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I simply do not believe that at this point in time the distinctiveness of our different churches is more important than the values and common understandings of Scripture that unite us.

Nonviolence requires training. It requires the humility to take correction from someone you can trust to see your shadow better than you do. It also requires you to forgive yourself when you give in to the violence crouching at the door, and keep at it. Don’t give up on nonviolence.

First Presbyterian Church Elizabethton, Tennessee April 6, 2012 Good Friday Mark 15:1-47 A few years ago a poster advertising Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion, featured an image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. The caption read: Dying …

Recorded Sunday January 8, 2012 at Pilgrim UCC in Carlsbad, CA.
Pilgrim UCC is an Open and Affirming member of the United Church of Christ.

Rev. Madison Shockley II
A sermon on a topic ripped from the headlines.

The god-of-the-gaps, that creation of superstition and magic, that combination of pre-science simplicity, is not what draws us here.
We’re not trying to get in touch with the god who helps us to find a parking place at the mall or make it rain on our vegetable garden. And yet, people are terribly afraid to give up on the institutional religious packaging that first introduced us to the god-of-the-gaps.

Good is God…All the time!
I will say it again, Good is God…All the time!
Did you hear something different?

Faith is not about getting our doctrines right. Nobody gets the doctrines right. It’s about doing the right things.

Easter Reflections for Christians, and for people who are not Christian as well, by Cara Hochalter. May speak to people who are “spiritual but not religious” who, like all of us, seek the fresh winds of the spirit and new births in love.

I think it is interesting that Mary’s first reaction to the angelic visitation is fear. For some reason most people’s first reaction to the Divine is fear. All through Scripture, whenever God appears or an angelic representative of God appears, the first reaction of those who experience the encounter is fear. So the first words typically spoken by God or the angel are, “Do not be afraid.”

By: Gary Wiburn.  Last week I spoke of our defining identity here at First Presbyterian as being four things:  a Christ-Centered faith, a place of Creative Celebration, of Compassionate Caring, and Inclusive Community.  These are some of the primary ways in which we understand ourselves as a Center for Progressive Christianity, which means nothing less than trying to embrace the essential teachings of Jesus.

The values of church in confronting a world in collapse.

The power of the new creation, the power of forgiveness and restoring love, the power to redeem and atone for all the evil that is at work in our lives and in our world is available to us if we will by faith claim it and live it.  

The following is a message by Rev. Roger Wolsey of Wesley Chapel in Boulder, CO is inspired by the resurrection stories in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John; the book The Powers that Be by Walter Wink; and the book The Last Week by Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan. A few paragraphs are adapted from the last chapter of Jim Wallis’ The Call to Conversion. 
 

God is so connected to creation, so much a part of our lives that God feels the pain we bring on ourselves when we pursue our selfish desires and cling to our false attachments. The father in the story does not say: “I am through with you. Go your own way.” This father will never abandon the one who abandoned him. And so he looks and longs and waits for the son’s return.

By: Rev. David McClean. “Sin” is not a word about problems with our body images or our bad relationships or our tempers or our spending habits, and how we can, in some piecemeal way, fix them. It isn’t a word about specific failings, it is a word that frames a different kind of discourse about those failings. It is a word that bespeaks a complete spiritual and existential condition, a condition that seems to be pretty much proven out if you look at the way human beings tend to treat one another.