| Niles Discovery Church | |
| If your idea of what a church ought to be is open minded, warm hearted, and bright spirited, then we invite you to worship at Niles Discovery Church. | |
| Here, we take God seriously, and try to take ourselves less seriously. | |
| Here, we bring our minds, as well as our hearts and souls, to knowing the Bible. Our questions are as important as the answer we find together. | |
| Here, children learn and grow, adults find good friends, and the love of Christ is shared with all. | |
| We have an outstanding Choir, Youth Programs, and Sunday School. | |
| We are a progressive, open and affirming church that serves the Bay Area Community, uniting in God’s love for all people regardless of race, age, nationality, physical ability, marital status, family configuration, mental ability, economic status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, religion, faith, or creed, encouraging them on the adventure we call the faith journey. | |
| We don't think that Christianity is about believing unbelievable stuff about God or Jesus or the Bible. It's about a lifelong journey of relationship with God that grows and changes as we do. | |
| We recognize that we have been given a fantastic and diverse world within which to live, work and play and have a responsibility to care for it. We enjoy our relationships with faithful persons of other religious persuasions and seek to work cooperatively with all to make our communities better places. | |
| Check out our site and see that we are serious about our faith, our service, and our fun together. Then come and share worship with us any Sunday at 10:00 a.m. | |
| No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here. | |
| What is the Niles Discovery Church difference? | |
| We strive to provide a community where people can discover God and God’s purposes for themselves without dictating just what that is. Freedom of thought and expression are encouraged. The one unifying factor is Jesus Christ whose teachings we attempt to understand and follow. This means that, as Jesus valued love of all (including enemies), uplifting the downtrodden, confronting exploitative powers and institutions, and seeking the equality of all, we pursue social justice issues and work to eliminate inequities where they are found. | |
| We are part of the Progressive Christian movement. It is a way of being Christian that honors the traditions of our past while knowing that there is always more for us to learn and experience. We take the Bible seriously, but not literally. We understand that, while science helps explain the physical world and religion helps explain the spiritual world, science and religion can learn much from each other. We honor any religion that honors the two Great Commandments of Jesus: to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and our neighbor as our self. | |
| We at Niles Discovery Church are committed to these Progressive Christian principles and seek to work with God to realize Jesus’ prayer that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” | |
| If this sounds good to you, why not give us a try? | |
| A Church for a New Day | |
| The world is changing. American culture is changing. The church needs to change, too. | |
| Once upon a time, in America, you could assume that any person you met was a Christian (at least nominally). Mainline Protestantism was the assumption and society flexed to accommodate that assumption. Youth athletic programs and school activities were never scheduled for Sunday morning and you needed to be a white, Protestant male to even be considered to sit on the Supreme Court. No longer. And that’s a good thing. Now we see the richness and benefits that different cultures, beliefs, and ethnicities bring to society. | |
| These changes mean the church needs to change. So two congregations with deep roots in the Niles neighborhood – Niles Congregational Church (founded in 1889) and First Christian Church of Fremont (founded in 1960) – decided to create something new. On September 9, 2012, Niles Discovery Church was born, a congregation united in God’s love for everyone’s journey … no exceptions. Learn more about the churches that helped us create this new, progressive church for this new day here. | |
| Niles Discovery Church is affiliated with both the Norther California-Nevada Region of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Northern California Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ. We are also active in the work of the Tri-City Interfaith Council. | |
| A church for everyone | |
| To bring our worship service to our congregation during the COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place mandate (2020-2021), we moved our services to Zoom. We quickly learned that there were many people who had not been attending church due to several reasons (unrelated to COVID-19). When Shelter-in-Place mandate was lifted, we restructured our worship service as a hybrid service to enable people to attend service either in-person or online. Our goal is to make our worship service as meaningful as possible regardless how one attends. We continue to explore how technology can improve our ministries. | |
| We’re a church where being on a faith journey is more important that conformity of belief. Faith is much more about a relationship with God – our trust in God and our fidelity to God – that it is about beliefs. | |
| Faith | |
| As members of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), our faith is in the God who Jesus worshiped, the God who claims us and sustains us through the power of the Holy Spirit. The teachings of Jesus nurture our lives and challenge our living in the world and in our relationships to one another. Although we have no creed, we have continuity with the Church through the ages, and feel responsible to interpret our received traditions and the Bible in the light of our day. Our faith compels us to work for Christian unity and to create peace and justice among all peoples. | |
| In making this faith its own, the church is guided by the words of John Robinson (minister of the Pilgrims, the original Congregationalists in North America): "God has yet more truth and light to break forth out of his holy word." | |
| Freedom | |
| Freedom is highly valued in the faith of individual members and the governing of local churches. The United Church of Christ has a congregational form of government. Historically, it has supported causes seeking liberation and enlargement of opportunity for the oppressed. | |
| Fellowship | |
| Our fellowship is lived out through voluntary connections with nearby churches in Associations; regional churches in Conferences; and the national denomination through the General Synod. These relationships enable the autonomous local church to participate in a more effective mission, and bear witness to our responsibility to live in covenant with other Christians. | |
| Focus | |
| We are Christians who have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus. It’s the difference between worshiping Jesus or worshiping the God Jesus worshiped. Read more… | |
| We are Christians who recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to God’s realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us. Read more… | |
| We are Christians who understand the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus' name to be a realization of the vision of God's feast for all peoples. Read more… | |
| We are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable. That, in fact, we can learn from our differences. Read more… | |
| We are Christians who know that the way we behave toward one another and others is the fullest expression of what we believe. Read more… | |
| We are Christians who find more grace in the search for meaning than in absolute certainty, in the questions than in the answers. Read more… | |
| We are Christians who form ourselves into communities dedicated to equipping one another for the work we feel called to do: striving for peace and justice among all people, protecting and restoring the integrity of all God's creation, and bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his sisters and brothers. Read more… | |
| Friendship | |
| You'll find warm, close, open, accepting, and affirming relationships, which makes this a friendly and inviting church. | |
| Open and Affirming | |
| “Open and Affirming” is a designation used in both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ by local churches as a way of saying, “This congregation welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning people into the full life and ministry of the church.” Niles Discovery Church is an Open and Affirming congregation. | |
| The Open and Affirming programs of our denominations are administered by the national lgbt advocacy groups of each denomination: The GLAD Alliance and the United Church Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns (The Coalition). | |
| As an open and affirming congregation, we want all LGBTQ people to know that there is nothing wrong with them. They do not have a spiritual problem, nor do they have a mental problem. We know that there are Christians who claim that gayness can be ‘cured,’ that it can be ‘prayed away.’ We reject that claim. God has no interest in ‘healing’ a problem that doesn’t exist. Furthermore, the one reputable study that suggested that homosexuality might possibly be changed in some patients has now been repudiated by its author. See the video below for more information on this. | |