Worship has been described as "the primary work of the congregation." It is certainly critical in the life and ministry of the church. Worship is the one activity that involves the entire congregation. It is our primary contact with our community. When people are looking for a church they start by attending worship. And often it is worship that becomes the deciding factor in determining whether or not a person will continue a relationship with a church. Most people consider worship to be the primary motivation and encouragement for the life of faith.
At First Presbyterian worship is a vibrant blend of worship styles, music, the dramatic and visual arts, and participatory engagement of the congregation. Our aim is to capture the energy and spiritual quality of contemporary worship while embracing the richness of traditional worship.
Worship design and content are highly regarded at First Presbyterian. Staff resources are devoted to the careful planning of each service. We began 2025 with the annual worship theme: “Rooted in Faith, Growing in Grace”. A monthly theme is selected to support that theme. Recent themes include:
A Message From Pastor RJ Leek
08/23/26
When Pain Wears the Mask of Evil
We are quick to call pain evil. The surgeon's scalpel, the fire that clears deadwood, the grief that hollows us after loss — we lump these together with cruelty and sin as if suffering itself were the enemy. But Scripture draws a sharper line than our instincts do.
Consider Job. His suffering was real, unrelenting, and undeserved by any wrongdoing of his own — yet God never calls it evil. The text insists on this distinction even while refusing to explain it fully. Consider childbirth, labor, the ache of discipline (Hebrews 12:11) — pain woven into a fallen world, yet not therefore malicious in its nature.
The mistake is treating pain as a moral category rather than a physical or circumstantial one. Fire is not evil because it burns; a scalpel is not evil because it cuts. Evil is a matter of the will turned against God — malice, deceit, the deliberate choice to harm. Pain, by contrast, is often simply the cost of living in bodies, in time, in a world still groaning (Romans 8:22) toward redemption.
This distinction matters pastorally. When we tell a grieving parishioner “This is evil," we may unwittingly hand them a theology where God is either powerless against evil or complicit in it. But when we say, "this is pain, not evil — and God has not abandoned you to it," we open a door Job himself walked through: toward a God who is present in suffering without being its author.
Not all that hurts us hates us. Some things that wound are still, mysteriously, held in the hand of a good God.