First Time Visitors
If you’re here, you belong.
If you are doubting, questioning or deconstructing religion, welcome, you belong here.
If you’re a woman with leadership skills, you belong too.
If you’re LGBTQ, again, you belong.
If you trust science—and are a little suspicious of religion, you belong.
And, if you’ve been judged, rejected, or run ragged by religion, we apologize for how badly we religious folk have behaved. We’re working hard to do better. You belong here.
What to expect your first time …
1. Casual Simplicity
We don’t dress up. Not in our Sunday best. Not with nifty personas. Authentic is more important to us than impressive. Also, our space is casual. We share space with another church. It keeps us out of debt, gives us a smaller environmental footprint. Our decor is casual, and speaks to our desire to connect with one another.
2. A Feeling of Community
We believe spirituality happens best in community and we create a variety of spaces to connect. We have many flavors of groups and service projects.
We also do an unusual thing. After each Sunday lesson, the minister opens the floor. We all speak up. And we don’t always agree with the minister (and everybody is okay with that).
3. Un-Churchy Spirituality
Organized religion isn’t very healthy these days. We know that. You do too. Consequently, for years we’ve been distilling our religion into what is essential and universal. We love what we’ve found. We think you might too. It is beautiful and transformative—but it’s not very churchy. That’ll be pretty obvious when you show up. And you might love it too.
We’ll invite you to form spiritual friendships.
Friendships aren’t something that can be manufactured. Like trees or flowers, they grow their own way, on their own timetable. So we trust the natural process and simply create lots of spaces for it to happen. You’ll find spaces you can belong, connect, and build spiritual friendships.
You are welcome here. We really mean that.
If you like staying anonymous, that’s okay with us. If you want to connect socially, we have places for that. If you want to be more intentional in connecting, we’ll invite you into a group. Our groups focus on some aspect of the spiritual journey. Some meditate together. Others learn together. We study the enneagram and talk about how it informs our lives. Some groups last all year. Others for just a few weeks.
The bottom line is this: You are welcome here as you are, on your terms. We really mean that.
We’ll invite you to explore your inner life.
Access to the Inner Divine is the center of the spiritual life. We organize our community to encourage one another in the ancient practices that awaken us to that interior spirituality.
At Common Thread, dogma isn’t the center of our universe. What is central is being on the journey together and encouraging one another in the practices which invite firsthand encounter with the Divine.
We don’t give much attention to making sure people believe the right stuff. Much more important is that we support one another on a life-long quest to awaken to the Inner Voice, the Indwelling Spirit.
We are an affirming and egalitarian community.
We welcome LGBTQ+ people in all levels of participation and leadership at Common Thread Church, and we encourage them in their relationships. Women are encouraged to and do serve at all levels of leadership at Common Thread Church.