The Upper Room Fellowship

If you were able to join us for our Transforming Together Growth Campaign meeting this past weekend, you know the room was filled with faith, generosity, and a real sense of God moving among us. If you weren't able to make it, we want to make sure you're caught up on everything that was shared, because this involves all of us. We spent time looking back at our history, and it was a good re...

SERMON SUMMARYWe kicked off this week by going deeper into the foundation underneath our Here for Good series and our Transforming Together growth campaign. Before we talk about buildings, timelines, or giving, we need to talk about the thing that holds all of it up: prayer. We started in Joshua 10, where Joshua finds himself in a battle that God has already promised to deliver into his hands, but...

We opened this series with a building campaign and a question worth sitting with: why are we really doing this? The answer starts in Isaiah 54, where God tells a barren woman with no household and no future to enlarge her tent. Not someday. Now. Before a single person has arrived. God sees who is coming before she does, and he invites her to act on that word before the evidence shows up. That patt...

Sermon Summary:We wrapped up our journey through Pete Scazzero's Emotionally Healthy Spirituality with a question that matters more than any sermon series: what does a sustainable spiritual life look like on a random Tuesday when no one is asking you to think about it? A study of Israeli parole judges showed that the time of day mattered more to their decisions than the facts of a case. Decisi...

Sermon Summary:What does it actually mean to love our neighbor? This week we explored one of the most familiar stories Jesus ever told and discovered it might be more challenging than we have let ourselves believe. The story begins with a lawyer testing Jesus, asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. He gets the answer right, loving God and loving neighbor, but wants to narrow the field. Je...

SERMON SUMMARYWe live in a blizzard. Our schedules overflow, we wear busyness as a badge, and we're expected to work like we don't have families while raising families like we don't have jobs. In the whiteout conditions of modern life, many of us have lost our way spiritually, wandering in circles just feet from home. God offers us a rope to lead us back: two ancient disciplines called...

Sermon Summary:We all hit walls in life: moments when our faith stops working the way we thought it would, when the foundation we've built on starts to crack. These aren't minor inconveniences. They're the trials that test everything we believe about God and ourselves. James 1:2-4 invites us to consider it pure joy when we face trials, because this testing produces the mature, complete...

Sermon Summary:We explored how our past profoundly shapes our present in this third week of our Emotionally Healthy Spirituality series. The core idea: to move into a healthy, mature future with God, we must take an honest look at our past. Science confirms what Scripture has always shown us. Research in epigenetics reveals that trauma and experiences can leave chemical markers on our DNA that get...

SERMON SUMMARYWe explored the journey to authentic spirituality by looking at David's confrontation with Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. Biblical authenticity means discovering who God created us to be, surrendering to the Holy Spirit's transforming work in that hidden 90% beneath the surface. David faced three major obstacles before he ever reached Goliath. First, accusations from family. His bro...

Sermon Summary We begin the year asking ourselves a crucial question: one year from now, how do we want to be different? This new series, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, explores why spiritual maturity and emotional health cannot be separated. Many of us experience a gap between the abundant life Jesus promises in John 10:10 and our actual reality. We might be exhausted, anxious, or struggling i...

Greetings from the Upper Room Fellowship, a church in Columbiana, Ohio, where we seek to Know God, Share Life, and Serve Others together. At the Upper Room Fellowship, we believe in a relational God who created us and will go to whatever lengths possible to connect with us so we can experience his perfect love. We believe that His love is open to all and has the power to transform lives and commun...

We often romanticize Christmas with cozy sweaters, twinkling lights, and sentimental nostalgia. But the reality of that first Christmas was scandalous. God looked at broken humanity and became one of us, born to an unwed teenage mother in a forgotten town, arriving in a stable because there was no room anywhere else. This is love at its purest. In 1 John 4:7-12, 19, we discover what real love look...

We explore Advent as "WAIT Training" - celebrating Jesus' first coming while anticipating His return. Living between two gardens, in the "now and not yet," presents unique challenges, especially when joy feels just out of reach. Joy is more than a feeling. Kay Warren defines it as "the settled assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet co...

Greetings from the Upper Room Fellowship, a church in Columbiana, Ohio, where we seek to Know God, Share Life, and Serve Others together. At the Upper Room Fellowship, we believe in a relational God who created us and will go to whatever lengths possible to connect with us so we can experience his perfect love. We believe that His love is open to all and has the power to transform lives and commun...

We kicked off Advent by exploring hope in three dimensions: today, tomorrow, and eternity. Hope isn't just wishful thinking like a Browns fan before kickoff. Biblical hope is the eager anticipation of kids stacked in the hallway on Christmas morning, knowing something good is coming even if we don't know exactly what. We dove into Jeremiah 29:11, that verse on every graduation mug, but we...

We wrapped up our Holy Spirit series by addressing two major challenges that hinder Spirit-filled community: consumerism and control. In 1 Corinthians 14:26, Paul describes a church where everyone showed up ready to contribute—a hymn, a word of instruction, a revelation. The Corinthian church was messy and broken, but the Spirit had freedom to move among them. We're shaped by consumer culture...

We continued our series "The Way" by exploring Ephesians 5:15-21, where Paul calls us to be filled with the Spirit rather than drunk with wine. Paul wrote to Christians in Ephesus, a city saturated with pagan religion, excess, and Roman imperial propaganda. In that hostile cultural environment, he urged believers to be intentional about how they lived. When Paul contrasts drunkenness wit...

Prophecy isn't fortune telling or a Christian version of psychic readings. At its core, prophecy is simply hearing what God is saying and repeating it. We serve a God who speaks directly into the lives of his people and community through individuals who submit themselves to the authority of the Spirit and the community. In the Old Testament, prophets stood at the margins of power, speaking tru...

We're continuing our series "The Way" by exploring the gifts of healing and what it means to pray for the sick. In 1 Corinthians 12:7-10, Paul explains that spiritual gifts are given for the common good of the church, and healing is the only gift mentioned in plural form. We are the delivery system for God's healing gifts. The early church expected healing to be a normal part of...

We continued our exploration of the Holy Spirit by examining a vital truth: Jesus operated not merely as God, but as a Spirit-filled human being. This distinction transforms everything because it means Jesus becomes our model, not just our object of admiration. When Jesus read from Isaiah 61 in Luke 4, declaring "The Spirit of the Lord is on me," he revealed his mission statement. Theologians call...

SERMON SUMMARYWe find ourselves in a tension. We read Scripture and encounter people who had wild, transformative experiences with God, yet many of us settle for something less. We develop explanations for the gap between what we read and what we experience, normalizing something that was never meant to be normal. At the Feast of Tabernacles, as thousands gathered to watch the priest pour water on...

SERMON SUMMARY We explored what a healthy church actually looks like when it's filled with people genuinely following Jesus together. This isn't about perfection or arrival but about a community faithfully pursuing the way of Christ. Drawing from Ephesians 4 and other passages, we identified ten biblical marks of health. We examined how Scripture serves as our authority outside ourselves a...

We explored what total transformation looks like in 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, where Paul prays that God would sanctify us "through and through." This isn't about becoming boring or religious. Sanctification means becoming the most fully alive version of ourselves. Paul wrote to people in Thessalonica who had already experienced complete transformation once before. They had pledged tot...

Jesus deliberately chose twelve diverse disciples who would naturally clash with each other, demonstrating that God's kingdom unites people who would never choose each other naturally. From Luke 6 and Acts 2, we see that following Jesus means embracing both the beauty and messiness of authentic community. The early church devoted themselves to teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, and prayer,...