Traverse Bay United Methodist Church home

Welcome
Why Bother with Church?
What's It Like?
Why We Exist
What We Believe
Who Are We?

Our goal is for you to feel welcomed and wanted, for who you are—not for some pretend world where we all act like we’ve got it together. This is a church with all kinds of regular people, at different places in their life journey, all trying to figure out what’s next. We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we want to encourage you to share the journey with other people, and to keep listening for God along the way.

We have two pastors, and three very different worship services on Sunday morning. We have small groups, youth groups, service projects, Sunday School and other things for kids. We do old-fashioned things like potlucks, and even older things like singing together and talking together.

The Christian tradition and faith is a really big house, with lots of different people inside. There’s a lot of room for variety in the house, and we’re only one small room in it. But we really try to keep the doors and windows wide open.

We try to stay more interested in the questions than in the answers. We’re about the journey, and not just the destination.

If you wanted to change the world, how far would you get by yourself? If you wanted to change yourself, wouldn’t you go looking for help from someone who had some experience trying to change themselves?

The people in church—any church—are trying to change the world for Christ, and trying to make themselves more like Christ. We do it together, because Christ prayed that we would all be one.

The bad news is that we often forget what our purpose is. We often lose track of our purpose of changing the world and ourselves. There’s no doubt that every church is full of hypocrites. But that doesn’t make the church different from the rest of the world. What makes us different is that in the times when we do remember what we’re here for, we really can be a force for peace and justice and God’s will in the world; we really can aid in the work of making disciples, and change lives together.

In a way, it’s worth showing up just to see if it can really happen. And with God, it does.

Most people visiting a church come first to check out one of the worship times. At Traverse Bay we have three different worship times, and they’re different from each other.

We know that the first time you’re here you might want to sneak in and out without anyone noticing. But we’re going to try to get to know you a little bit, if you give us the chance.

You won’t have to stand up in the middle of worship and have everyone look at you. But there is a time when everyone gets up and says hello to each other for a minute in the middle of each worship time.
People also tend to hang around in the lobby area for a while before and after worship. That’s an important time to get to know people, so we have coffee and cookies. It’s really important to us that you not only come to worship, but that you have a chance to become part of the community.
If you let us know who you are, we’ll be in touch later to thank you for coming. We really are glad to see you.
Usually one of the pastors talks during worship, and usually it’s about fifteen minutes. We try to avoid churchy lingo, and focus on how to live the faith and have your life changed now. You’re not going to be condemned or judged during worship, but hopefully you will be challenged.
The rest of worship is singing and praying. The style and the number of songs depends on which service you come to.
Usually, worship lasts about an hour, sometimes longer (up to 1 hr 20 mins), occasionally shorter. The 8:30 communion service is only about half an hour long.
If you decide to check out one of our adults classes, one typically has about a 12-15 people, and the other has 4-6. We promise to make you feel welcome, and to make sure you will be included if you want to be.
Children’s Sunday classes are downstairs. Sunday school starts at 9:30, with singing for children through elementary ages. Our pastors take turns leading the singing time before they go upstairs to worship.
Our nurseries are easy to find, straight down the hall from where we worship. They're staffed with paid attendants and volunteers working together.

To start with, here’s our mission statement:

Traverse Bay United Methodist Church is a multigenerational worshiping community, embracing both newness and tradition, service and outreach, in our expression of Christ’s life.

The reason we exist is to be an expression of Christ’s life in the world. Christ (Jesus) brings new life, speaks the truth, and embraces all people with love. We believe that the Church, when it’s being its best and truest self, is Jesus’ presence in the world.

But there are so many churches! Aren’t they all trying to do the same thing? We hope so. But Christ’s life is bigger than what just one congregation can live out. We all show a different side of God’s love to the world. So the rest of the mission statement tries to spell out what’s particular about our expression of Christ’s life.

Outreach. Traverse Bay Church exists to help people (including one another) be followers of Jesus. That’s a process that begins the first time any person from the church meets someone, and it goes all the way through life, as we each try to be more and more like Christ. The outreach part of our identity is trying to connect with people who want to find out more about Jesus, maybe for the first time.

Service. We are deeply committed to meeting the real needs of people, by hosting our community homeless shelter at our church, by working in and supporting an orphanage in Haiti, creating a micro-loan program within the congregation for those with unexpected needs, with support for dozens of programs around the world and around America, trips to help Hurricane Katrina survivors and many more local, national, and international needs. We send our people as well as our money to bring Jesus’ love wherever we can. Each year we give about a quarter of our total income to support needs such as these. We exist to make these things happen, because we can do more together than alone.

Newness and tradition. Different people need different styles of worship and organization and community. We’re not here to provide everything, but we believe we fill a necessary and unique place in our community’s range of churches. We have three very different worship services, that reflect three sets of needs, but every one of them tries hard to have integrity and humanity. We try to have that character whether we are singing old-fashioned hymns with an organ at 9:30, or the same hymn (or something newer) with drums and electric guitar at 11:00. We don’t exist to present a particular style; we exist to present Jesus.

A multigenerational worshiping community. There is something precious about having small children, teenagers, college students, single and married adults, families, and older adults together in one place, knowing one another, talking about anything, and enjoying one another’s company. And then when the whole bunch comes together to sing, to pray, and to listen together, something holy happens. As we were writing our mission statement, we realized that the connection between all generations is one of the things that we treasure about who we are. We have twenty-somethings who prefer the 9:30 worship, and eighty-somethings who prefer the 11:00 worship, so every time we worship we can look around and feel the connectedness of a complete community. To us, that’s beautiful.

We don’t all believe exactly the same thing, but we do firmly believe that Jesus Christ is the one who can give us a relationship with God. Here’s one explanation that tries to avoid the usual churchy lingo:

The basic Christian message:

We believe that everybody has turned away from God, and has failed to live up to God’s expectations.
We also believe that the only way to find real meaning in life, and the only way to have eternal life, is to fix our relationship with God. But we can’t do that ourselves, because we keep messing up.
We need to rely on God’s love and forgiveness to reach out and fix our relationship. Jesus’ life on earth, and his death on a cross, were an incredible act of God’s love for us, reaching out to us and giving himself to us in a completely vulnerable way.
When Jesus rose up three days later, he proved that he has power over death. He proved to us that his act of love means that we can all have life that lasts forever, with God. What we need to do is to commit ourselves to following him, and accept the love he’s given us.
You can make this commitment yourself right now, by yourself. It’s really important, though, that you share your commitment with other people. Just imagine if you got married and didn’t tell anyone else—it wouldn’t really be a marriage, would it? It’s the same way with a commitment to God. It’s a thing that shows, and it’s a thing that’s shared with other people.

The Bible: We believe that the Bible is a unique authority for our faith, and all our preaching and teaching is based firmly and directly on the Bible. In line with the tradition of John Wesley (who founded Methodism in the 1700’s), we believe that if we’re going to read the Bible responsibly, we have to use our reason, we have to check it out with our own experience of God, and we have to also check out how the whole Christian tradition has read the Bible and believed since Jesus founded the Church two thousand years ago. It’s important to have these three things guide us in reading the Bible, because human history shows us how dangerous and hurtful we can be when we read the Bible carelessly or too literally.

The Holy Spirit: We believe that the Holy Spirit is God’s presence in the world today, and is the power that makes the whole Church everywhere keep going. We believe that every Christian is connected to one another and to God by the presence of the Holy Spirit. There are some churches that spend a lot of time in worship speaking in tongues and healing. We don’t think that those particular gifts are useful in our worship time together. We believe that the Holy Spirit fills our worship, and the experience of worship is filled with a sense of unity, that comes when we sing and pray and learn together.

We’re a group of people of every age, from small children to the elderly.
We are brand new Christians, people who aren’t yet Christians, and people who have been trying to follow Christ for more than fifty years.
We include poor unemployed people, working folks, students, professional folks, and retired folks, single moms, divorced people, recovering addicts, married people, well-educated people and people who didn’t finish high school.
We are people who listen to all kinds of music, who have fun in all kinds of ways, and who don’t all like the same style of worship.
But we are all here because Traverse Bay is a community where we feel like we belong.
Some of us are very conservative, and some are very liberal; Traverse Bay is a place where we can get along.
We have about 350 members, and on a typical weekend we have two very different worship experiences, with a total of about 250 people. A lot of people who come to Asbury say that they feel it’s small enough to feel like you matter, but big enough to have some good programs that they’re looking for.
We are a United Methodist Church. That means that we are connected to all the other United Methodist churches in the country, and that we have a serious commitment to service programs that are national and international.