Saint Matthew Lutheran Church sits along Wiget Lane in Walnut Creek, a few minutes off the major corridors of Contra Costa County, and the way the people here talk about it tells you what they think matters most. They call themselves a Lutheran church that practices its faith in a multi-denomination context, and they mean it literally. In the same week you can find a liturgy-loving 3rd Gen congregation praying with communion rails on a Wednesday morning, a contemporary band rehearsing in the sanctuary, teenagers playing a Heist Night game across the parking lot, and a food pantry collection barrel out front for Friends Feeding Friends. Saint Matthew is known for being a church where the welcome is explicit. The welcome statement runs long on purpose: searching, saved, sure, doubting, gay, straight, older, younger, divorced, single, disabled, lost or peace-filled, each line underscored by a refrain that has become the church's unofficial motto: you are welcome in our community and you are loved.
Three Sunday-Morning (and One Wednesday) Doors
Saint Matthew worships three times a week, and the differences between services are intentional rather than accidental. Wednesdays at 11:00 a.m. are reserved for a traditional liturgy in the sanctuary, complete with classic hymns, a sermon, and Holy Communion - a service that draws much of its energy from the 3rd Gen community and concludes with a light lunch in the fellowship hall. Sundays offer two expressions of contemporary worship. At 8:30 a.m., a smaller chapel service offers what the church describes as an intimate contemporary setting. At 10:00 a.m., the larger contemporary service fills the sanctuary with a full band, newer songs alongside reworked hymns, and Communion at the table. Communion is offered at every service, and the 10:00 service is livestreamed on the Saint Matthew YouTube channel for those who cannot be in the room.
The church's self-description of its Sunday sound is deliberately relaxed: Our Worship services are contemporary and relaxed and led by our worship team with a blend of modern songs and reworked hymns. On Easter Sunday the band is joined by a horn section, an early signal that Saint Matthew likes its major feasts to feel like celebrations, not obligations. Holy Week stretches from a Friday Golgotha Experience at 7:00 p.m. through a Saturday evening Easter Vigil in the courtyard by firelight, then opens into Easter Sunday at 8:30 and 10:00 with a post-service photo booth for families.
Where to Park, What to Wear, and Why Every Entrance Has a HELLO Spot
First-time visitors are taken seriously at Saint Matthew, and the front door has been engineered accordingly. The church's I'm New Here page answers the practical questions - what time, where, what to wear, where the kids go - in plain language, and the answers reflect a congregation that has thought about how a newcomer actually experiences Sunday morning. Parking is offered in two places: visitor spots in front of the offices, or parallel parking in front of the church marked with bright HELLO signs. Step through any of the sanctuary entrances and you will find a HELLO Spot staffed by a host whose only job is to help you find what you need - the nursery, the children's wing, the quiet room, a particular pew, or simply someone to sit with.
Families with young children have several options. Babies and children are always welcome in the sanctuary itself, and small activity bags are tucked into the HELLO Spot for older kids who would rather doodle than listen. Just off the Fellowship Hall there is a Quiet Room where parents can calm, feed, or change a baby while still watching the service on a TV monitor, along with a private family restroom. The full Children's Ministry meets at the 10:00 service and welcomes kids from nursery age through fifth grade. As for dress, the church is generous about it. Visitors tend to come in business casual to casual clothing, but the staff puts it plainly: we are not concerned with what you wear.
Thirteen Milestones: A Curriculum for the Whole Childhood
What sets Saint Matthew apart from many congregations is a deliberate program it calls Milestones, a sequence of thirteen short faith-formation experiences designed to walk a child from infancy through high school graduation. Each Milestone pairs a teaching session for parents and kids with a public blessing during worship, and the whole program is built on the conviction that family faith practices - blessing one another, praying together, sharing highs and lows, reading scripture, and giving and receiving forgiveness - are the basic building blocks of a life with God.
The Milestones, in order, begin with the Baptism Milestone and the First Communion Milestone before children are even in school. Once school starts, the calendar fills out: the Kindergarten Blessing of the Backpacks sends rising kindergarteners forward during the 10:00 service with their school backpacks; the 1st Grade Prayer Milestone gathers families for lunch and a hands-on exploration of family prayer; the 4th Grade Bible Milestone marks the year a child receives their own Bible; the 5th Grade Transition Milestone eases them from the children's wing into the youth program; the 10th Grade Keys Milestone marks the beginning of the driving years; and the 12th Grade Commissioning Milestone, recognized each June during the 10:00 service, sends graduates out into the world with the church's prayer. Sue Burke, the Children's Minister, walks families through each of these celebrations and ensures the church never lets cost stand in the way of participation.
Early Childhood Through Fifth Grade
The Sunday-morning Christian formation flow is intentionally layered by age. Early Childhood Ministry serves children from three months old through preschool and transitional kindergarten, and it runs alongside the 10:00 service. The Nursery, staffed with attentive caregivers, is set up for infants and toddlers while parents worship. Preschool and TK, for three- and four-year-olds, mix crafts, snacks, playtime, and small interactive lessons about the love of God. Children's Ministry proper, for kindergarten through fifth grade, includes Early Elementary (TK and first grade) and Upper Elementary (second through fifth grade), with age-appropriate teaching, music, games, and activities. Each Sunday the children experience what the children's ministry calls engaging, age-appropriate teaching, music, games, and activities designed to help them explore who God is and how deeply they are loved.
Parents are treated as the primary faith-shapers of their children. A Parent Resource Guide, a digital resource library curated by the staff, and the Parent Resource Center just outside the sanctuary give families a place to land when the questions at home feel bigger than the answers. New families are invited to fill out a Hello New Families form in advance so check-in can be quick and ready when they arrive.
Teens: Middle School, High School, and an Annual Camp at Tahoe
Middle School and High School ministry at Saint Matthew is run out of the youth wing and is overseen by Kaitlin Stone, who divides her time between communications and the teen program. The rhythm of the year follows the academic calendar. Heist Nights - team-based, building-wide games where middle schoolers and high schoolers race to recover a hidden mystery object - are a recurring staple, as are Nerf War Nights, photo scavenger hunts through downtown Walnut Creek, Urban Air Adventure Park evenings in Concord, water park days at Hurricane Harbor, and a Youth Summer Camp at Zephyr Point on Lake Tahoe that runs the Sunday before the last week of June. Pool parties at the start of the school year, a 12th Grade Graduation Recognition each June, and a regular season of service mission mornings - including an annual partnership with Monument Crisis Center for food-pantry volunteering and a poverty-learning conversation - round out the calendar.
The 6th- through 12th-grade ministry treats its young people as full participants in the church's mission rather than as the church of the future. Communicating that philosophy is partly why the church positions its older youth ministries the way it does.
3rd Gen: Youth Ministry for 60+
Perhaps the most distinctive program at Saint Matthew is 3rd Gen, the church's ministry for adults in the third phase of life. The framing is unusual and deliberate. The ministry is built around the conviction that people in their sixties and beyond are neither young nor old and have more time, talent, passion, and resources to help change our world than any other generation before it. 3rd Gen is run by Tami Gomez, the Pastoral Care Minister, and it organizes itself around five overlapping pillars: Social (dinners, wine-tastings, travel, game days, theater nights, and field trips), Service (ways to deploy the experience and gifts of older adults), Spiritual (Bible studies, prayer groups, retreats, and the Wednesday 11:00 a.m. traditional service they sponsor), Self (walking groups, mental-health partnerships, intergenerational activities), and Study (educational forums, book clubs, classes, and small groups).
The 3rd Gen calendar is packed. A monthly Coffee in the Community hops between Rooted Coffee in Pleasant Hill and Koin Coffee in Walnut Creek. The Lunch and Learn series, run under the Sensational Seniors banner, brings in regional nonprofits for a free, lunch-included program: Connected Horse has come to talk about equine-assisted dementia work, Joybound has shared its pet-and-adoption program, and Custom Moving Solutions led a session on rightsizing for safety and accessibility. Larger events include an annual Vision and Formation Mixer in August and a fall or winter evening lecture. Recent speaker evenings have featured theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, author of Building a Moral Economy, in conversation about purpose in the third third of life.
MomCo, Young Adults, and LIFEgroups
Saint Matthew hosts a MomCo (formerly MOPS) chapter for mothers of young children, and Billy Roy wears three hats - Worship Minister, Young Adults Minister, and Community Organizer - giving the post-college demographic a clear entry point. The backbone of adult discipleship, however, is LIFEgroups. LIFEgroups are small gatherings that meet in homes and at the church throughout the week, organized around a shared study and a shared table. The most recent small-group curriculum, used in the fall, is a two-part series called Formed Together and Wonder: Wide Awake. LIFEgroups are also where new attendees are invited to plug in; the Connect Night dinners, held several times a year in the Fellowship Hall, are designed to be the on-ramp for people who don't know anyone and want to find a chair at a table.
Care Ministry: Counseling, Weddings, Funerals, and Lasagna
Care Ministry at Saint Matthew is staffed by a team of trained lay Community Care Ministers alongside the pastoral staff, and it is the way the church wraps itself around the milestones no one schedules. The ministry offers confidential counseling referrals for marriages, parenting, grief, depression, anxiety, abuse, and more, with explicit support for LGBTQIA+ individuals. Wedding preparation is led personally by the pastoral team, and Saint Matthew notes that it hosts and presides over weddings for all types of couples. Funeral and memorial planning is similarly hands-on, with pastors walking families through the liturgy and the details and a 24-hour pastor support line available at (925) 932-1955 for immediate loss.
Then there is the TLC Team, a network of volunteers who deliver or prepare home-cooked meals during recoveries, new-baby seasons, or bereavement - what the ministry describes unapologetically as love that looks like lasagna (or takeout!). Layette Ministry, a long-running partnership with Contra Costa Regional Medical Center, collects donations of new baby items for the roughly 1,500 babies born each year in Contra Costa County into poverty. Together, these programs add up to a quiet safety net of trained volunteers and clergy who can be reached through a single Care Request Form.
Community Partners: A Map of the Wider Work
Saint Matthew does most of its community-facing work through partnerships rather than standalone programs, and the list of those partners reads like a map of social services across the East Bay. Contra Costa Foster Friends, GROW Concord (a homeless-outreach group that provides food, water, hygiene, and medical referrals on the streets of the county), Love a Child - Bay Point (the largest emergency shelter for women and children in Contra Costa County), Points of Light Oakland (a children's program reaching Oakland youth in a city with no full-time youth leaders at most of its 500 churches), Young Life Middle EurAsia, Monument Crisis Center (a food pantry and resource center serving 17,000 people a year with which Saint Matthew has partnered since its founding in 2003), Friends Feeding Friends (a Good Shepherd Lutheran food-pantry ministry with drop barrels on the Saint Matthew campus), ARM of Care (an arts-and-movement ministry reaching survivors of commercial sexual exploitation), Winter Nights (a rotating family shelter and safe-parking program that Saint Matthew hosts annually), Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay (a refugee welcome and resettlement partner), and Meals on Wheels Diablo Region are all listed among the church's missional partners.
Every partnership is tied back to one of the four Strategic Pillars - Develop Deeply Formed Lives, Nurture Family Children and Youth Wholeness, Power Positive Aging, and Communicate the Radical Love of Jesus - and the church encourages members to discover where they fit through a SHAPE assessment (Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, Experiences).
Music, Sermons, and the Weekly Wednesday Lunch
Music and preaching are at the center of Sunday-morning life. The full band leads the 10:00 contemporary service, and sermons from Sunday services are posted to the Saint Matthew YouTube channel and also released as an audio podcast on Spotify under the Saint Matthew name. Special musical evenings - a recent spring concert by Gungor, the Grammy-nominated songwriter behind Beautiful Things and Friend of God, presented a communal evening called Mystic Hymnal in the sanctuary - are scheduled throughout the year, often as ticketed or RSVPed events with childcare on site.
The Wednesday 11:00 a.m. traditional service closes with a light lunch, a gathering that doubles as one of the church's quietest fellowship rhythms and a place where older members, neighbors, and weekday visitors can be present in the building without committing to a Sunday. Lecture series in the fall, like the recent October series with author Derek Flood and Pastor Rustin Comer called Disarming Scripture, take place on Thursday evenings at 7:00 p.m. and tackle hard questions about how to read troubling passages of the Bible through the lens of Jesus' life and teaching.
Five Core Values: Gratitude, Inclusion, Integration, Renewal, Transformation
Saint Matthew's stated theology is shaped by five values that anchor its strategy. Gratitude echoes Jesus' life of surrender and joyful gratitude before God. Inclusion follows Jesus' habit of crossing borders to bring in the outsider and the irreligious. Integration commits the community to be present to every person and every moment, trusting that everything is an opportunity. Renewal names the church's call to participate in God's personal, relational, societal, and ecological work of making all things new. Transformation is the hope that the same power which opened blind eyes and raised the dead will wake up and reshape every person who walks through the doors. These values are repeated, in slightly different form, in the 2023-26 Foundations Strategic Plan, the four-pillar roadmap by which Saint Matthew is currently organizing its life.
The People Who Shepherd the Place
The pastoral team is small and is led by Pastor Rustin Comer, a third-generation pastor and self-described church mut who came home to the ELCA, and Pastor Mike Basil, an East Bay native who has served at Saint Matthew for more than a decade and was originally ordained in the Assemblies of God before transitioning to the Lutheran church. Tami Gomez leads Pastoral Care and 3rd Gen after more than twenty years at Saint Matthew and a decade of hospice chaplaincy behind her. Sue Burke is the Children's Minister who has been helping kids learn about God's love here for more than fifteen years. Billy Roy is the Worship Minister, Young Adults Minister, and Community Organizer, a recent Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary graduate whose M.Div. and M.A. in Christian Spirituality focused on theology and social justice. Kaitlin Stone, who grew up attending Saint Matthew in middle school herself, leads Communications and the Youth Ministry.
Practicalities: Address, Giving, Where to Find More
Saint Matthew is at 399 Wiget Lane, Walnut Creek, CA 94598. The general inbox is info@saintmatthew.org and the main line is (925) 932-1955. One-time and recurring giving is handled online through PushPay, donors have the option to cover processing fees, and a Capital Campaign is currently underway in addition to the regular offering. The campus also hosts outside groups; rental inquiries go to the executive office by email. A members-only portal, My Saint Matthew, runs on the church management platform for registration forms and household information. Each year the church publishes an annual magazine called The Saint, which it describes as part reflection, part celebration, and part report, and which serves as the church's formal annual report. The Saint and the Saint Annual Magazine are available online and tell the story of the previous year in photos, finances, and ministry highlights.