FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF AUBURN, UCC
Ready to Pledge?
How to Pledge Digitally
If you prefer a paper pledge card, they will be mailed out mid-October.
That is stewardship.
And that is why, during this year’s stewardship campaign, I am asking each of us to think prayerfully and generously about what we can give.
Our financial gifts are not simply what keeps the lights on or pays the bills. They are how we tend this place together. They provide the soil in which ministries can take root, the nourishment that allows them to grow, and the living water that enables us to reach beyond ourselves. Every pledge whatever its size—is an act of faith in what this community can become.
And when we are able to give more generously, we make more possible. We create room for another person to be welcomed, another child to be nurtured, another hungry neighbor to be fed, another ministry to grow, another seed to be planted.
We may never know the full harvest of what we give today.
Perhaps that is part of the beauty of stewardship.
We plant because we believe in the harvest, even when someone else may be the one who sees it.
We give because we believe that love, when faithfully tended, grows.
We plant. We water. We nurture. We trust.
So this year, I invite you to plant generously.
Plant something for the people sitting beside you. Plant something for the stranger who has not yet walked through our doors. Plant something for the children who will inherit this church and carry its love into a world that desperately needs it.
Someday, someone may stand beneath branches heavy with fruit and never know who planted the first seed.
But we will know why we planted it.
We planted it in love.
Dr. Sam Johnson
Church Treasurer/Finance Committee Chair
Rooted In Love
Annual Stewardship Campaign
Lately, I have been spending a great deal of time restoring the land around my home—planting native shrubs and wildflowers, creating places for birds and wildlife to find food, shelter, and water, and trying, little by little, to bring life back to a landscape that has lost some of its abundance.
And as I have worked, I cannot help but think about our church.
Restoration is an extraordinary act of faith.
I can plant a berry-producing shrub today, water it, protect it, and nurture it—but I may wait three years before the birds discover its fruit. I plant anyway. I trust that roots are growing beneath the soil even when I cannot see them. I trust that someday there will be berries in the thicket and birds in the branches, and that a place that was once quiet will be filled with sweet birdsong.
Isn’t that much of what we do here?
We are rooted in love when we create a community where human beings can put down roots of their own. We feed one another—not only with food, but with friendship, kindness, dignity, faith, encouragement, and belonging. Like berries in a thicket nourishing the birds, these gifts nourish the human soul.
Jesus spoke of living water, water that gives life to a thirsty soul. I see something wonderfully tangible in that image now. Create a source of life-giving water on a dry landscape, and life begins to find it. Birds come. Animals come. Seeds germinate. Roots grow. What seemed barren begins to live again.
A loving church can be that kind of place.
Every time we welcome someone who needs a home, feed someone who is hungry, comfort someone who is grieving, teach a child that they are loved, stand beside someone who is struggling, or simply treat another human being with compassion and respect, we are planting seeds.
And we do not always get to see the harvest.
The kindness offered today may take root in someone’s life years from now. A child raised within this community may carry what they learned here into places we will never see. A person who encounters love here at a difficult moment may someday offer that same love to someone else.
