Read this week’s issue of our newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal Feb. 9

The State (and Future) of Our Church

We hope you’ll join us for our annual State of the Church meeting this Sunday, Feb. 12, at 1 p.m. This mid-year “check-in” will be a multi-platform meeting held in the Sanctuary and live-streamed meeting-style on Zoom, and will include updates from the board and staff on our annual work plan, finances, music ministries, online engagement, the development of a Covenant and Right Relations Team, and our Visionary Goals process. We’ll also be looking ahead to our congregation’s Annual Meeting on June 4 and the upcoming UUA General Assembly which will take place June 21–25, 2023. And perhaps most importantly, we will share invitations to get involved in what’s coming up at church!

Join us at 1 p.m Sunday for the State of the Church meeting in person in the Sanctuary or on Zoom here.

We’re also now at the point of welcoming the whole church community into the important process of Visionary Goals Planning, charting the future of the church for the next five years and beyond, via a series of upcoming workshops.

Last week, church Board leadership along with Laura Park, our consultant in this process, went live on Zoom to share an introduction to the Visionary Goals Planning process. If you missed it, the recording is available here. We highly recommend taking time to listen to board executive team members Daryn Woodson, Rebecca Slaby, Ben Miles, and Matt Keller, along with Rev. Arif Mamdani and Laura Park, share what’s happened in the process so far, why it’s important, and how we hope you’ll be involved.

The church’s Visionary Goals are what the board uses to discern and guide the church’s overall direction. From that, staff use the board’s direction to develop their annual work plan. You’re probably at least somewhat familiar with the Visionary Goals that have been guiding our work for the past five years; you can read them here. It’s normal for churches and organizations to refresh and update their Visionary Goals regularly—often about every five years—and that’s where we’re at now. The First Universalist Board of Trustees has been laying the groundwork for this process in the first half of this church year, and now it’s time to invite the whole congregation to participate in what is next.

As Laura Park shares in the introduction to the process, “These visionary goals that you are going to help your board establish are going to set the very foundation for everything that happens in your church. They are not operational, this is not about the programmatic implementation of these visionary goals, these conversations are really about that highest level articulation of what brings meaning and purpose to your covenanted religious community—what are the shared purposes that we will try to embody together?”

To do this work together, we’re inviting you to participate in one of about a dozen Visionary Goals Workshops that we’ll be holding over the next month and a half. 

In these workshops, we’ll come together to share and to listen to what we long for for our church, for our relationships with each other, and for the impact we have in the larger world, so that our board can help to steward us toward the future that is seeking to emerge from among us. You might imagine this as a figurative vision board that we make together that guides our lives together over the next five years.

Sign up to participate in a workshop here.

We are also still looking for a few volunteers to facilitate some of these workshops. Training is provided and will be happening on Saturday, Feb. 18. If you have an interest in group facilitation and this is a way you can imagine offering your gifts and service to the church, please reach out to Christa Anders for more information.

We hope that you will give generously of your time and your attention by participating in an upcoming workshop with fellow church members and friends, as together we joyfully envision and shape the future of our church.