Welcome to Christ Episcopal Church

I was the YMCA this morning, and started up a conversation with another early-riser that I’ve only spoken to once or twice. I asked him how his weekend was, and he said “really good – we had a great worship service on Sunday”. And without knowing I was a pastor, he told me all about the exciting things he’d been part of at his church. It opened the door to a short but meaningful conversation about our respective faith lives.

Conversations about faith can really be that easy. There are lots of opportunities where the door gets opened for us to talk about our experiences of God, and we can put it our there. Sometimes people take us up on it, and sometimes people don’t. The reality, though, is that many of neighbors are hungry to talk about their faith, and even hungrier to have people listen to their spiritual stories. As we move into the future that God is calling us into, I’ve set three goals for us in 2025 that will help us work on these skills.

Our first goal is to issue 200 personal invitations for people to engage more deeply in our shared life at Christ Church. Maybe this is inviting someone to come to church with you. Or to a Third Fun Friday. Or a viewing of The Chosen. Or maybe it’s inviting a new or existing member into a new ministry opportunity. All of it aligns with our desired outcome: to develop a culture of invitation to go alongside our culture of welcoming.

Our second goal is to have 400 conversations about faith outside our walls. These can be dinnertime conversations with our families. Or people we know well. Or maybe we just out it out there, like my new friend at the Y did, and see if people want to enter into that conversation.

Our third goal is to serve 600 community members in 2025. We’re already proficient at this, with ministries including our Coat Shed, our support for the local food shelf, and our hosting of Hope and Harbor. The question is: how can we build on this as a congregation and as individuals? Finally, I’d ask you all to consider how you’re deepening your discipleship.

The reality is that faith is a living thing – it needs to be nurtured in order to grow and blossom. All of us are involved in something at Christ Church. Maybe it’s a ministry area. Maybe it’s a Bible Study or Christian Conversations. Maybe it’s simply worship. But the question we need to be asking ourselves is: if I do this for a year, how will it form me spiritually? Or to put it another way, how does my participation in our faith community help me more closely pattern my life after Jesus’ teachings?

The reality is that if we can do these things – if we can be a church that listens carefully to our neighbors, invites them into a rich shared life focused around Christ, while modeling what it means to follow Jesus – well, that’s a church that just might appeal to people who are hungry to know that they’re loved by God and by us.

In Christ, Pastor Aaron Twait