Our History

Origin matters.  How you begin will often determine how you finish.  Where you start affects your direction and course. 

First Light Community, the Sherwood Foursquare Church, started with a vision born of hope and a deep desire for a fresh start.

Pastor Ed describes it this way: “It was May 6, 2002 and we were returning home to Portland.  I would drive my parent’s car from Los Angeles and then fly back to resume the moving process.  I woke earlier than planned.  It was about 3:00 AM. 

“I grappled with sleeves and socks in the shadows before slipping down the moon lit stairs.  I hushed the front door behind me, placed my pre-packed overnight bag on the seat and jostled my way in between truckers on their nightly northern migration up I-5.  Over the grapevine and into the San Joaquin Valley: feedlots and diesel fumes saturated the cold air.  As new country filled the radio airwaves, a pre-dawn smoky-blue silhouette cast a backdrop for the distant Eastern Sierras.   Tractors churned dirt as their highly mounted headlights beamed evidence through rising streams of dust.
“As the eastern sky profile lightened, providing evidence of first light, I sensed a change, not a physical one, but an internal one.  At first light there was new hope for a new season in my own life.
“It happened again, a few weeks later in August.  We had ended one chapter in our lives and waited for the new to begin.  We then received some unsettling news.  After a sleepless night, I decided to get up and pray.  As I sat on the downstairs sofa, I gazed through the windows in the back of our house.   Pre-dawn darkness morphed into first light and new hope once more surged deep within at the sight of dawn.  Then I uttered an unplanned prayer.  “You know Jesus, if you want us to start a church around here, a good name would be First Light.” 

And so the vision for First Light Community began taking form: we would be a people of ever increasing hope providing a place for people who need a fresh start.  Matthew 4:16 says, “…The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”