement along the way. If we err, we prefer to err on the side of grace.
No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, welcome to this website, where we hope you will find some support and encouragement for your own journey.
~ Tobias Schlingensiepen, Senior Minister