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 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.

• 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 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. 

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 during the 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.
• The style and the number of songs in worship 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.
• There are adult classes Sunday morning and during the week.
• Children’s Sunday classes start at 9:30, with singing for children through elementary ages.
• 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.

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.