FCC Winchester

For about 185 years this church has stood on this plot of land doing its churchy thing, looking beautiful and raising heads and lifting eyes toward the heavens, opening space for prayer and for worship, for community and for serving. Sometimes it’s been a place of comfort and care. And sometimes it’s been a place of challenge and provocation, pushing the people who come through the doors to think more deeply, act more lovingly, live more faithfully. It’s the church doing its churchy thing. Reminding people that there’s a God above and beneath, within and between, it all and a God of love at that. Over all these years, we’ve come here to light candles in the dark of Christmas Eve to proclaim the Light Come into the world as a babe in a manger and then we’ve come here months later to extinguish the candles as we read of his suffering and his death in Holy Week out of Holy Love. What a thing we do together here, how odd and ancient and beautiful. We tell our children about this man from God who taught people that they are loved and taught them to love, even and most especially the unloveable. Sometimes here there are rituals of death and departures and sometimes baptismal rituals of births and arrivals, sometimes people coming together in loving union and sometimes we hold vigils to grieve how we can be torn apart.