Read this week’s issue of The Weekly Liberal email newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal July 5

Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal June 28.

Read this week’s issue of our email newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal June 21

On May 29, the Faithful Action Council hosted a dinner to celebrate the community partnership and faithful action work of our members. Fifty people came to recognize the commitment and perseverance of those who lead First Universalist Church’s community partnerships.

In the 2017–2018 church year we had six community partners: Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative (Families Moving Forward), Simpson Housing Services, Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity, Augsburg Fairview Academy (AFA), EMERGE, and Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light (MNIPL). We are deeply grateful for all who have volunteered with these partners over the past year, and we are especially thankful to members Peg Mitchell, Jess Lyons and David Caccamo, Geoff Lenox, Ingrid Young, Cindy Marsh, Hal Schroer, and Stan Sattinger and Mark Bohnhorst for their leadership and generosity of time and energy. read more

Read this week’s issue of our email newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal June 14

Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal June 7

In this week’s issue, guest preacher, Lena K. Gardner, writes about her upcoming sermon:

Things don’t often just emerge out of nothing. There are usually (and in most cases) a whole host of circumstances and unknowable intersecting things that conspire so that something can emerge – and it usually emerges as a response to a need. How can we begin to curate emergence as a need-based, love-infused response to the inherited world around us? How do we recognize what it means to create a loving response in our individual lives and collective world? Just as our needs are, our lives can be beautifully and continually emerging. This emergence can be curated, it need not be just something that is enacted upon us. We are both capable of and called to create responses to these continuously arising needs and we always have a choice in lacing our response with love, or shrouding it with fear and shame. Will we be rigid, inflexible and out of touch? Or will we be warm, responsive, nimble and yet persistent? This Sunday, we’ll explore emergence as curated response to a need.

Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal May 31

In this week’s issue, Board President, Eric Cooperstein, writes:

Dear Members and Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to write to inform you of an upcoming change in the ministry of First Universalist Church. At the request of our two called ministers, Senior Minister Justin Schroeder and Executive Minister Jennifer Crow, the Board of Trustees has agreed that Justin and Jen should serve as Senior Co-Ministers, with equal responsibilities and compensation structures. The Board will ask the congregation to ratify this transition at the Annual Meeting on June 3, 2018.

The Board of Trustees enthusiastically supports the move to co-ministry. It is another example of how Justin and Jen provide visionary leadership for our church, seeking to practice equity themselves and model how equity can be lived out in the world. The Board believes that Jen and Justin have demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate, the honesty, maturity, and compassion that is necessary to succeed as co-ministers.

More information about the decision to move to a Senior Co-Ministry model can be found in the document Frequently Asked Questions about Co-Ministry, which is available here.

Your Board of Trustees is excited about this change and Justin’s and Jen’s joint leadership of the ministry of this church!

Sincerely,

Eric T. Cooperstein
President, 2017-18
First Universalist Church

Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal May 24 read more

Read this week’s newsletter here: The Weekly Liberal May 17

A message from Rev. Jen Crow in this week’s issue:

So many things have broken my heart this week. It started with the killings in Gaza, and was quickly followed up by our president referring to immigrants as animals. A few days later I was sitting with a Jewish friend as he described people calling him a Nazi and sending him pictures of himself burning in an oven after he made the radical public statement that both Palestinians and Jews are worthy of basic human rights. Coming from a place of fear, we do so much harm to one another. read more

Read the full issue of this week’s newsletter: The Weekly Liberal May 10

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