Dvergsten Endowment

A program focused on the Music and the Message of our church.

The Irvin and Ruby Dvergsten Music and Message Endowment

Irvin and Ruby Dvergsten were long-time residents of Spencer and members of the First Congregational Church of Spencer.  Ruby and D had a love of the church, the arts, and the community, and had a continuous desire to learn and help others learn. Upon their deaths, the Dvergsten Foundation invited grant applications from specific organizations. The First Congregational Church received a grant to establish The Irvin & Ruby Dvergsten Music and Message Endowment, which will allow the Dvergsten legacy to live forever.  It is with great gratitude and joy that First Congregational Church seeks to extend D and Ruby’s mission of service, study and community outreach; to partner with other organizations in providing music concerts, guest speakers or community-based performing artists; and to spread joy and hope, foster creativity and imagination, and develop faith. As a longstanding, ecumenically minded church in the community, we are pleased to perpetuate the historic Congregational link with education and culture for the greater good of the Spencer area.

The Kent Tritle concert and lecture demonstration are especially appropriate for the Dvergsten Music and Message program because Mr. D and Ruby loved music and were an important part of the music ministry and the maintenance and improvement of the Temple Organ in the sanctuary of First Congregational Church.

We offer the Dvergsten programs to the glory of God and for the enrichment and well-being of the life we all share!

Literature, painting, music — the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.    —Frederick Buechner

Art can communicate glory, beauty, and joy, which are godly of themselves. However, the arts can be and have been used to bring people to repentance, salvation, and a greater revelation of God.            –Todd Farley