Welcome to the Facebook home of the Amherst Congregational United Church of Christ! We are an inclusive and progressive faith community opening minds, nurturing hearts, and inspiring souls.  

We live by love, for peace & justice, with joy.  

If you are a "seeker," unsure of your faith stance, you will find your questions welcomed here.  And you will be joined by others looking for spiritual truth and desiring to put their values into practice to help make the world a better place.  

If you are a "seedling" Christian, you will find your faith nurtured here while you are encouraged to live out your faith in daily living.  

If you are a "mature oak" Christian, you will be encouraged to share your witness and spiritual journey with others as we develop deep and long-lasting relationships with one another.

If you are agnostic, atheist, or an adherent of a different religious faith and need to find a place where you can share your spiritual experiences with others, work towards mutual understandings, and cultivate a character of compassion and a heart of justice-making with other like-minded persons in a supportive and encouraging spiritual family, then you will find here a home you may not have felt existed.

As you can see, we are not all alike here.  And that is a good thing!  We get to learn from one another's thoughts and experiences.  We'd rather laugh together in our differences than sternly insist on uniformity.  

We like to have fun!  We see playfulness as necessary for spiritual health, and humor as its manifestation.  

We like to learn together -- about our world, our faith perspectives, and each other.  Creating mutual understanding and respect for a divergence of viewpoints helps us to see the sacred in others; and for them to see it in us as well.  We trust that caring for one another in this way reveals more light to the world than exclusively thinking we're right and others are wrong.  

This is a place to transform your spirit.  We seek to see the beauty in one another, and inspire that beauty to shine forth.  We are committed to the Golden Rule of treating others as we would want to be treated -- given the same circumstances.  We want to develop our values in community with one another.  We yearn to cultivate virtues in ourselves and each other that not only are recognized as blessings to ourselves but also to others.  Random acts of kindness, intentional practices of peace, and overflowing deeds of compassion are how we live out our faith.

We are not literalistic or dogmatic in our approach to sacred writings, but want to broaden our minds and deepen our souls by seeing multivalent meanings that can be applied to our daily living.  Jesus used parables, metaphors, and mytho-poetic language to describe his understandings of things; so why shouldn't we?