Greetings UUCM!

It has come to my attention recently that we as your interim team may not have been clear enough or vocal enough about some shifts in how we’re allocating time amongst the three of us, and what I’m doing this year in addition to working at UUCM. So, here goes:

Rev. Meg, Rev. Terri, and I collectively fill one full time position. This year, differently from last year, Rev. Terri is with you 50% time, and Rev. Meg and I are each 25% time. Our portfolios are largely the same. Rev. Meg handles worship and pastoral care, I handle governance and administration, and Rev. Terri handles congregational life, social justice, and this year, is also handling the majority of staff supervision. The other major change this year is that I’m also working at First Universalist in Minneapolis ¾ time. All of which is to say that you may have noticed you’re seeing me less, and some of you might run into me over at First Universalist if you happen to find yourselves there. Continue reading →

My 23 year old, Jie, recently visited Minnesota from Western Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley area if you know it.  “Why do you live here?” Jie asked.  “It’s so ugly, and boring, and flat!”

I replied, “I don’t know why, but this just feels like home to me.  I belong here.”

Jie persisted, “But it is so much more beautiful where I live!”

I’m out visiting Jie now, after a UU conference in Connecticut, and I can’t disagree.  The trees are ablaze in reds and golds, there are mountains with streams and rivers tumbling down them, and I absolutely love the stone walls that are frequently seen around New England fields.  It’s absolutely beautiful.  I love it.  It’s much more dramatic and wild than Minnesota.  And…  It doesn’t feel like home.  Though I love to visit, I don’t feel a sense of belonging there. Continue reading →

What does it mean to belong to a church, to UUCM in particular? Why did you choose to become a member or attend regularly as a friend? What about this place allows you to go deeper, to give of yourself, to take risks, to seek connections, to try, to wonder, to work, to have fun?

What we love, we empower, wrote a now retired UU minister.* In your relationship with and your belonging to UUCM, you commit to empowering this place. And in return, it commits to empowering you. This happens in big and small ways through the trust, vulnerability, and openness that are required in the quality of belonging. Continue reading →

We’ve been back at church for a while now, but it still feels like we’re returning. Perhaps it’s the sudden and somewhat unexpected burst of warm weather. Maybe it’s just that I got sick last weekend and wasn’t able to join you at church, but to me, it feels like we’re still not quite back into the church year yet. There’s a transience to things on the surface. At the same time, there’s a deeper sense of permanence as newly graduated, I return to the rhythms of life outside of the academic world. I’ve caught myself thinking “oh yeah, I remember how it is to *not* got back to class in September!”

In the midst of all these musings on the transient and the permanent, I’ve been recalling Theodore Parker’s sermon of the same name (well, sort of). In a sermon/essay titled “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” Parker explores this dynamic of what is transient and what is permanent in religion, and in his case, Christianity. I’m not going to step on Parker’s punchline and ruin it for you – you can read it here if you want, but what it made me think about is the transient and permanent character not just of religion, but of religious community, particularly this one.  Continue reading →

It’s been my privilege to hold worship as central in my portfolio as part of the troika providing interim ministry to this congregation.  That’s why you see more of me in the pulpit than you do of Rev. Terri or Arif—I’m the minister for worship arts.

It’s been wonderful to work with the Worship Arts Ministry team, a strong team with great skills and devotion.  We meet monthly and dream, scheme, plot and plan what’s coming along.  We work closely with Paul Winchester and the Music Ministry team, Jennifer Zwick and the religious education folks.  And we could use more members!

If helping with worship in any way is an exciting idea for you, I encourage you to come to a half-day training on Saturday, September 28, 9 AM to noon, to reflect more about it.  Our team members don’t all stand up on the chancel—indeed some of them say they’d prefer having 3 root canals to doing that—but help in ways large and small, visible and invisible.  All kinds of different skills are necessary. Continue reading →