Dear First Parish Church,

After a quiet (at times too quiet) February, March is filling up with lots of Holy activity at First Parish Church. First, I am so excited to be officially Installed as your Pastor by the SNEUCC on Sunday, March 2nd at 3pm. I hope you can all be there – and tell your friends. We will be joined by my family, mentors, colleagues and friends from across the span of my ministry and life, and our preacher is the amazing Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor, former Senior Minister of Old South Church in Boston, and former Minister and President of the Massachusetts Conference of the UCC. You won’t want to miss it.

The Season of Lent will begin on Ash Wednesday (March 5th) and we will mark the day with a service of Repentance and Imposition of Ashes at 6pm. Throughout Lent we will have weekly Vespers Services on Wednesday evenings at 6pm. These 30 minute services of prayer and candlelight help us to find our center in the midst of a chaotic world. Also during Lent we will take up a seasonal study, this year focused on the book “Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again,” by Rachel Held Evans. We will meet each week to discuss the themes of the book and our own evolving relationships to sacred scripture. In Sunday Worship through the season of Lent we will take a fresh look at Jesus’ most powerful parables, the stories that enlivened his teaching and preaching.

 As I will share more fully at Annual Meeting (Note the Change of Date due to Snow – Annual Meeting will now be held on March 9th after worship!), our theme for this year is all about telling our story. Telling our story as a congregation, and telling our faith stories as individuals. Through the spring there will be many opportunities to engage in discussion and reflection about our commitments as a faith community, about our own evolving sense of self, and about how the stories we tell shape our identity and the legacy we leave to the future. You are a part of FPCC’s story, that we are all writing together.

I love to tell the story of unseen things above,

Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love;

I love to tell the story, because I know ’tis true,

It satisfies my longings as nothing else would do.

I love to tell the story, for those who know it best

Seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest;

And when in scenes of glory I sing the new, new song,

’Twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.

Blessings,

Rev. Katherine