Soon after I moved to Detroit from Tokyo to pursue a marketing job at a law firm, I started looking for a home church. My first visit to the Congregational Church of Birmingham was to attend a concert where a pianist friend performed to raise funds for the church. The following Sunday, I decided to come to the worship service – and the rest is history! I’m fortunate to have found this open and inclusive church where congregants respect one another, embrace wider humanity and experience individual spiritual growth. For a Japanese single woman with no family roots here, the warmth and sense of safety I felt were very important factors in choosing a church. As a youth, I went to a Catholic kindergarten and studied a Methodist discipline in college. But when I first came to CCB, it had been decades since I had regularly attended church. Interestingly, I later learned that the church in Japan that my grandmother and I attended was, like CCB, a member of the United Church Christ.