Faith

As a faith community within MIT, students, staff members and professors come to LEM with a wide variety of prior religious experiences and personal beliefs.  Some of these beliefs were formed from within the two traditions we represent, the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, while some of these beliefs come from other religious traditions, from philosophy, or from ethical reflection. 

Our life together as a community is less about creating doctrinally similar beliefs within each of our members, and more about creating a spiritual home where we can engage the ‘big questions’ together – questions about God, about ourselves, about our world, about the Gospels, about science, about believing, about knowledge, and about discipleship.  Many of us find that praying and thinking about these questions is centrally important to our lives and to the decisions we face every day.

Of course, we’re not all questions and no answers!  People at LEM do have deeply held beliefs about our experience of God in the world, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and how we respond to our beliefs through the choices we make in our lives.  Our services, discipleship groups, fellowship time, activities, Bible studies and service opportunities all give us the chance to share our beliefs with others and to listen to others’ stories about their own belief in God.  In our ongoing spiritual growth as a community, we especially find that praying together and sharing communion every week helps us come to know and believe in God’s presence in our lives.