Who We Are
This is a place of open doors, open minds, open hearts and open hands.
Whether you live out your faith journey primarily through study, meditation, heartfelt experience, or social activism, you can find others at Good Shepherd who share your spiritual temperament.
We are a diverse congregation
We are gay, straight, young, old, rich, poor, multi-racial and multi-ethnic.
At Good Shepherd, we value diversity. In embracing diversity we seek to be a bridge of understanding among people, to live in the creative tension of differences, to be a blessing to a community and a world where dialogue, understanding and collaboration among diverse people is needed.
We are one in Christ
We encounter Christ in each person and treat one another with trust, love, care and respect.
We celebrate our oneness in Christ by recognizing that it is Jesus' embrace that holds us together and that we are all equally-loved children of God. Our relationship with the God and each other deepens through a life-long journey of seeking, questioning, praying, serving, learning, caring. As a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Good Shepherd is part of a church body comprising almost five million members in more than ten thousand congregations throughout the U.S.
We are committed to justice
We partner with Christian, Jewish, Muslim and secular organizations as we work for social justice and provide social ministries.
We demonstrate faith in action both as a congregation and as individuals. We strive to be an anti-racist congregation with many of our members completing anti-racism training. We support global and local ELCA organizations such as Lutheran Social Services, disaster relief, prison ministries, immigrant and refugee services. As a congregation we participate in local organizations such as United Power for Action and Justice, Housing Forward, Beyond Hunger, and Kidz Express, and provide breakfast to high school students on late-start Wednesdays.
We honor our Earth
We are stewards of God’s creation through our actions.
We challenge ourselves as a congregation to be as earth-friendly as we can in both our daily functioning and special events. We are proud to have one of the first prairie gardens to change the landscape of the parkway, inviting bees, butterflies and neighbors to enjoy the flowers. Recent changes to our physical space ensure we are more energy efficient, as well as offering recycling and composting opportunities to our congregation.