2005 - 2006 Annual Reports

ASSOCIATE PASTOR Lucy M. Alexander

            God is love.
            That’s one of the first things we are taught in Sunday school.  I remember the first year I was at First Parish Church and Debbie Gline Allen was teaching.  She focused with the children on just this:  Love, Love, Love, Love, God is Love.  With each word came a picture of a child.

            God is love. 
            It’s so simple and yet it’s so complex.  I remember hearing about Reinhold Niebuhr, that famous theologian of the mid-20th century.  After writing numerous dense books on Christian theology, he reaffirmed what he had learned in his own earliest years:  “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so….”

            God is love. 
It’s where we begin and where we hope to end up:  our alpha and our omega, just like that window in the sanctuary.  What a simple and complex reality. We are born out of God’s love and we both live in God’s embrace and return to God’s arms after we die. 

            God is love.
            Everything we are and everything we do should come out of and be focused on that wonderful reality.  To say that God is love is to say that God is relationship.  Love requires more than one.  And love is not what either is or does, but rather what happens between them.  Does this “in-between” reflect the love that God shows us in Jesus, in the scriptures, in our Christian tradition, in our own experience?  For many of us, it means learning day by day just how our own relationships might better reflect God’s love.  For some of us, this is a kind of love never before experienced or known.  But when our relationships begin to be formed and reformed in God’s love, we ourselves are changed forever.            

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            Our mission as a church, it seems to me, is to try and discern what that love looks and feels like here at First Parish Church, East Derry, NH.  And this past year, it seems to me, has been a year in which we have focused in some very particular ways on just this issue.

            The dialogue on blessing ceremonies stands out, I think, in many people’s minds.  And there are at least two aspects here:  the decision, but also that dialogue itself.  We come from a whole variety of places on this issue and for many if not most the positions come from deep inside.  But I will never forget the day of our meeting last October and the way in which true dialogue seemed to emerge.  People spoke from the heart and were able to really listen to one another.  Throughout that process, as painful as it was sometimes, the quality of our relationships changed.

            The Board of Christian Education has been asking some profound relationship questions as well.  A strongly felt need that came out of a retreat in January 2005 was the need to focus on some “nuts and bolts” of Christian education.  We wanted children to reach a certain age being well familiar with, for example, Psalm 23, the Lord’s Prayer, the ten commandments, baptism, communion.  Underlying this need, it seems to me, is a focus on the way in which our approach to education thinks about the relationships among our faith tradition, the world the children live in, the developmental stages in which the children find themselves.    

            The Board of Christian Outreach and Mission has been similarly asking relationship questions.  How does mission within our own congregation relate to mission within our local community?  And how do both of those relate to mission in the wider world?  The financial support of the church has stretched from the Sonshine Soup Kitchen in Derry to Katrina relief to support of ministries in Zimbabwe.  Likewise, our direct service opportunities have expanded and have also embraced this spectrum of local to wider community outreach.  There has been local outreach, often informal.  Many have participated in New Hampshire prison ministries.  A group has been to Grace House in Worcester, Massachusetts, a newly developed home for women newly released from prison.  Other groups are soon headed to serve the homeless in Washington and to aid Katrina survivors in New Orleans. 

            Likewise relationship issues have been key for the Youth Ministry Committee.  How do we best integrate faith, fun, group building, outreach when we sponsor trips and gatherings?  In the Friday evening youth group, what should be the relationship between youth leadership and adult guidance?  How should the youth ministry program best relate to the other programs of the church?  How can there be a variety of involvements in youth ministry, from being on the committee, to being a teacher or group leader, to being an occasional adult leader?  Our depth in youth ministry outreach depends on all these relationships.     

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            God is love.
            "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."  (Matthew 22:36-40)

            I feel blessed in our relationships at First Parish Church.  I am grateful for the ways in which we are intentional about those relationships and cherish those relationships.  For love of God, of ourselves, of one another, of our neighbor are inextricably intertwined.