Contemplation and Community

Contemplation and Community: Creating Another Kind of Church

In 2025, at Bountiful Community Church, I created and led a Sunday evening gathering called Contemplation and Community.

The idea was simple: create a different kind of space for people who longed for spiritual community but might not necessarily find themselves in traditional Sunday morning worship.

Each Sunday evening, we gathered for contemporary music, contemplation, spiritual reflection, and conversation. The service was intentionally intimate and participatory. Music became a doorway into reflection, silence gave us space to listen inwardly, and conversation invited people to bring their questions, experiences, doubts, wisdom, and stories into the room.

There was no expectation that everyone arrive with the same theology or understanding of God.

We practiced being present together.

From Connection to Community

That same year, another experience helped shape my understanding of just how important these kinds of connections can be.

On May 11, my friend Anita and I attended Nadia Bolz-Weber's Red-State Revival Tour at First Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City. Nadia spoke about hope, solidarity, the enduring Love of God, and the resilience of communities of faith. One of her strongest invitations was also one of the simplest: find one another.

When we arrived, each of us was given a colored sticker according to our ZIP code, although we weren't initially told why. At the end of the evening, the mystery was revealed. We gathered according to our colors and discovered that the people standing around us were our neighbors.

We exchanged information and committed to gathering again.

I volunteered Bountiful Community Church as a place where that could happen.

On July 18, several of us gathered at the church for tacos, conversation, friendship, and reconnection. We toured the building, shared memories, talked about our communities, and imagined what might still be possible.

Some of the people connected through Nadia and Friends also began joining us for Contemplation and Community on Sunday evenings.

Something that began as colored dots in a crowded sanctuary had become relationships around a table—and then relationships within a worshiping community.

That experience reinforced something I was already discovering through the Sunday evening services:

Church can be a connector.

It can provide the table.

It can open the building.

It can create the conditions in which people who might otherwise never meet discover one another.

And sometimes ministry is not about creating another program at all. Sometimes it is simply recognizing the connections already trying to happen and giving them somewhere to take root.

Contemplation and Community became one of those places for me.

It was an experiment in a form of worship centered less on certainty and more on presence, music, contemplation, conversation, belonging, and relationship.

The familiar United Church of Christ invitation took on deeper meaning:

No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here.

Looking back, I recognize these Sunday evenings as part of a question that continues to shape my ministry:

What becomes possible when we stop asking people to fit themselves into church and begin asking how church might create sacred space for the people who are already seeking one another?

Sometimes community begins with worship.

Sometimes with a song.

Sometimes with a question.

And apparently, sometimes it begins with a colored sticker and an Oreo.