Centre Congregational Church - Brattleboro, VT

09/03/2026

This was shared by a local pastor who grew up at Centre Church, and as an Open and Affirming Church, we felt it was well worth sharing more widely.

📰BIDDEFORD | Ray Responds to Pride Flag Concerns in Schools

"I’m not going to have it removed. That’s my call, not the teacher’s." - Jeremy Ray, Superintendent, Biddeford and S**o Schools

September 2, 2026, Earlier today a letter was shared to social media by a parent of a student attending school in Biddeford. The letter was sent to Superintendent Jeremy Ray and was outlining the parents concerns about a pride flag that was currently displayed in a elementary classroom in a Biddeford school.

Ray's response to the parent is included below:

"Thank you for writing, and for taking the time to outline your thinking.

We agree on more than we disagree. Inclusion does show up in how a teacher treats kids day to day, not in what’s on the wall. If this particular teacher were kind to some students and cold to others, no flag would fix that.

Where I see it differently is the phrase identity-based symbol.

I understand why it’s being used, but I don’t think it fits what’s actually hanging in that room. That flag isn’t asking a third grader to adopt a belief or to be anything. It’s telling the handful of kids in that building who are being raised by two moms or two dads that their family isn’t going to be treated as odd in art class.

That’s not an ideology. That’s a kid knowing they can talk about their life like everyone else.

I’d also say our classrooms have never been blank. We put up family photos, flags of the countries our students come from, work about the holidays and plenty about Biddeford’s Franco heritage.

Every one of those is tied to somebody’s identity, and I’ve never had a parent tell me they broke neutrality. I understand this one feels different to you. I’m telling you honestly that when I look at the wall, I don’t see a different category.

The other thing I’d offer is that there’s no neutral option here. Putting it up says something and taking it down says something too, and the kids it’s meant for would hear the second one loud and clear.

I’m not willing to send that message, so I’m not going to have it removed. That’s my call, not the teacher’s.

Regarding your request for guidelines, that one isn’t mine to decide. We don’t currently have a policy that lists approved classroom displays, and policy is set by the Biddeford School Committee, not by me. If you want that considered, the right place to say so is directly to them.

Our next meeting is September 9 at 5 p.m. and there’s a public comment period near the end. You’re welcome to come and speak, and I’d encourage it.

In the meantime, the one line I hold is elections. Campaign signs, candidate names and ballot questions come down, because staff shouldn’t be influencing how a family votes.

I know this isn’t the answer you asked for. You and your family are welcome in our schools, and disagreeing with me on this doesn’t change that one bit. If you’d like to sit down and talk it through before the 9th, I’m glad to. Just tell me when.

Thank you,

Jeremy Ray"

ARTICLE:
https://www.biddefordbuzz.com/post/biddeford-ray-responds-to-pride-flag-concerns-in-schools

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08/26/2026

Dolly Parton: The Gospel She Never Called a Sermon
By A Country Pastor

We lost a legend today. We lost an example. We lost a woman who broke the mold this world presses over the women it has already decided to underestimate, and who walked in the footsteps of Jesus while she did it. She shared these same hills with me, the same upbringing, the same community, the same neighbors, and the same love of neighbor and of self I have spent my life trying to preach.

I grew up hearing her name spoken the way people speak of a relative who made good, with pride and something close to ownership, like she belonged to us before she belonged to the world. She came from a one-room cabin, the fourth of twelve children, a family so poor her mama sewed her a coat out of rags. She never hid that beginning. She sang about it, joked about it, wore it like a badge instead of a shame. I cannot separate that humble start from the way Jesus arrived among us, not in a palace, but in a feed trough in a town nobody thought much of. Scripture says he had no majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him (Isaiah 53:2). Dolly spent her whole life proving that the last place the world expects greatness to come from is exactly where God likes to plant it.

She never forgot what it felt like to be laughed at either, and that is the part of her I love most. People mocked her for the big hair, the painted face, the body, the drawl, the trailer-park jokes that followed her out of these mountains. She turned the volume up on all of it instead of shrinking it down, until the people laughing had nothing left to laugh at, because she had already laughed at herself first and harder. Every person who was ever told they were too much, too poor, too country, too different, found a home in her, the same way Jesus kept turning up at the tables of tax collectors and sinners while the religious crowd grumbled about the company he kept (Luke 15:1-2). She loved the churchgoing grandmother in Sevier County the same way she loved the person on the other side of town everybody else had already made up their mind about, and she said so in her own plain language. Jesus said much the same to a crowd ready to stone a woman for her sin: whoever among them was without sin could throw the first stone (John 8:7). Nobody threw one that day. Dolly seemed to know, in her bones, that judgment was never ours to carry, and she spent her life giving refuge to people already judged enough.

Jesus came to us as a man, and Scripture makes plain the image of God belongs to both, male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27), and I see that image most clearly in a woman from these mountains who spent a career being underestimated for the very things people use to dismiss a woman's strength, her looks, her voice, her softness. She let the world call her a dumb blonde and quietly built a business empire, wrote thousands of songs, and turned a theme park into one of the largest employers in this state. She wore the stereotype instead of fighting it, and let her life argue for her, which looks a great deal like the patient, unhurried strength Scripture shows us in God, more like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing than a warrior kicking down a door (Matthew 23:37). None of it read like performance, even though performing was her trade. A person can fake a smile for a stage far easier than sixty years of giving that never put her own name above its mission.

I think of Steve Summers when I think about how she loved the people closest to her. We grew up as youth raised in the same Southern Baptist upbringing, gathering for youth events at his parents' house on weekend nights. Steve went on to become Dolly's costume designer and creative director, and by every account he became family to her, the way she made so many people family, right down to a Christmas movie they made together. Love that is genuine rather than performed for a crowd shows up in exactly that, who a person chooses to build a life alongside.

I think of my friend Jinx too, a professor at the University of Tennessee who helped build the Imagination Library into what it became, a program that now sends free books to children across the world every month, because a woman who grew up without much reading material of her own decided no child should grow up that way. Just this year, the hospital that cares for East Tennessee's sickest children took on her name, becoming the Dolly Parton Children's Hospital, carried by a gift large enough to change how it serves families for a generation. She gave that gift the way she gave most things, without needing the world to make a spectacle of it.

I want to tell you about a young man named Zach, part of a church I pastored last year. In his final stage of life, the wish he asked for through the Make-A-Wish program was to see Dolly, and he got to go, and it meant everything to him and to his partner Robbie in a season when so much else was being taken from him. Zach passed away a couple of months ago. A woman with every reason to be too busy for a dying young man's wish made room for him anyway, from a place of genuine love rather than any publicity to gain, the kind of love Scripture describes as patient and kind, bearing all things, hoping all things (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Zach felt that love in person, and I believe he carried it with him.

Dolly carried her own grief too, and never hid that either. Her husband Carl Dean, married to her nearly sixty years, died in March of last year, and she admitted afterward that she stopped taking care of herself in the aftermath. That kind of honesty is rare from someone the world expects to always be smiling. A marriage kept almost entirely out of public view had shaped her more than any stage ever did. Even that felt like a sermon to me, a reminder that grief does not care how famous a person is.

She talked the same way about her plastic surgery, plainly, without denial or apology. She did it, by her own account, because it made her feel better about herself, not to chase anyone else's approval. That points straight at what Jesus taught, that we are meant to love our neighbor as we already love ourselves (Matthew 22:39). Dolly made peace with loving herself long before the world gave her permission to.

Southern people used to be known for a particular kind of hospitality, setting an extra plate at the table without asking too many questions about who was showing up to eat. Scripture tells us to extend hospitality to strangers, that some who did so entertained angels without ever knowing it (Hebrews 13:2). Somewhere along the way, a good part of this region traded that porch for a gate, and the extra plate for a checklist of who counts as one of us. We live in a moment where power in this country too often measures itself by who it can keep out, and Scripture warned us long ago about the difference between a king who demands to be served and a king who chooses to serve (1 Samuel 8:11-18). Dolly built her life the other direction, giving the world libraries and hospitals and a costume designer's whole career instead of a monument to herself. Here in Tennessee, many, in their own hypocrisy, did not always agree with what Dolly stood for, and yet they loved her anyway. I have spent much of today wondering why the exception Tennessee made for Dolly Parton could not become the rule: that we can disagree with someone, even deeply, and still choose to love them.

When someone this beloved passes, the tributes pour in fast, and the word that keeps showing up today is admiration. Admiration is what is left over when a person spends a lifetime giving more than she took, forgiving more than she condemned, and loving more people than the world thought she should. Jesus said a tree is known by its fruit (Matthew 7:16), and Dolly's fruit is scattered across children's hospitals, libraries, scholarship funds, and the quiet corners of a costume designer's career and a dying young man's final wish.

I keep coming back to the cabin and the manger, two beginnings that were never supposed to produce anything the world would remember. Dolly Parton took a hillbilly girlhood in these mountains and turned it into a life that touched nearly every corner of this earth, and every person who was ever laughed at for being too much found out they had somewhere to belong because of her.

None of us will ever have her fame or her fortune, but the parts of her that mattered most were never about either one. Any of us can set an extra plate at our own table without asking who deserves to sit at it. Any of us can laugh at ourselves first, before somebody else gets the chance, and take the sting out of whatever they meant to wound us with. Any of us can love the person our own street has already made up its mind about, the same way she loved the churchgoing grandmother and the stranger in the same breath. Scripture never asked us to be famous. It asked us to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:39), and Dolly spent eighty years showing an entire region what that looks like in blue jeans and rhinestones. The only real question left this week is whether we plan to keep admiring her for it or start living like her.

She walked through this world the way Jesus asked us to walk through it, loving the person in front of her instead of measuring who deserved it first. Tennessee will bury one of its own soon, but what she planted is going to keep growing long after we do.

**

08/23/2026

We need to take much better care of God's Earth and its flora and fauna.

Dominion, Not Destruction: What Genesis Says About Our National Parks
By A Country Pastor

Horses rounded up by helicopter. Sold for pocket change. Trucked away to die. That is not a headline from some distant place. That is happening on land that belongs to every one of us, under a government that answers to us, in a country that has always called itself the keeper of wide open spaces.

Something has gone wrong in the heart of a nation when that kind of beauty stops registering as beauty at all. There is a world that finds its glory in a canyon carved slow by water, in a herd of wild horses running because they can, in a trail where the only sound is wind through trees older than the country itself. There is another world that finds its glory in gold-plated ballrooms, marble lobbies, manufactured faces, and a golf course groomed within an inch of its life, a world where nothing counts as beautiful unless it can be branded, gated, and charged for. That is God's way standing next to man's way, and this administration has made its choice plain. It does not see a canyon and feel wonder. It sees a canyon and asks who will lease the mineral rights. It does not see a wild horse and feel awe at something free. It sees a wild horse and asks what it will fetch by the pound. Everything gets a price tag under this kind of leadership, even friendship. This week, decades of trust with Canada, one of this country's oldest and closest neighbors, were broken off overnight over a tariff dispute, as if a whole relationship between two peoples could be reduced to a number on a spreadsheet. This is not dominion. This is domination wearing dominion's name, and the parks are paying for it. Rangers, educators, and scientists are being cut faster than they can be replaced. Roads and drilling rigs are pushing into land set aside so it would never have to compete with a bulldozer. Wild horses, the very symbol this country uses to describe its own freedom, are being sold into a slaughter pipeline while officials insist with a straight face that nothing like that is happening. This is not a policy disagreement. This is a spiritual condition, and it has a name in Scripture long before it had a name in any budget document.

Genesis opens with God speaking the world into being and calling it good, again and again, before a single human being showed up to manage it (Genesis 1:1-25). Creation had worth in God's eyes before it had a use to humanity. Treating a canyon or a herd of horses as valuable only insofar as it can be drilled, paved, or sold reverses the order Genesis lays out, against its own Creator.

Then comes the verse people love to quote and hate to finish. God gives humanity dominion over the earth and every living thing (Genesis 1:26-28). Dominion has been twisted for generations into permission to take whatever can be taken. But turn two chapters, and Genesis defines what dominion was meant to look like: God placed the man in the garden "to till it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15). The word translated keep there is the same word used later for a priest guarding a sanctuary, the same word used for a shepherd watching a flock through the night. Dominion was never a blank check. It was a job description, and the job was to guard something sacred, not strip it for parts.

I remember turning the dial to Christian radio back in the 1990s and hearing dominion preached as a blank check. Pastor after pastor described the earth as something God had simply handed over, a warehouse to be emptied rather than a garden to be kept, this land and this day given so it could be used up and used up again. It was sickening to hear it framed that way, and harder still to hear congregations soak it in without question. That teaching did not stay confined to a radio dial. It planted the confusion still being harvested today in budget offices that treat a national park the same way that radio treated the whole earth, as something to consume rather than something to guard.

Scripture does not stop with the garden. After the flood, God's covenant is made with Noah and every living creature that came out of the ark, the birds, the livestock, every wild animal of the earth (Genesis 9:9-10). God bound Himself to the wild things of the world by name, long before anyone was around to lobby on their behalf. Job later hears God describe the wild donkey, free and untamed, given the wilderness as its home and finding no master over it (Job 39:5-8). God delights in creatures that serve no human purpose at all. That should unsettle anyone who has convinced themselves a wild horse's only worth is the price it fetches at auction.

Look no further than the Great Smoky Mountains. That park was bought piece by piece, farm by farm, from families in Tennessee and North Carolina who had to be persuaded to let go of home. School children gave up their pennies to help buy it. Tennessee handed over the roads through the mountains on the legal condition that no toll would ever be charged. When Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the park at Newfound Gap in 1940, he declared it would exist "for the permanent enjoyment of the people," free, forever. That promise held for nearly a century. Now the most visited national park in the country is losing rangers and absorbing budget cuts the people who built it, penny by penny, never agreed to.

Nature does not build monuments to itself, and Scripture never shows Jesus treating it that way either. He withdrew to deserted places to pray, often before daylight (Mark 1:35, Luke 5:16), and was led into the wilderness to be tested for forty days among wild animals, with nothing to control and no one to command (Matthew 4:1-2, Mark 1:13). The wilderness gave him what marble and gold never could, because it could not be owned, only entered. That says something about where real peace is found, and something about a man more at home behind gates and gold than under open sky among creatures who answer to no one.

Here is where the question has to turn inward before it turns anywhere else. It is easy to point at an administration and call it an outrage, and much of what is described above deserves exactly that word. But the deeper question is what has allowed people of faith to stay quiet while it happens. Convenience has a way of making silence feel like patience. The prophets never let their people off that easily.

Call it what it is. Slaughter is not too strong a word, and it does not stop with the horses. It is the horse run down by helicopter and sold for slaughter meat. It is the immigrant who dies inside a detention facility, one of dozens dying in ICE custody at the highest rate this country has recorded in over a decade, reduced to a case number before anyone learns their name. It is the slow slaughter of trust between neighbors and allies. A heart that makes peace with pricing a wild horse by the pound will not struggle long to make peace with pricing a human life the same way. Scripture calls this bloodguilt (Deuteronomy 19:10), a land groaning under the weight of it (Genesis 4:10).

Jeremiah warned a people who had forgotten who the land truly belonged to, who assumed ownership where there was only stewardship (Jeremiah 2:7). Amos condemned those who sold off what was sacred for the price of a pair of sandals, treating what God valued as nothing more than inventory (Amos 2:6-7). The pattern is the same whether the currency is silver, oil leases, or a slaughterhouse contract. Whenever the powerful start pricing what God called good, judgment follows.

None of this means despair gets the final word, because grace never leaves despair standing alone. The same God who called the wild donkey free and bound Himself in covenant to every living creature is still at work, still calling people back to the garden's original job description. Every ranger who keeps showing up for less pay, every family that plans a trip to teach their children the name of a wildflower, every person who stands at a trailhead this week, is living out the "keep it" Genesis described from the beginning. That is not activism dressed up in spiritual language. That is the oldest calling humanity has ever received, older than any administration that will ever hold office.This coming Tuesday, August 25, marks the National Park Service's 110th birthday, and a nationwide Day of Action, with people gathering from Yosemite to Acadia to the Smokies to Rock Creek Park to demand the investment and protection those lands and the people who care for them deserve. Put it on the calendar. Show up near home, join one online, or spend part of that day at a park with someone who needs reminding why these places were set apart. Scripture never asked anyone to save the whole world in a single afternoon. It only asked people to guard what was placed in front of them. Tuesday is a chance to do exactly that.

The land was never for sale. The wild horses were never priced by the pound. The pennies of school children and the promise made at Newfound Gap were never ours to break, and neither was the trust of a neighbor, nor the life of a human being reduced to a number in a detention file. Everything this administration has touched, it has tried to put a price tag on. Genesis said long before anyone got a vote that some things were never for sale, and that calling it dominion does not make it any less a slaughter.

08/23/2026

08/07/2026

Come visit the Green@Centre’s Gallery Walk on Friday, August 7, 5:00pm-7:00pm!
Come have a picnic on the lawn -- it’s SUPER SALAD SUPPER time, with a big assortment of salads, meat & veggie petite sandwiches, noodles & pot stickers, corn on the cob, and plenty of salads made with fresh produce harvested from home gardens.
And --homemade apple crisp!
What a spread for just $15 for adults, $6 for children under 6!
Rain (inside) or shine (outside).
Stay for the fun, kid and senior and family friendly, with sidewalk chalk art and collage creations in paper and fabric.

07/26/2026

Union Service July 26! You won’t find us on Main Street this Sunday morning; we’ll be worshiping at Dummerston Church with Guilford Community Church, United Church of Christ and First Congregational Church of West Brattleboro! Come up and join us!