Next Steps

Be Known

Find Your Place Among Us

You do not have to have it figured out to show up. You do not have to believe everything, understand everything, or have your life in order before you walk through the door. Finding your place here begins with one simple step: letting us know you are here.

Every Sunday morning, someone walks through our doors for the first time. A neighbor who finally said yes to an invitation, a parent looking for something more, someone carrying questions that seem so heavy. We see you. We are here to meet you, welcome you, and make sure you feel at home in a place where God is genuinely at work. First Pres is a community with room for you, whatever you are carrying and wherever you are starting from.

Alpha is one of the best places to begin. It is a relaxed, honest series of conversations about life, faith, and meaning, designed for people who are curious, skeptical, or simply open. No pressure. No expectations. Just real questions and real people. Or plan your first Sunday visit and let us meet you where you are. Your place here is waiting.

Every great story begins with a first step. Yours can begin here.

Belong

Make Worship a Way of Life

Belonging happens in the rhythm of returning. Worship is a discipline that shapes what you love, what you live for, and who you are becoming. When you build your week around gathering with the people of God, something begins to form in you that cannot happen any other way.

There is something that happens when Sunday morning becomes a consistent anchor in your life. You start to hear the Word differently. You begin to recognize faces, to know names, to feel the weight of belonging to something larger than yourself. Worship is formative. It re-orients your affections, names what is true, and places your ordinary life inside a story that stretches far beyond it. Sunday Communities offer a consistent gathering by age and stage, where the same group of people shows up week after week and faces become familiar. Growing Together Wednesdays provides a midweek rhythm of teaching and discussion for those ready to go deeper.

Belonging is built through repetition, and repetition requires one thing: showing up. You may still be working out what you believe. You may come with questions every single week. Bring them. Worship has a way of finding you in the middle of uncertainty, if you give it the chance.

Make worship a rhythm, not a reaction. Return. Again and again.

Believe

Faith in Christ Changes You

At some point on this journey, the questions begin to lead somewhere. Certainty about everything may come slowly, but one question tends to come into focus before the others: who is Jesus, and what will you do with Him? Belief, in the deepest sense, is giving your life over to Christ as Lord.

When you surrender your life to Christ and trust that he is who he says he is, something fundamental changes. Not gradually. Not partially. The old passes away and the new comes. Worship becomes something entirely different. You now know who he is, and gathering in his name, singing to him, hearing his Word, receiving his table, these things carry a weight they never did before. The Holy Spirit makes his home in you. Everything is different now, starting from the inside.

If you are still exploring, we want you to keep exploring. We are not in a hurry. But if you are ready, or even nearly ready, we want to walk with you through it. Faith in Christ is the foundation on which everything else in this booklet is built. We want to celebrate it with you and make sure you are not doing it alone. Talk to a pastor. Ask your questions out loud. Let us know where you are.

This is the foundation. Everything else is built on this.

Become

Be Transformed and Renewed

Belief is the beginning. Once Christ lives in you through the Holy Spirit, you have both the calling and the power to become more like him. This is discipleship, and it is the ongoing work of a lifetime.

Transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit in a willing life, carried out through the ordinary means of community, Scripture, and prayer. A Life Group is one of the most powerful environments for this kind of formation: a small circle of people committed to reading Scripture together, being honest about their lives, and holding each other accountable to what they actually believe. Bible study becomes our formation. Showing up becomes accountability. Service becomes our calling. The shift is from "I attend First Pres" to "Christ lives in me."

Transformation almost always happens in relationship. Find someone who is a little further down the road and ask them to walk with you for a season. Be willing to be honest, to be challenged, to change slowly and genuinely. And in time, become that person for someone else. This is how disciples are formed: through the slow, faithful, ordinary practice of following Jesus together.

God is not done with you. He never stops the work he has started.

Bear Fruit

Invest in Someone Else's Story

There comes a point where everything you have received is meant to be given away. A life shaped by Christ overflows. And the astonishing thing is that the more you give, the more your own faith grows.

Jesus did not call us to grow in faith so we could keep it to ourselves. The entire journey, being known, building a rhythm of worship, coming to faith, being transformed, is preparation for this: a life so shaped by Christ that it overflows naturally into the lives of the people around you. That looks like naming a specific person you are walking with. Inviting someone to Alpha and sitting with them through the tough questions, the way someone once sat with you. Leading a group of people into the same community that changed you. Showing up for the city through service.

This is what First Pres was built for: a movement of men and women who carry Light and Life into every corner of Colorado Springs. Bearing fruit begins the moment you are willing to invest in someone else's story. When you do, you become part of something much larger than yourself. You help change a life. And through that life, you help change the city and the world to the glory of God.

Your story is not just for you. Give it away.