Continuing Education
As part of our ongoing drive for staying relevant in todays challenging times, not only in the church but our current environment, it means more than just keeping up — it means leading the way with the latest insights and techniques. Our staff is a community of lifelong learners committed to their growth by participating in conferences, classes and workshops. It is our promise to you that we continue to learn ways to best serve the needs of our community and congregation. Below you will find the latest ways our staff is fulfilling that promise.
Mandy Lape-Freeberg
I am so grateful to once again be attending the Alliance of Baptist, a progressive arm of American Baptists who gathered in their concern for justice to be lived out amongst God’s people. Last year, I attended for the first time and the vitality of the worship, the insightfulness of the lectures and preachers, and the warmth of fellow attenders was restorative, broadening, and joyous. I am even more excited to attend this year as I am filled with expectation. Please read this description and rationale for this year’s meeting entitled: Repent, Repair, Reclaim.
Thank you for this opportunity,
Mandy
Isaiah tells us that God does not ask for shallow piety or polite charity, but for a people who break the yoke of oppression, who spend themselves on behalf of the hungry, who repair ancient ruins and restore streets once abandoned. This is not soft work. It is truth-telling, wall-tearing, life-reorienting work. It is repentance. Not as guilt-nursing, but as returning: turning back toward the heart of God so that justice can take root in us again.
To reckon with our roots means naming the soil we stand in: the legacy of white Christian Nationalism, the deep taproot of white supremacy, the ways our tradition has twisted the story of God to justify power rather than liberation. It means acknowledging how we have benefited from systems that deform God’s creation, harm our neighbors, and fracture our own souls. And it means telling the truth about the world we inhabit now: a nation where the machinery of empire still turns. Where families are separated and exiled, where ICE raids terrorize communities, where borders are weaponized, communities are policed and surveilled, creation exploited, and fear is used as currency.
This reckoning is not about shame, but about truth for the sake of transformation. Christian freedom requires the courage to confront the stories we inherited, the temptations of innocence and exceptionalism, and the false securities that privilege builds. Repentance demands that we tell the truth about what has shaped us so we can step into a future rooted not in fear or dominance, but in love, courage, liberation, and responsibility. If we will turn, if we will return, God will meet us there. Re-centered. Re-rooted. Ready to repair what has been broken.
Repent: turn back to the God of justice and mercy.
Repair: join God in mending what empire has shattered — bodies, land, relationships, memory, hope.
Reclaim: our humanity, our faith’s liberating core, our prophetic imagination and public witness.
Only then, Isaiah promises, will our light break forth like morning. Only then will we become what God has always called us to be — repairers of broken walls, restorers of streets where all may dwell.
Sara Lamar-Sterling, Minister of Children’s Education
In my role as Minister of Children’s Education, I ensure that our children’s programming follows the Safe Church policy that was approved by the Board of Elders in May 2025. This past fall I completed the 5 online training modules that CCDCUCC’s insurance company, Praesidium, provides as part of our congregation’s efforts to maintain safe and secure programs for children and vulnerable adults. Additionally, our Sunday school volunteers have completed the introductory training, in accordance with our Safe Church policy.