In a weary world, where can we find joy? Our special guest is Rev Dr. Joshua Lopez-Reyes is the executive director of Echo Park Immigration Center and he has tons of insights into the scriptures about joy of connection in the midst of hardship.

6 Kinds of Friends We Need Right Now: The Friend Who is a Partner in Purpose (Acts 18:1-3) - November 23, 2025 Sometimes strong friendships develop from a shared purpose, a mutual "mission," even between somewhat unlikely people. And it's a good thing because our churches are full of unlikely friends who've discovered they need each other on the journey toward Jesus, and they actually like each other, too. Come join us on Sunday as we look at the story of Paul, Priscila and Aquila, and the tables turn - Brenna and Bill get interviewed!

One of the friends we need these days is the one who is our safe place. We can share our sadness, our anger, our fears, and our dreams - because they don’t need to fix us. The bible tells of such a friendship and invites us to move towards those kinds of friendship Join us as we hear about David and Jonathan in the Bible and see it unfold in front of us in the lives of our friends Rod and Byron.

Suffering is inevitable in this life. There is hardship. There is pain. But somehow through the working of the Spirit of God, these difficult things can be transformed with one little addition: the presence of a friend. Join us again this week as we continue our series, The Six Kinds of Friends You Need These Days.

6 Kinds of Friends We Need Right Now: The Friend In the Fight – Ecclesiastes 4:12 – October 26, 2025 One of the kinds of friends we need right now is a friend in the fight. We need someone who stands next to us as we push back against the injustices in the world. If we go it alone, we’ll wear out and break down and crack under all the sadness and pressure and frustration. That’s why we need this kind of friend. Join us as scripture and real life stories give us wisdom on how to be friends in the fight.

If you find yourself feeling lonely more often than you would like, you are not alone! Social scientists tell us that around 60% of Americans feel that way regularly, and those numbers are only going up. Let's honor the fact that God has wired us for love and meaningful connection, and spend the next few months seeing what God might have to say to us through some famous stories of friendship in Scripture. Jesus is up first this coming Sunday - yes, even Jesus, the Human One, needed friends! Come ponder and be encouraged.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the evil and suffering, the meanness (big and small) we see all around us and especially on our social media feeds. Where are the glimmers of hope we need to sustain us? How do we re-focus on these things and why do we need to? Join us as we explore Jesus's invitation to commit ourselves to the way of hope.

Stories of Hope – Luke 16:1-9 – Sept 28, 2025 These are intense days in our country. So many of us have struggled to find equilibrium as news story after news story comes out about our nation moving away from democracy. What must it have been like for Jesus to face the uncertainty of his own political climate, and what teaching did he give us that might help us find hope today?

Stories of Hope: Luke 18:1-8 – Sept 21, 2025 Emily Dickinson famously said that hope is a thing with feathers... Do you ever feel like these days hope needs a little more grit, a little more muscle, a song just as strong and forceful as it is sweet? This Sunday we'll let an unusual example of faith Jesus described for us speak into the places of our souls that are both hopeful and angry. Because hope isn't always polite. Join us!

Stories of Hope: Matthew 13:31-32 – Sept 14, 2025 In a world full of cruelty and darkness, hope can feel hard to come by. But what if hope wasn’t a bright shiny thing, but rather more like a little old lady who keeps stopping to talk with beggars and then one day you realize she’s Mother Teresa and she’s changing the world? How does real change happen and how does hope play into it and how do we plant and water that hope in dry seasons? Join us Sunday to learn along with us.

This Sunday we're talking about grief, which may sound strange because usually churches do a big, energetic kick off on this Sunday each year. And in fact, we're having TACOs for lunch! So why grief? We're talking about grief because it's so sneaky and always weasels its way into new seasons of life, especially when there is change. So if we don't look at it directly (and gently), it'll slip into the shadows and haunt out lives, even in the good times. Come celebrate tacos with us - and grieve with us as well. It'll be a fully human Sunday.

Untold Stories: Zipporah and Biblical Bizarreness – Exodus 4:24-26 - August 31, 2025 The Bible has some strange parts to it. Strange stories, like Zipporah saving Moses from God. Strange teachings like salting people with fire. Strange customs like heaping burning coals upon your head. And strange images like a woman riding a dragon. What do we do with the things in the Bible that don’t make much sense? How do we hear from God through a book that’s thousands of years old, not written in a language we read, and full of things that are hard to understand?  Join us on Sunday and we’ll wrestle with these questions and more.

What do you do when people put you in a box? We all love to oversimplify others - it's sometimes called being a 'cognitive miser' - because we don't want to take the energy to be curious, to complicate the narratives we tell ourselves and to relate to people as they are as opposed to how we think they are. But Jesus loves to explode boxes, both the ones people put you and the ones you put others in. Along the way he teaches us some practical tools on when to fight against other people's assumptions about us and when to let it slide.