Be part of stewardship and missions.
You can help a little. You can help a lot.
We appreciate your involvement, no matter at what level.
God gave us a gift: God gave us Jesus.
And our wonderful earth, our county, our community, our family, our friends, and our children.
How can we treasure and maintain these gifts?
We can be stewards.
What is stewardship for the First Congregational Church?
We take a broad view of stewardship. We are committed financially to maintaining our historic church building, which dates from 1863. We also pledge to guard, protect, and nurture a warm and welcoming Christian community.
- We support our members.
- Our first Gratitude Sunday meal, which concluded our 2017 stewardship campaign, led to monthly potlucks where, in small groups, we share the joys and concerns of our individual lives.
- During the 2020 stewardship season, when we were isolated from one another, we divided the congregation into groups, inviting members in each “pod” to periodically reach out to all in their cluster with a phone call, card, meal, or a small token. That initiative helped strengthen our bonds of fellowship and good will as we spent the pandemic year worshiping via Zoom.
- Letter writing
- We help our neighbors. Hospitality is the theme that not only defines our approach to stewardship but that extends throughout our missions activities.
- On weekdays, the Berkshire Food Project serves meals from our kitchen and assembly hall and has for thirty years, welcoming everyone with “respect, dignity, good food and good company.”
- We encourage awareness of our global community. We formed our immigrant support initiative in response to the crisis at our nation’s southern border, where we contribute resources as we are able.
- We advocate for justice. The murder of George Floyd and our shared reading of Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide has spurred us to advocate for racial justice. In all, we seek to model Christ’s love for the world by embracing the God-given rights and goodness of all human beings.
Yes, we can all be “stewards.”
We can give our time, our talents, and our treasure to maintain our church and its missions
because, as it says in the book of John, Chapter 1, Verse 3
Everything was created through the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer,
Nothing- not one thing! -came into being without God.