Dear WUU Community,
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a good and safe holiday season, as I did. With 2020 in our rearview mirror at last, I’m happy to share some hopeful new things shaping up here at WUU:
First, our racial justice & inclusivity work is moving forward in a new way! You’ve probably heard me talk about a major new anti-oppression report from our UUA: Widening the Circle of Concern. Last month, our Program Council began studying the report’s many recommendations for congregations like ours that want to become more skillful at the work of diversity and inclusion. (Check out the recommendations along with our working notes here if you like.) Our ministry teams have already begun to plan for changes they want to make. Over the coming months, we’ll be rolling out opportunities for the whole congregation to get involved, so stay tuned, and sincere thanks to all our ministry leaders for getting this going.
Second, please mark your calendars for a fun fundraiser coming soon! Dave Robbins, our Assistant Director of Music, was about to play a fundraising piano concert for us when the pandemic hit last spring. Now, it’s back on: Dave will be playing a full recital on Saturday, Jan. 30 at 6 p.m. on Zoom. Please come to enjoy the music and support WUU! It’ll be a fun evening with breakout groups at intermission, so you can chat with fellow WUUs, and real-time donation updates just like an old-school telethon. With our annual auction and yard sale cancelled due to the pandemic, this will be our only major fundraiser this year. Our goal is to raise $17,000 for this beloved congregation, and we need your support to do it. So please consider making a generous gift—thank you so much!
Of course, we hope and expect that next year will be different. Now that vaccine distribution has begun, we’re starting to plan for reopening the WUU campus. Mind you, this will still be many months away—next fall at the earliest would be my best guess based on what we know now. But it’s time to start figuring out what Sundays are going to look like whenever we can start coming back together.
One thing I’ll say for sure: even when we’re back to in-person worship, we’ll be keeping an online streaming video option for everyone who wants to join in remotely. It’s been a real joy to welcome online participants who aren’t able to leave their homes, or who live in different parts of the country. We’ll be keeping that going so that WUU is as accessible as possible to everyone who wants to connect with us. We have some technical details to figure out, but our AV team has already started configuring our sanctuary AV system to make it all work.
Meanwhile, this month, I’m starting to work with a WUU Reopening Task Force to explore questions like these:
- What attendance trends are we likely to see, and will that prompt any changes to the Sunday morning schedule?
- What in-person safety measures should we institute on an ongoing basis?
- What formats, times, etc. will work best for children & youth in the religious education program to gather?
- What practices that we’ve developed as a response to the pandemic will we wish to continue?
- How can we best create community for people of all ages who participate primarily online?
If you have any suggestions to share as we begin this planning work, please reach out to me at revlaura@wuu.org.
In the meantime, our board will soon be releasing updated guidelines for Covid safety on campus. Please look for that by email soon.
Let’s hope for a much better 2021. Take care, stay safe, and hope to see you online soon,
Rev. Laura