Rooted in a pluralistic Christian heritage, Spirit of Joy is an oasis for inquiring minds, contemplative souls, and compassionate hearts.

An oasis because SOJ is a fueling station: a place to renew our energies and increase our capacity for loving God and others, An oasis is a touchstone, a resting place, not a permanent destination. SOJ provides sustenance for the spiritual journey. In particular, we see this through the three primary aspects of our ministry mentioned above.

Inquiring minds speaks to our attention to learning and growing as we strive for greater spiritual maturity and understanding. Through educational opportunities, including Sunday morning study hour, guest speakers, special topics, etc. we provide a safe place to explore our faith journeys in ever greater depth, with curiosity and the awareness that we can never know too much.

Contemplative souls refers to providing meaningful worship opportunities using a variety of modalities in an attempt to meet as many diverse needs as possible. An emphasis on spiritual disciplines has created a centering prayer ministry group, as well as one focusing on lectio divina, both of which are ways to deepen one’s experience of the divine.

Compassionate hearts is about social justice and being with and for the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten. Spirit of Joy does a single mom’s oil change twice a year, serves a meal to the men at St Stephen’s Shelter once a month, collects food for the local food shelf, and participates in Armful of Love at Christmas. Both individually and collectively, we seek to follow Jesus in providing for “the least of these.” SOJ feeds us, nurtures us and then urges us to focus outside ourselves to a world desperate for loving hearts and willing hands to serve the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten.

As a community, we exist to encourage, and support people on their spiritual journeys, but also to challenge and stretch us in uncomfortable ways as we seek to follow Jesus.

We know adolescence is a difficult time in our personal lives. We face decisions about who we are, who are friends are, what paths to pursue, which doors to open and which ones to close. We experiment with different styles of clothes, music, and language. We drive our parents a little bit crazy. Our idealism ramps up to fever pitch, along with our judgment of others and ourselves. But at the same time, we feel deeper compassion and tolerance for others than we've ever felt. We become aware of our own limitations while feeling invincible. We feel the deepest betrayals cutting our heart in two while simultaneously falling passionately in love.

It's fortunate that all of us who are adults were 15 once. But it's also fortunate that we didn't stay that age forever. Who could sustain it?

To complicate matters, we bring our own individual coming-of-age to our church community. You may remember we explored family-of-origin issues in some depth last winter and spring, discovering how our own upbringing still shapes our spiritual lives and frames our expectations and experiences of the church today. 

Thankfully, we bring our own adult faith experiences with us, too. We're our own older mentor as our community comes of age. Individually we have walked this path before. We bring the self-reflection and spiritual strength of the older self we know in our 20s, 40s, 60s, and 80s, to walk beside the emerging "self" that is Spirit of Joy at 15.