First Christian Church sits on High Street in Paris, the seat of Bourbon County, Kentucky, and it carries the long memory of the place in its bones. The congregation is part of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the fellowship that took shape in this same region two centuries ago when preachers Barton Stone of Bourbon County and Alexander Campbell of nearby Washington, Kentucky agreed in 1832 to work together around a common faith in Christ. The seeds of that movement had been sown even earlier at the Cane Ridge revival of 1801, held just seven miles from the present church, and that local geography continues to shape the congregation's identity and its outreach.
Sunday Mornings on High Street
The Sunday rhythm is simple and welcoming. Sunday School begins at 9:30 AM and the worship service begins at 10:45 AM, with nursery care available at both hours. Visitors are told to enter through the ramp door, and the building is handicap accessible. Dress is casual, communion is open to all who believe, and the service is livestreamed on the church's YouTube channel for those who cannot attend in person. The Tech Team records each service for later viewing, and the audio is amplified outside during outdoor services and the Christmas living nativity.
The worship itself draws on the Chalice Praise hymnbook and runs across a wide musical range. The congregation sings traditional hymns alongside praise choruses, gospel songs and patriotic songs, and the choir regularly leads the singing with arrangements by Director Nastosha Robinson-Tater, a music educator who sings and performs from childhood. Pianist Anna Daavettila provides keyboard support. Special music has included country and gospel solos, classical string trios, a cappella pieces, children's bell choir, flute solos, and visits from guest musicians such as the Triplets. Worship teams made up of lay members plan services and select music, art and drama, especially during Advent, Lent and Easter, and the doors are open to anyone who would like to help shape a service.
What Disciples Believe Here
The congregation's own statement of faith centers on the confession that "Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and that he is Lord and Savior of the world." Two further questions are asked of those considering membership: "Do you want to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?" and "Do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength?" - the words Jesus quotes from the Old Testament in Matthew 22:34-38.
Scripture is treated as a living Word. The congregation believes that study of the Bible is essential to understanding God's plan and that each person interacts with the text personally, informed by communal study, historical scholarship, and prayer. So the same passage may speak differently across a lifetime.
Baptism at First Christian is by immersion and is reserved for those able to make a personal decision to become a disciple of Jesus Christ. Leaning back into the water is taught as a sign of trust, of dying to self and being buried in Christ; rising represents spiritual resurrection to new life. The church embraces other forms of baptism from different traditions and does not require re-baptism. Parents of infants may bring their children forward during worship for a service of blessing, with a six-week baptism class typically offered around age eleven for those exploring a personal profession of faith.
The Lord's Supper is celebrated each week. Trays of fresh bread and small cups of grape juice are passed by the deacons, and each person decides for themselves whether to participate. All who believe are invited to the table, and the open-topped chalice that appears on the church's symbol is a reminder of that practice.
Service is shared. Men, women and youth serve side by side as pastors, elders, deacons, teachers, board and committee members. The church has roughly four hundred members and keeps giving private between each giver and the Financial Secretary.
A Parish Shaped by Bourbon County
The story of First Christian is the story of Bourbon County Christianity. The congregation began in 1827 when "six forthright women" gathered under the leadership of John Allen Gano and T. M. Allen at the Bourbon County Courthouse. Alexander Campbell himself preached in Paris around 1830, and many who heard him joined the new church. By 1858 a sanctuary had been built at the corner of 8th and Main Street, where it stood until the present sanctuary was constructed in 1902 at a cost of fifty thousand dollars. The education wing followed in 1958, paid in large part by a gift from Nanine Clay Wallis that covered roughly sixty percent of the one hundred eighty thousand dollar cost.
During the Civil War, the Union Army commandeered the 1858 building as a headquarters for three months during the Christmas of 1861. Membership grew past one thousand under pastors Sweeney, Ellis and Thompson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historic chapel has hosted a remarkable list of preachers from the Stone-Campbell tradition - Barton Stone, John Rogers, Alexander Campbell, Walter Scott and Raccoon John Smith - and Fred Craddock, named by Time magazine one of the top ten preachers in the United States, has spoken from the sanctuary pulpit.
Pastors since the 1950s have included Rhodes Thompson Sr., Leonard Boynton, James Seale, Bert Smith, John Ledford, Henry Hanna, Jeff Bell and, currently, Rev. Judi Ring. Many others from this parish have entered Christian ministry - among them William Sweeney, Joseph Faulconer, James Quinn, Kaye Speakes Edwards, Sharon Fields and Sue McCracken - a reminder that the congregation has long seen itself as a sending church.
Children, Youth, and Sunday School
Children are present from the earliest age. A staffed nursery is open during both the Sunday School hour and worship for children from birth through three years old. Nursery monitors Gracie Underwood and Allison Smith, both long-time members of the congregation, care for the children each week.
Older children join the Worship & Wonder program, a Montessori-influenced approach that treats children as spiritual beings who already have a relationship with God. Children ages three through third grade are dismissed from worship after the children's message and gather with a storyteller in a classroom on the second floor, where they hear Bible stories and form their own responses using wooden figures and other materials. Fourth and fifth graders are welcome to stay if they can follow the lesson. Worship & Wonder has been a particular passion of Youth Director Andrea Underwood, a certified storyteller in the program.
Sunday School classes for all ages meet at 9:30 AM. The church's five adult classes each have their own character: the Hanna Class, the Friendship Class, the CCF and JYF Class for Christian Children's Fellowship and Junior Youth Fellowship families, the Chi Rho and CYF Class for middle and high schoolers, and the Journey Class for those exploring faith questions.
Youth ministry reaches well beyond Sunday morning. The Chi Rho middle school group (named for the ancient Greek monogram XP, the first two letters of "Christ") meets for games, conversation about real-life issues, and service. The Christian Youth Fellowship brings high schoolers together to ask questions, study the Bible, talk about current events, and plan service projects. The Christian Children's Fellowship serves kindergarten through third grade, with the guiding verse Matthew 19:14 - "Let the little children come to me and do not stop them." The Junior Youth Fellowship bridges fourth and fifth graders into the youth-group model and introduces age-appropriate volunteer work in the community. Acolytes serve in worship, and Vacation Bible School fills three evenings each summer with Bible stories, games, crafts, an outreach project and a shared meal for up to fifty young participants from the wider community. Older youth have also traveled with the church on mission trips to Honduras, Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky.
Music That Welcomes Every Voice
Music carries a lot of weight at First Christian. The chancel choir, directed by Nastosha Robinson-Tater, rehearses and sings regularly for worship and presents an annual Christmas Cantata. Soloists, small ensembles, the children's bell choir and visiting instrumentalists add variety through the year. Worship teams, made up of lay members, plan services for the seasons of Advent, Lent and Easter and help select music, art, technology and drama that supports the message of a given Sunday. Anyone who would like to help plan a service is welcome to join a worship team.
Roots Run Deep in Cane Ridge Country
The congregation is just seven miles from the Cane Ridge Meeting House, the site of the 1801 revival where Barton Stone's belief in the oneness of all Christians first found an audience. Combined with Alexander Campbell's teaching on the restoration of the New Testament church, that setting is part of how the Disciples of Christ got its start and spread across the frontier. The chalice symbol that represents the denomination - the chalice for the central place of the Lord's Supper, the red for the vitality of faith, the St. Andrew's X-shaped cross for humility before Christ, and the open top for the welcome at the table - is explained in the church's history materials and stands on the walls and in the windows of the building.
Reaching Out Across Bourbon County
Outreach is woven into the congregation's identity. The Outreach Team, chaired by Ellen Cook with Kay Denniston and Myra Miller, keeps the work organized, and the church's history lists a long roster of local projects.
Operation Food Basket is a food pantry coordinated by an independent board of representatives from about eighteen churches in Bourbon County, with First Christian among the founding partners. Food is distributed Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings from 10:00 AM to 12:00 noon and Thursday evenings from 6:00 to 7:00 PM at the basement of the City Building at 525 High Street, on a quarterly emergency basis to qualifying residents of Bourbon County. Youth of the church have helped stock and serve there.
The Well is a ministry of the Bourbon County Ministerial Association, also housed at the City Building, where five volunteers meet Thursdays from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM to assist with utility bills and rent. Clients may receive help once a year. The Well also arranges temporary motel housing for those who are homeless, working through local churches or police dispatch. First Christian helped establish The Well in 2006.
The Clothing Closet has operated for more than thirty years in the basement of First Christian, offering clean, usable clothing at very low prices on Thursdays from 8:30 to 11:30 AM and on every third Saturday from 9:00 to 11:00 AM. Income from sales supports other outreach ministries through Disciple Women. Volunteers have included Cathy Caldwell, Ginger Wagoner, Sally Puckett, Jane Leer, Kathi Vance, Linda Herzog, Allison Smith, Ruby Smart, Cheryl Stone and Sue Denton, among others.
In 2018 Vacation Bible School built four small lending libraries for the community, called My Little Libraries. Three of them stand today - at Rucker Village Apartments on the corner of Kelly and Second, at the Senior Center on Legion Drive, and on the church's own High Street property - stocked weekly by a rotating crew of six volunteers with books and magazines for a range of ages.
The church has also resettled a refugee family, given a one hundred thousand dollar gift from its endowment to Week of Compassion for Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, served hot meals to road crews and first responders, supported Cane Ridge and Camp WaKonDaHo, taken a leadership role in creating Operation Food Basket, hosted a Habitat for Humanity house dedication, partnered with the local YMCA for parking and a community garden, hosted bloodmobiles and Scout meetings, provided space for Alcoholics Anonymous, offered communion at Bourbon Heights, and kept in regular correspondence with a death-row inmate in Ohio who has become an active member by mail and through the paintings he sends to the congregation.
The Green Team, meanwhile, meets four or five times a year to organize recycling through Rumpke and to help the congregation reduce, reuse and recycle.
The People Who Carry the Work
The staff is small and rooted in the place. Rev. Judi Ring, the minister, grew up in Oklahoma and attended Phillips University, a Disciples institution, where she earned a Bachelor of Music Education. She later earned a Master of Arts in Ministry and Culture at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa while serving at First Christian Church in Greeley, Colorado. Before coming to Paris she served as Associate Pastor and Minister of Music at New Union Christian Church in Versailles and worked as a math interventionist at Bourbon Central Elementary.
Andrea Underwood has directed youth ministry since September 2018. She grew up in the church, was baptized here at thirteen, attended Camp WaKonDaHo as a child, and helped lead Vacation Bible School for years before joining the staff. She is a certified Worship & Wonder storyteller. Dianne Stubblefield, the administrative assistant, joined the staff in 2002 after years with Paris City Schools. Charlotte Owens, the financial secretary since 2003, is a former schoolteacher and longtime elder, deacon and Sunday School teacher here. Nastosha Robinson-Tater directs the choir, and Anna Daavettila plays piano.
Elders, deacons, Sunday School teachers, musicians, Outreach Team members and the many volunteers who staff the food pantry, the clothing closet, the libraries and Vacation Bible School make the rest of the work possible. The congregation publishes a weekly newsletter, The Messenger, and maintains an active sermon archive online, where recent preaching by Rev. Judi Ring, Elder Marie Smart, Rev. Sharon Fields, and guest preachers can be watched or read alongside older recordings stretching back years.
Welcoming All God's People
That phrase is the congregation's own motto, and it appears under the church's name on its home page. It captures something of the posture of a church that traces its beginning to six women in a courthouse nearly two hundred years ago, that meets visitors at the ramp door, that serves Bourbon County from the same High Street it has occupied for more than a century, and that still gathers around an open-topped chalice every Sunday morning.