I’m just back from visiting our Partner Church in Kissolymos, and what a wonderful visit it was! I have so many ideas for bringing more about our Partner Church into the RE classrooms, and I’m looking forward to this year’s Partner Church Sunday (usually in November) being a whole church experience.
And I can’t wait to see you all in class this Sunday!
At the February meeting of the Family Ministry Team, we discussed another chapter of our study book, Full Circle: Fifteen Ways to Grow Lifelong UU’s by Kate Tweedie Erslev. This month’s chapter was about the need to encourage regular Sunday morning attendance and participation, and it launched a great discussion about why each of our families comes to church.
We come because it’s a place to connect with our family, perhaps even our extended family, and we come because we want this community or education for our children, and we come because we love the music or the message, and we come because we feel a need for connection and spirituality. There are obstacles that have to be overcome: reluctant or disinterested partners, just the difficulty of getting up and organized and out the door, feeling tired and wanting to rest instead, kids who might be reluctant to come sometimes. Tweedie Erslev points out that: “Joining a UU congregation is not the same as joining the Sierra Club or the Brownies. We offer support for a life-enriching, lifelong journey that involves the whole family through the calamities and joys of life”. We are a community, and that comes with many benefits and some costs.
As a recent blog post at the blog Yet Another Unitarian Universalist points out: “And in fact one of the great weaknesses of today’s Unitarian Universalist congregations is that so many of the people who think of themselves as Unitarian Universalists aren’t willing to sacrifice any of their autonomy to participate in the congregational community. But here, as in so many aspects of life, ya gotta pay to play. Rule number one of congregational community:– if you want a Unitarian Universalist community, you have to give up the much-loved American autonomy that says it’s better to sleep in or go for a walk or play video games on Sunday morning. Then add some volunteer hours on top of that. Otherwise, you’re not part of a community.”
It is wonderful to be able to come to church when the sermon topic looks Really Interesting, or when it’s your birthday and you want us to sing for you, or when you have something weighing on your heart, or an event or cause to work on, but I would suggest that it’s just as wonderful to show up when you have nothing on your own agenda, and to be there to sing for someone else’s birthday, to hear what is weighing on someone else’s heart, to be surprised by a sermon topic or a religious education class that speaks to you in ways you would never have guessed, and be there to sign-up for a really great event or project.
As another UU blogger, The Journey, wrote in a blog post titled “Everything I Needed To Know About Church I Learned At Weight Watchers”, going every week matters because it gives you accountability and community. The real work of your life (whether it’s spiritual growth or losing weight) may be done during the week, but you come and check in and listen to other people speak from experience. And you have community, with all its benefits and the need for commitment it requires.
Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.
And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return.
“Song (4)” Collected Poems -Wendell Berry
New space for our community. Hand prints of all, marking this space and blessing it, for these generations and for those that will follow us.
Dear OUUC Families,
Our brand-new Religious Education classroom wing has been going up since last summer, and now it is actually time to do some remodeling on our existing classrooms and finish up what is going to be a wonderful new space for us all.
But – we aren’t going to get to that new space without some disruption, and we’ve just been notified by the contractors that we won’t be able to use our classrooms at all in February, and possibly for two weeks of March.
After surveying families and checking our options, the Transition Team and I have decided we need to just shut-down RE for this month. In the meantime, please bring your children to worship services. I will have Fidget Bags for them, and we’ll be making an effort to make the services more child-friendly.
The nursery will still be available, for children 0-4 years old. Because the space is small and limited, we will be enforcing that age-limit.
The 1st-3rd grade curriculum Superheroes: Bible People, will be photocopied and sent home so families can do those lessons at home if they wish. The 4th-6th grade curriculum Journey to Jerusalem will be resumed after the space is available again.
Middle School and High School groups have their own special arrangements, so check on those if you have children in those groups.
I hope we will have some kind of party (such as skating or bowling) scheduled this month, so the kids get a chance to see their friends and have some fellowship time. More details TBD.
Thank you all for your flexibility and patience. As inconvenient as this is, we are so close to being done with a building project that has been years in the planning, and we can all look forward to that fabulous new space being available soon!
Sara Lewis, DRE
Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation
I (and my fun little traveling gnome, seen above on top of LOVE), traveled to Salt Lake City a few weeks ago to attend General Assembly, the annual gathering of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).
I wish I could have taken you all with me, as the experience of so many UU’s gathered together is very energizing. If you ever feel that we are a tiny and isolated religion, it would give you a new perspective to attend GA. There were Unitarians there from Transylvania, India, and Africa, representing their own particular heritage within our global religion. There were UU’s there from all around the United States and Canada. In the exhibition hall, there were tables for Christian UU’s, Buddhist UU’s, Humanist UU’s, and many more, as well as tables for causes from peace in the middle east to water rights in California.
I was thrilled to experience GA, and I’ve brought back many ideas from the various lectures and seminars I attended.
Welcome to the new RE blog. Watch this space for news and cool stuff…