Sermon Scripture: Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 The kingdom of heaven is hidden in plain sight. It is the domain where God lives and the Spirit moves, bringing the treasure of grace, mercy, and love into the ordinary soil of our lives.In our passage today, Jesus offers five more parables that play with this idea from different angles:
Sermon Scripture: Matthew 13:33 (NRSV) From outward appearances, nothing seems to be happening, but a few grains of live yeast, worked by hand into a large bowl of flour, will transform the whole mass by morning. Jesus compares the kingdom of God to this kind of work, hidden rather than announced, growing from the inside
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 Each person who views a work of art will experience it in entirely different ways. Some will barely notice it, others might acknowledge the virtuosity of the artist or admire the quality of the frame or materials, while others might have a truly transcendent experience as they gaze in wonder upon something
Sermon Scripture: 1 Samuel 16:1–13, 1 Samuel 17 This morning, as we close out our centennial season, our children and teenagers are leading us in worship, reading scripture, and preaching; a living reminder of the ancient promise that God's spirit would be poured out on sons and daughters, and that the young would speak and
Sermon Scripture: 1 Samuel 7:12 As our congregation reaches a hundred years, in the midst of our celebrations, we also want to remember all that God has done. The prophet Samuel once set up a memorial stone between two towns and named it Ebenezer, the stone of help, so that anyone who passed by would
Sermon Scripture: Romans 12:1-2 When congregations begin to grow, there is a natural pull toward activity that is not always sustainable. We start looking for programs to launch, ministries to add, and we begin thinking about what all the other successful churches are doing that we should imitate. Yet we have discovered that activity alone
Sermon Scripture: Matthew 28:16-20, Acts 2:42-47, Hebrews 13:8 Our city (our church) would be unrecognizable by those who first founded this congregation, yet our testimony and our story would feel familiar. We are a remnant of the legacy that they planted and tended a hundred years ago. And what were they planting and tending? A
Sermon Scripture: Hebrews 13:8 In this year's annual church meeting, we celebrate a year of God's steady faithfulness, where ministries grew, recovery deepened, finances steadied, and a hundred-year story kept unfolding. From the Eco-Church certification to the Centennial on the horizon, we are reminded that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and
Sermon Scripture: Acts 2:38-47 On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit did not come to give one hundred and twenty people a private religious experience. The Spirit came to make a people. A new kind of community. A new kind of family that had never existed in the world before. The scripture says three thousand
Sermon Scripture: Luke 24:44-53 Today is the feast of the Ascension of the Lord on the Christian calendar, and it is one of the least observed and most underappreciated feasts the church has. Most of us grew up in traditions that moved quickly from Easter to Pentecost, treating the forty days between them as a
