Let's not use the Featured Articles and create a simple home page that only shows one single, full article:
Navigate to Menus | Main Menu. As you can see, there's a star in the Home column of the Home link. This indicates that this is the default page; the visitor will see this page in the mainbody when accessing your site.
In this example we'll select the Mission Statement menu item as the new home page. Locate this article in the list and click on the grey star in the Home column.
Clicking the grey star will turn its color into orange, indicating this is now the default page. Click on View Site. The results are shown in the following screenshot. An ordinary article is now the home page:
If you want to update the Main Menu to reflect these changes, you can hide the existing Home link in the Article Manager, which is still pointing to the "old" homepage. To do this, in the Menu Manager you would click on the Unpublish item icon next to the Home...