KANSAS CITY, Mo. — There was much to celebrate Sunday at the Community Christian Church on Main Street.
Parishioners attended their first in-person worship service in more than a year on the same weekend the church leader turned the switch on an iconic beacon.
It's the single beam of light once again illuminating the night sky over the Country Club Plaza and beyond.
"We know that it is a source of joy and hope and just pride for our city," Reverend Shanna Steitz, Senior Minister at Community Christian Church said.
Four individual lights make up the "Steeple of Light" atop of the Main Street church that went dark two years ago when the original ones burned out.
Their absence were quite noticeable last year when during the worst of the pandemic, any sign of hope brought people a little joy.
"People called us asking us to turn the lights on and some of the neighbors stopping asking about the lights and so we had to explain that you know we were working on it," Steitz said.
Donors raised $80,000 to bring back it to life.
The lights are really beautiful on their own. But because there are multiple of them, they're really this connection that we're all a little brighter when we when we shine together," Steitz said.
A point she reiterated in Sunday's sermon.
"It’s just like this culminating moment of everything that we have done that is good and beautiful and holy, that is pointing us towards what we are doing next," Steitz told her congregation.
It's a signal following a year of pain and chaos.
"It's a connector to something greater than us at least that's how we see it as people of faith," Steitz said.
The lights are coming back in the middle of the bird migration season, so the church plans to have them on for about three hours from 8:45 p.m. until midnight.
