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Who We Are
Hope is a local congregation of the United Church
of Christ, formed in 1957 from the national merger of the Evangelical and
Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian churches.
Our heritage is born of hope - hope for religious
freedom to live a
life of faith without hierarchical constraints, hope grounded in a love
of tradition, yet an openness to the future, hope as old as scripture,
yet as new as next Sunday's opening hymn!
Feel free to visit
our History page to discover more about the story of Hope UCC.
We are a community
willing to stretch, grow, to see God's fingerprints on our lives and on
this world - we are a heady mix of liberals and conservatives,
of young
and old, of newcomer and long-timer, of urban and suburban, of shared
leadership styles and of lots of people doing lots of creative things
together!
We are teachers, retirees, doctors, electricians,
students, plasterers, school administrators, lawyers, laborers,
artists, travel agents, police and firefighters, engineers and a
zillion young children balanced by a marvelous anchor of elders.
Always
exciting because of our diversity, but truly united in our quest to
discern Christ's message of hope for our own time and circumstance.
Please stop by or contact
us to learn more about this dynamic congregation of the
United Church of Christ.
What We Believe
The center of gravity for defining hope is the
New Testament. Out of the early church's response to the
life, death and resurrection of God's Son, Jesus Christ, rises up
meanings of the word Hope that frame this church's mandate and thereby
frame and guide our hopes for Hope!
Hope is a powerful biblical yearning. Multiple evangelists, pastors, travelers, authors in scripture
leave us a glistening, complex set of interpretations of hope.
The power of New Testament hope is fashioned from
the intersection of God's transforming, gracious gift of Jesus Christ
and our genuine, ongoing response to the unmerited gift of forgiveness,
new life and love.
God is the author and source of all hope, its
sustaining power, its unseen yet certain object. Because hope
is God-grounded, God-sustained, God-directed, hope is a reality within
which we dwell. That indwelling comes from Hebrew scripture,
generations before the church's first tentative glimmerings; as
psalmists and prophets declared that Israel's hope rested in the God
who called and saved them.
Biblical hope, grounded in God's decisive love in
Jesus Christ, enables us to live in expectation, confidence, patience,
endurance, eagerness, come what may.
Why? Because God has acted decisively
in Christ. Once and for all times. That is our
portfolio, or ticket, or invitation to the feast in this life and into
the next.
We are a people grounded in the theology of
Hope!
The Wider Church
Hope UCC is affiliated with national as well as
regional organizations of the United Church of Christ.
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6273 Eichelberger Street