Welcome to all Newcomers and Visitors

Welcome to St. Columba's! We are a community where visitors, friends, families, and members find comfort, relationship, learning, joy, and the opportunity to serve the world. We strive to be a church that both communally serves our neighborhood and city, and transforms our members to better engage in work, family, and civic life outside the church. 

 

If you are new to the area, or seeking a spiritual home, I invite you to join us for Sunday worship to see what we are all about. Our 8am service is quiet, spoken, and held in our more intimate chapel space. Our 10am service is lively, musical, and held in our unique open sanctuary space. 

 

We engage the mystery of God's love for us and for the whole world through worship, spiritual formation, and acts of compassion for each other and for our community at large. This is a church made up of children, the elderly, young parents, single and divorced people, married and partnered couples, and people from a variety of religious, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. All are welcome and valued among us.

• Visitors are often pleased by our open worship space, built with the Celtic heritage of our patron saint, Columba of Iona, in mind. The flexible seating and simple, open beauty of our space is a visible symbol of the flexibility and openness we strive to embody as a faith community. 

• St. Columba's is a community that delights in hosting and hospitality, which means that our coffee hour is usually quite delicious, and the people here are eager to meet you.  We aren't the quietest bunch, but if you love good food and coffee combined with the sounds children make when they're having fun, you will enjoy your time with us.

• At a recent Confirmation class, one of our new adult members commented that "I love that I don't have to leave my brain, or my questions, outside when I come to church." This is so true here at St. Columba's! We are proud of our Episcopal tradition of valuing questions as much as answers, and we don't believe that faith and certainty are the same thing. All questions are good questions here, and we treasure the process of seeking answers even more than the finding of them.

• Our patron saint, Columba, built an abbey on the island of Iona for the benefit of the community and people around it. In this spirit, community hosting and engaging in acts of compassion within our community is a vital part of how we live out our faith at St. Columba's. We want what we say and do in worship, and the promises we made in our baptismal covenant, to be reflected in the individual lives of our congregants and in the communal life we share as Church. People here are passionate about helping the poor and vulnerable in our communities. We do this together in several ways, and we support our members in work that engages this as individuals.

I hope you will explore more of who we are here on the website, and I look forward to meeting you at St. Columba's! I can honestly tell you that I have never been part of a friendlier, more hospitable church community.

 

with care and gratitude,

 

Alissa Newton

Vicar