The Southwest Conference of the United Church of Christ is celebrating 15 congregations whose creative visions for ministry have been approved for 2026 Congregational Revitalization & Resiliency Grants.
For the third consecutive year, the grant program is helping congregations pursue renewal, faithful innovation, and deeper connection with God, one another, and their communities. This year, applicants were invited to connect their projects with the Southwest Conference C.A.R.E.S. framework—Covenant, Advocacy, Rest, Engagement, and Spirit.
The 15 projects demonstrate just how many forms revitalization can take. Some congregations are investing in children and youth. Others are addressing racial justice, isolation, accessibility, community outreach, spiritual renewal, or new ways of worshiping and building relationships. What they share is a willingness to listen, experiment, and respond faithfully to the communities they serve.
Desert Palm UCC — Living Our Faith: Growing Young Leaders in Faith and Action
Desert Palm is investing in young people not simply as participants in church life, but as developing Christian leaders. Through biblical reflection, experiential learning, and engagement with justice and community ministries, youth will explore how Christian faith is lived through compassion, inclusion, service, and advocacy. Participants will visit ministries and community organizations where they can see faith being put into practice, build relationships with other young people, and reflect on what they experience. The project culminates with youth sharing what they have learned with the wider congregation, making this an intergenerational experience as well as a youth program. The grant also provides resources for youth to develop a project of their own based on what they have learned.
Desert Garden UCC — Growing Two New Ministries
Desert Garden will launch two complementary ministries that combine learning with hands-on service. Movies for the Soul will use films and facilitated conversations to explore social justice, faith formation, and community healing, with plans to extend the ministry to young people at HomeBase youth shelter. Bags of Blessings will give members an opportunity to translate those values into action by assembling hygiene items, school supplies, and other needed resources for nonprofit partners serving youth, families, and people experiencing hardship. Desert Garden is also contributing its own restricted mission funds to the effort, expanding the reach of the Conference grant.
Church of the Good Shepherd, Albuquerque — Building Congregational Capacity to Engage in Effective Racial Justice Work
Good Shepherd is beginning the first year of an intentional three-year racial justice formation process after congregational discernment identified racial justice as a ministry priority. Rather than approaching anti-racism as a single workshop or event, the congregation will spend time developing the knowledge and relationships needed for sustained engagement. Nine after-church learning gatherings and three cultural-humility workshops will help participants develop shared vocabulary, listening skills, cultural humility, trust, and resilience. Discussion, theological reflection, outside facilitation, and relationship-building will help prepare the congregation to engage racial justice work thoughtfully and faithfully over the long term.
The Good Shepherd UCC, Sahuarita — Dinner Church: Gathering Around the Table
Good Shepherd will experiment with an ancient Christian practice in a fresh form: gathering around a table. Six Dinner Church experiences will combine a shared meal with scripture and spiritual reflection, guided conversation, music, prayer, storytelling, and relationship-building. The gatherings are intended both to deepen relationships among current participants and to provide a welcoming alternative for people who may be spiritually curious, isolated, or uncomfortable with traditional worship. Meals will be prepared through the Sahuarita Food Bank, adding a community partnership to the ministry. By the end of the pilot, the congregation will have experienced six opportunities to explore what worship and Christian community can look like when the table itself becomes sacred space.
First Congregational Church, Prescott — Strengthen and Invigorate Youth Ministry
First Congregational Prescott will build upon an existing youth ministry by investing more deeply in both the adults who lead it and the young people who participate. Youth leaders will receive additional theological and educational preparation, while the congregation will establish a regular teaching and mentoring relationship between the pastor and youth during a time of pastoral transition. The project will also include new faith-formation resources and culminate in a 2027 youth spiritual retreat. Together, these efforts are designed to deepen Christian formation, strengthen relationships among youth, families, leaders, and pastor, and develop young people who see themselves as an integral part of the congregation's present and future.
Scottsdale Congregational UCC — Soul Check: Engaging Youth in Spiritual Innovation through Hybrid Worship and Digital Storytelling
Scottsdale Congregational is taking faith formation into the digital world with a 12-month pilot that combines weekly hybrid Christian education with intergenerational storytelling. Youth will engage scripture and prayer while also learning technology, interviewing church elders, and creating faith-based digital stories. The project gives young people meaningful leadership roles while preserving and sharing the experiences of older members. Technology funded through the grant will also make Christian education more accessible to families who cannot always participate in person. By combining faith formation, youth leadership, intergenerational relationships, technology, and social-media outreach, Soul Check explores how Christian community can extend beyond the physical church building.
Taos United Church of Christ — Community Transformation
Taos UCC is asking a significant question: How can personal transformation lead to transformation in the wider community? The congregation will undertake a process of study, listening, conversation, and discernment to determine where it is being called to make a meaningful difference. Community leaders and outside speakers will contribute their perspectives, while Gen Z focus groups and conversations with immigrants and community partners will bring voices from outside the congregation into the process. Areas for exploration include immigration, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, houselessness, and environmental justice. Rather than beginning with a predetermined ministry, Taos is beginning by listening—then using what it learns to discern concrete justice ministries responsive to the needs of its community.
First Church UCC Phoenix — Growing Together in Faith: Expanding Belonging in Faith Formation
First Church Phoenix will expand its growing faith-formation ministry through two initiatives centered on belonging. A new youth group for ages 12–18 will combine progressive Christian education, justice-centered conversation, service, activities, and community-building. At the same time, the church will establish a sensory room for neurodivergent children and others who sometimes need a quieter or differently structured environment in order to participate comfortably in worship and church activities. The room will include resources such as weighted blankets, fidgets, flexible seating, sensory equipment, and worship materials. Together, the two initiatives recognize that meaningful faith formation requires not only good programming, but creating spaces where different people genuinely experience that they belong.
Rincon Congregational UCC — Pull Up A Chair
At Rincon, a chair at the table becomes an invitation to community. Pull Up A Chair will expand the congregation's feeding and hospitality ministries toward weekly community lunches where food becomes a starting point for relationship, discipleship, and extravagant welcome. The ministry seeks to bring together people from different backgrounds who might not otherwise encounter one another and to create pathways from community hospitality into deeper participation and relationship. A second part of the project will strengthen Rincon's relationship with the Marshallese Fellowship through shared service, social gatherings, and faith-based activities. In both parts of the project, the emphasis is not simply on serving food—it is on using hospitality to create relationships and a stronger sense of community.
New Hope UCC, Phoenix — Young, Gifted, and Grounded: Preparing Youth to Lead Community Change
New Hope will establish a structured, Christ-centered youth ministry designed to nurture young people spiritually while preparing them to become leaders in their church and community. The program combines biblical teaching, educational enrichment, leadership development, family engagement, and community service. Grant funds will help provide volunteer screening and training, create a safe and welcoming learning environment, purchase age-appropriate Bibles, curriculum, workbooks, games, art and hands-on learning materials, and support four family engagement, outreach, and community-service activities. The goal is not only to reconnect youth and families with church life, but to equip young people to understand that their gifts and faith can be used to make a difference in their communities.
St. Paul's UCC, Rio Rancho — All God's Children Game Day
What began as an intergenerational game-day ministry will grow into a richer experience of food, faith, play, and community through St. Paul's partnership with St. Francis Episcopal Church. Gatherings will expand from snacks to family-style meals and incorporate structured opportunities for intergenerational faith-sharing along with games, crafts, and conversation. The ministry intentionally brings generations together, helping address isolation while creating relationships across age groups. It also offers a safe progressive-Christian community for people who may be unaffiliated with a church or have experienced hurt in previous religious settings. St. Francis Episcopal will contribute a larger meeting space, making this a collaborative ministry as well as an intergenerational one.
Encanto Community Church — Cooking for Justa
Encanto will deepen its relationship with the Justa Center through something wonderfully tangible: preparing and sharing good food. During the year, a church cooking club will prepare four home-cooked meals for approximately 100 older adults who are unhoused or experiencing significant economic hardship. Members of the congregation and neighborhood will be invited to participate in preparing the meals, and produce from Encanto's own garden will supplement the food when possible. The grant will support the meals as well as garden expenses and neighborhood outreach. Cooking for Justa brings together fellowship, service, gardening, neighborhood participation, and an existing community partnership—creating a simple but meaningful way for people to serve together and build relationships with their neighbors.
The Church of the Red Rocks — Hope Lives Here: A Weekend with Carrie Newcomer
Church of the Red Rocks will invite the wider Sedona community into a public conversation about hope, peace, justice, and progressive Christian values through a weekend featuring singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer. The project is intentionally designed to reach beyond the existing congregation, using community-wide publicity, hospitality, and highly visible statements of UCC values to introduce people to a faith community committed to justice, inclusion, and hope. Grant funding will primarily support outreach and marketing rather than the performance itself, which will be supported through the church budget and ticket sales. The weekend is envisioned not simply as a concert, but as an opportunity to create new relationships and communicate publicly what the congregation and the United Church of Christ stand for.
Black Mountain UCC — Rejuvenation Retreat
Black Mountain's project recognizes that sometimes revitalization begins with healing. Following several years marked by leadership disruption, loss, hurt, and burnout, the congregation will hold a one-day off-site retreat centered on spiritual renewal, reconciliation, reconnection, and renewed ownership of the church's future. A congregational task force will select the location, develop the spiritual program, and engage a facilitator or speaker to guide the experience. Rather than immediately asking members to do more, the retreat intentionally creates space to rest, listen, reconnect, and recover a shared sense of purpose. It is a meaningful expression of the C.A.R.E.S. principle of Rest as Resistance and recognizes that a resilient congregation also needs opportunities for restoration.
United Church of Sun City — Sanctuary Display Project
United Church of Sun City will address accessibility and participation through improvements to its sanctuary's visual technology. Serving an older congregation and community that includes people with visual limitations, the church plans to improve the size, brightness, and clarity of information displayed during worship and other gatherings. Updated display and projection capabilities will make hymns, prayers, scripture readings, worship leadership materials, concerts, guest presentations, and community programs easier to see and follow. While the technology itself is important, the larger purpose is inclusion: removing a barrier that can make full participation difficult and helping more people remain actively engaged in worship and congregational life.
Fifteen Congregations, One Spirit of Renewal
Taken together, these projects tell an encouraging story about the Southwest Conference. Revitalization isn't one thing.
It can look like teenagers learning that their faith has something to say about justice. It can be an older adult seeing the words of a hymn clearly again. It can happen around a dinner table, at a game night, in a garden, during a racial-justice conversation, through a digital story shared by a teenager and an elder, or on a retreat where a congregation finally has time to heal.
It can begin by feeding someone—or by pulling up a chair and listening.
The 2026 Congregational Revitalization & Resiliency Grants represent an investment in 15 individual ministries, but they also represent something larger: congregations willing to ask what God may be calling them to do next.
Through C.A.R.E.S., the Southwest Conference is helping give those congregations the resources to begin.
And now, we get to watch what grows.