What We Do

Worship

Sunday mornings at Urania First Baptist are special times of corporate worship. With a joyful and loving spirit, we join together each week in this service to honor and glorify God and to celebrate his wonderful grace to us. In everything we do during this time, we strive for excellence because it is our offering to God, and we find great joy in pleasing him.

Though we strive for excellence in what we do, our services aren't highly polished, choreographed presentations; they are times when we come together as God's people to celebrate God's grace, renew our commitment, and enjoy the gift God has given us in one another. We don't believe that a style of music makes a church relevant or not; instead, we believe that the truth, vividly displayed in lives lived out for the glory of God and boldly proclaimed from God's word, is what makes us relevant to the culture around us.

We also meet regularly on Sunday and Wednesday evenings for times of teaching, fellowship, prayer, and discussion.

Fellowship

Jesus said that the thing that would mark his disciples above all else would be their love for one another. Because of this expectation, we work hard to build strong relationships in our congregation along both inter- and intra-generational lines. To this end we place great value on our adult Bible study groups which are arranged generationally as well as frequent congregational activities that have all of our members together. We believe that sharing our lives together this way is a demonstration of God's glory to ourselves and the world around us.

Because we believe fellowship is so important, we take both church membership and church leadership very seriously. We've labored long and hard to reclaim both of these ideas, and we continue to work toward the biblical ideal for both of them. Membership at Urania First Baptist means that we are part of a family, and like all families we share good times and bad, we occasionally bicker, and we are always accountable to one another for our attitudes, words, and deeds. Leadership is something that we value as a gift from God. Our leaders are expected to engage in their responsibilities with all diligence, integrity, grace, and humility because in their roles as leaders they are examples to the rest of us and to the community in which we live.

Mission

Our view of ministry is framed by the Great Commission of the church found in the book of Matthew chapter 28 verses 19 through 20. In this passage, we are given the simple command to make disciples. Therefore everything that we undertake must have this as its aim. Our goal is to make both more and better disciples of Christ. As we carry out this idea of mission-driven ministry, our most basic and important resource is the gospel. It is this message that reconciles lost souls to God and changes lives forever.

This is how we have been called to make a difference in this world: not by make a better world for people, but for making better people for the world. The only means by which we can accomplish this task of making better people is by utilizing the gospel. Once a person accepts this gospel, that person will spend the rest of his or her life coming to a greater and greater understanding of it through the gift of God's Word. So by communicating the gospel to the world around us and by teaching believers God's Word we fulfill the mission we have been given to Christ. And though the ministries we undertake as a church vary widely in form and substance, this mission must be at the heart of them all. We also partner with other churches of like faith and practice to carry out this mission on a global scale.