Beloved,

During Lent 2009, small groups of First Churchers met each week to talk about the relevancy of scripture and Christian tradition to our modern lives. We focused on four aspects of post-modern urban life where we felt like the dialogue between The Church and Culture had broken down: Isolation and Community, Poverty and Justice, Sexuality, and Death. Here is an edited version of the “We Believe” statements we came up with. They don’t represent all of us. We didn’t wordsmith or vote on these. They are just a Spirit-led response to our discussions, affirmed by all of us:

We believe that God calls us to live in community with space for positive aloneness.

We believe that in isolation we can hear God’s voice clearly, and in community we can see God’s love in action.

We believe that one cannot be a Christian alone in one’s room; that to love one’s neighbor one must first have a neighbor.

We believe a more just world is possible.

We believe that by doing justice, we are taking steps toward making God manifest on Earth.

We believe that the doing of justice is yoked to our spiritual well-being, and our salvation.

We believe our love of the poor glorifies God.

We believe that to acknowledge our own poverty is to be in communion with all, and with Christ.

We believe in the goodness of the body that God gave us.

We believe that sexuality is an important spiritual practice—along with many other important spiritual practices.

We believe that adults have the responsibility to nurture the young people around them into a healthy understanding of sexuality, and to protect the vulnerable.

We believe that healthy sexual expression is an opportunity to practice generosity, and to feel the full range of feelings that God has given us as a gift.

We believe that these senses and bodies are finite, and that we will surely die.

We believe that we have nothing to fear from death.

We believe that death is not an end to life, but a threshold into a deeper reality.

We believe that if there’s life after death, life is in God’s love.

We believe that the only measure of our words and our deeds will be the love we leave behind when we’re done.