Each week during our "Share the Message, Share our Message" campaign, a member of our congregation will share their message about why First Congregational is such a special place. Some of these messages will be archived on the menu to the right.
Jordan and Aleisa
JORDAN: Good morning. For those of you who don’t know us, my name is Jordan, and this is my wife Aleisa. We’ve been coming to this church for a little over two years—ever since we moved to Fort Worth from Iowa in August of 2007. Aleisa came to Fort Worth for graduate school in TCU’s English program. I followed and ended up teaching math at Crowley high school. We were married four months  ago in Iowa, in Aleisa’s hometown. I now work for Tarrant County College and Aleisa is a copyeditor, though she will finish her master’s degree next year.
Aleisa and I both grew up in conservative, evangelical communities and homes. She in Northwest Iowa, I in South-Central Nebraska. Weboth also attended the same small Xian liberal arts college in Iowa. (That’s where she fell in love with me. And later, I with her. But that’s a different story.)
ALEISA: As Jordan and I have grown in, and struggled to make sense of, our faith, our paths have followed very similar trajectories. As Jordan mentioned, we both grew up in rathoer conservative evangelical traditions, and we both began to ask questions about those traditions in college, frustrated with the sometimes simplistic, and often stubborn, answers our churches offered to our questions about God. Our hometown churches were, largely, loving and nurturing places, and we’re grateful for the many good ways they shaped us; but learning to question the values and beliefs we’d often taken for granted has, for both of us, been an important part of our faith journey.
JORDAN: I recall this happening particularly for me during my Intro to Xian Theology class. It was the first time I’d really looked at the tradition I grew up in from the outside. That tradition’s emphasis on individual spiritual experience began to seem one-dimensional. And it’s “the world is a sinking ship, save souls before it goes down because it’s going down soon” kind of thinking and posture of absolute certaintybegan to seem problematic.
ALEISA: I, too, began to ask difficult questions in college. And I began to experience doubt, which there was little room for in the church of my childhood. College provided a safe environment for me to ask questions, and to accept doubt as a natural part of living a life of faith.Learning about other cultures and religions in my literature and cultural studies classes began to challenge my rather small and simplistic view of who God is, and how God acts in the world.
Aside from convincing me that a single-minded focus on the afterlife has very little to do with the gospel, my time in college prompted me to rethink the relationship between religion and politics (for example, my assumption that the words “Christian” and “Republican” were essentially interchangeable did not survive college). My college courses also gave me a language for naming the hypocrisy within my hometown church regarding the role of women. I had always been frustrated by the way women seemed to run my church—women, not men, taught the youth in Sunday school, they ran the kitchen, were in charge of the music, organized prayer chains, and community outreach—and yet they were rigorously excluded from official leadership positions. The idea that women could fulfill these roles—and actuallyseeing it happen—was really exciting.
JORDAN: We both found ourselves attending a small Episcopal church that put more emphasis on liturgy, community, and open-minded discussion than our prior church experiences had.
After moving to Fort Worth we hadn’t even had time to start searching for a church before friends invited us to First Congregational. Those friends have since moved from Fort Worth, but we have stayed at First Congregational because we felt welcomed here from day one and because we feel challenged by the church’s commitment to loving all people and engaging in that hard work socially.
ALEISA: We are also grateful for this church’s struggle to balance a focus on individual spirituality and a faith that turns outward, to engage with the world. This is a balance we are seeking in our own lives and, certainly, I believe it is this struggle that is at the very heart of a life of faith. We want to thank everyone here for welcoming us so warmly. Truly, you have made us feel like family—something we are especially grateful for, given that our families are so far away.
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