Welcome to the Fall program season! I want to highlight some of the Board activities then end with a larger perspective on the challenges that we, along with so many other congregations, are facing.
First, though the Board did not meet in August, much of the work takes place in our committees. For instance:
- The Executive Committee, composed of the elected officers and ex-officio Minister (Pat Russo is filling in) typically meets weekly to discuss a range of topics including a more timely way to follow membership trends, review of attendance information for the last few years, creating a dashboard of metrics on membership, finance, and programs, on-going sabbatical progress, etc. A major focus of this work is to ensure the future health of our congregation.
- Our Personnel Committee submitted its proposal to the Board for the 5-year evaluation of ministries, Board, and minister.
- The Governance Committee will begin its work to further develop and implement the 5-year evaluation.
- Our Finance Committee is developing a series of articles on various financial topics. Watch for the first article in this month’s Spiral.
- An important item for this month’s meeting will be a discussion about the future of the Journey to Asylum. Though this is a Social Justice program within the Program Council, the Board has a responsibility to review the program in light of the Board’s fiduciary responsibilities to the congregation and mission.
- Chris Faia was nominated and elected by the Board to fill the vacancy on the By-Laws Committee. Roger Baldwin
served in this capacity for a number of years. As a charter member and as a highly-skilled community and congregational leader, including Board president, Chris is well positioned to lead the By-Laws Committee. Welcome Chris!
Second, thanks to our Music Committee for their diligent work to search for our new music leaders—Kim Ness and James Sudbury. It has been exciting to see how our new worship team–musicians, worship associates, guest speakers and AV technicians have created such interesting worship services. From my calculations our worship attendance in August has exceeded our August average for the last few years.
Finally, I want to devote the rest of this letter to share an interesting communication our WUU leadership received from Natalie Briscoe, our lead for the Southern Region. Here are some highlights.
“Two to three times per year, your Congregational Life Leadership Team meets to strategize the work of the Congregational Life Department toward fulfilling the UUA’s mission of Supporting Congregations, Training Leaders, and Living our UU Values. We begin by sharing the major needs facing each area of the country, discover commonalities, work together to design responses, and offer resources from staff team to staff team to use all means necessary to meet the needs of the congregations who form the Unitarian Universalist Association. This team quickly realized that there are two major challenges facing Unitarian Universalist congregations as we enter a new year.
First, many congregations are beginning a year without the level of professional staffing that they had planned or hoped for….
- Lay leaders are met with the particular challenge of needing to pivot in the roles and responsibilities within the congregation.
- Perhaps the worship team was not prepared to go another full year of designing worship.
- Perhaps the board is feeling like they need assistance with navigating the cultural shifts within the congregation caused by the necessary changes to governance that the pandemic brought, and they do not have a ministry partner to help them with these shifts.
- Perhaps the developmental disruption that the pandemic brought to the congregation is causing a lack of trust, lay leaders are exhausted from the emotional labor of building the relationships back.
Second, families with children and youth have not yet returned to church, leaving professional Religious Educators with many challenges for program planning.
- Families with children were devastated during the pandemic as they tried to juggle homeschooling or online schooling with work and other duties.
- It has been an exhausting time, and one thing is very clear: parents do not want to take on volunteer work at this time. They are tired and in desperate need of a break.
- Children and teens alike have their own developmental interruptions at critical times, and they need more and different kinds of emotional and intellectual support, all of which creates ongoing stress for caregivers.
- Religious Education models that relied on large numbers of parent volunteers will not work right now, if they ever did. Leaner budgets mean that buildings once built for large numbers of children and youth become unsustainable, and staffing these programs which look very different now is also a challenge for congregations.
- Religious Education programs must pivot into serving in a pop-up fashion with a camp-type atmosphere when the more traditional class-type model fails.
At WUU, your leadership teams have experienced many of these challenges and we are thankful that all of Natalie’s observations don’t apply to WUU!
As we move forward, here are a few recommendations:
- Acknowledge that these are challenging times. We cannot return to pre-COVID life.
- Join us in person on Sundays and at various events. It’s amazing to hear from so many people about how important it is to be together again!
I do hope to see you in September. Together, we can build the Beloved Community!
Respectfully submitted:
Les Solomon, Board President
September 2022