In the dis-ease of our times, battered by a fragile economy and the brokenness of our world, Advent comes to us as the Church’s gift – four weeks of something quieter, more solemn, more hopeful than the glitter of the commercial holiday.  

• Four weeks to let God enter anxious souls and psyches.  

• Four weeks of Scripture and prayer and music that hold up for us a sense of the immensity of God as well as the nearness of God.  

• Four weeks to ponder an Advent wreath, to watch the lights grow slowly and steadily brighter as the days of December grow shorter and darkness comes quicker.  

In our regal blues and purples, we are cloaked for this season in a sober beauty as pointers to mystery, dread, awe and the sovereignty of God.

Advent always seems to put folk like us at odds with the surrounding culture – yet we have something to offer our world in anxious times and a frenetic season.  It is this world, with its hurts and hopes, it faults and sins, its joys and sorrows, that God enters.  Advent makes our longings and our fears into something holy and holds us in greater promises and equips us for God’s purposes.   

Advent’s scriptures, Advent’s music, speak to us of dread and awe, of judgment and mercy, of expectation and hope. And God calls the likes of us to incarnate God’s promises and purposes for our time and place.

Join us in this Advent exploration – as we open our imaginations to Advent’s larger themes – to history’s end and a vision of humanity restored and the creation renewed; to the nearness of God and coming of Christ --- more than a baby in a manger, but also a message, a ministry and a man on a cross.

Even in the height of summer, we gather as a community of song and prayer, a people called to “wait upon God” in all the seasons of our lives.