Happy New Year!

I don’t know how you would describe your 2025, but I think “moving” is a good word to describe my year. Perhaps you saw Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s choice of word for 2025, “Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.’ All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.” Gladly here at the First Congregational Church we did not produce Slop in 2025! Together we turned the page to the next chapter in our 142 years as a church.

My choice of word looking back at 2025 is “revive.” Susie and I arrived on June first to a very cold sanctuary and a very warm welcome. As we settled in, got to know all of you, learned the history of the church, we heard over and over, “We used to have that here,” or “We did that before.” Truly this church has done it all throughout the years. But the realities of culture, change, and covid took their toll to put past programming on pause. Our job was to blow on the embers that remained and ignite the fire once again.

And now what awaits us in 2026? If I can choose a word that I hope will define our year ahead, I choose “bridge.” Bridges are pretty essential around Rhinelander. With the mighty Wisconsin River cutting through the middle of the city and the Pelican River meandering along the southern edge, bridges are the only way to get from one side of town to the other. Bridges do the hard work of connecting two sides together.

Our job now as a church is to connect the past with the future. Will you be the bridge?
My prayer is that we honor the past with gratitude, remembering the saints who built this place with vision, hard work, and faithful prayer. We stand firmly on the foundation they laid, and we receive their gifts as a sacred trust, not a binding tether. Now it is our turn to be the bridge—connecting past to future, memory to hope, legacy to possibility, faithfulness to courage.
Together let’s listen to God’s spirit and follow. May we carry the light of Christ into what is yet to be, walking together into God’s unfolding future.
Happy New Year everyone! – Submitted by Rev. Tim Grade