What are the questions that keep you up at night? What curiosities beckon you toward exploration? Share them with us by January 10, 2023, and let your voice become a building block for our collective exploration.

As we journey through this season and beyond, we remain ever-invigorated by the diverse and thoughtful voices that make up our church family. Now, we’re turning to you—because the insights you carry, from the whispers of personal reflection to the echoes of wide-ranging inquiry, truly matter.

We’re inviting every one of you, without exception, to play an active role in shaping the path our worship will tread. 

Contribution is just a click away. Your input is more than welcome; it’s a cornerstone of the vibrant narrative we weave every Sunday. Your perspectives and ponderings are the threads that enrich the tapestry of our time together, a reflection of our most cherished Unitarian Universalist ideals.

Together, in the spirit of gratitude, let’s cherish the rich symphony of voices within our congregation. As we grow and learn from each other, we foster the very bonds that unite us—not only in shared belief but also in our pursuit of deeper understanding and heartfelt connection.

Join us in this sacred exchange. Share your thoughts, and help shape the future of our worship.

Dr. Glen Thomas Rideout, Director of Worship Arts Ministries, is excited to invite you to consider applying to become a worship associate here at First Universalist, as we at once re-start a once vibrant program here and create its new place in our community from the ground up.

Worship associates are members of our community who serve as worship leaders with our current worship team. Associates participate in selecting worship themes throughout the year. They each contribute to the planning of worship services, having a voice in shaping what the community experiences together on Sunday mornings. Associates prepare words for different elements of worship and lead the congregation in service 2–4 times a year. They join the worship team in reflecting on what’s going well in our services and what ought to be improved. 

The term “worship associates” was developed at Oakland. The program was begun by Rev. Robert Eller-Isaacs, who was later joined by his wife Janne in co-ministry. The church formally adopted the program in 1988. 

“The sharing of power by the clergy and sharing the benefits of participation in the active ministry of the church is the real gift Unitarian Universalism has to offer its people,” said Eller-Isaacs.

Here’s what former worship associates at First Universalist have said about the program:

“I have been speaking in public since I was 12 years old. I do it professionally. But it was always about someone or something else. Being a Worship Associate has given me a chance to speak my truth, to be vulnerable, and to share my heart.” – Ginger Murphrey

“More than anything else I’ve done at First Universalist, being part of the Worship Associates team made me feel a part of this church.” – Marion Dane Bauer

“The worship associate circle expanded my soul in ways that I could not have imagined. Gathering with such a wonderful group has made me feel more connected to the church.” – Benjamin Miles

Before the beginning of the church year, worship associates come together to get to know the worship planning and leadership process here at First Universalist, and to train in important skills like what makes a great worship theme, speaking in public, and writing for worship. Along the way of their terms of service, worship associates will work closely with me (as well as with our ministers leading worship), receiving feedback to encourage and strengthen their worship leading technique and help them to become steadily more comfortable and proficient on the chancel. 

Worship associates are a vital part of how the community helps to build its own worship experience. Associates are valued members of the worship team and leaders in the community. They represent our community’s diversity of age, race, socio-economic background, spiritual perspective, culture. Still, the team will be united by a common love for our community, an investment in its worship, and an earnest desire to help build it up. 

If you’re interested in becoming a worship associate here, we invite your application to the program for the coming year. Applications are being accepted now through June 14, 2023, with our initial gathering to happen in July. 

A note from Dr. Glen Thomas Rideout, Director of Worship Arts Ministries:

I know her as Aunt LaVerne—one of my family’s rare extroverts, a queen of a woman with a noticeably vibrant way about her, and a laugh you can hear from Baltimore. The colors and flow of everything she wears reminds instantly of autumn. My aunt is also the reverend—a decorated minister, and one of my first teachers in the art of ministry. 

When I was 15, my very first year as a student-preacher, Aunt LaVerne was adamant to teach me how to take a compliment well. It took me years to know why. 

“When someone offers you a good word, you take it” she insisted to my very shy self. “Receive with grace and gratitude. There are blessings for both of you there.” 

This memory resurfaced for me at the First Universalist staff’s annual Halloween potluck on Wednesday. I’m not typically the biggest fan of holiday parties, but this one is something different to me. It’s taken me a year to know why. 

The central tradition of this particular shindig is to offer the most delicious tasting, most-bizarre-looking foodstuff imaginable. My go-to example is Rev. Jen’s legendary meatloaf baked in the mold of a human foot. If you can say “feetloaf” without bursting into laughter and delight, you’re steeler than I! 

Just outside, the orange and reds of countless tiny leaves flew off the trees wilder than usual, hundreds upon hundreds in a wind-swept choreography. I kept thinking it was snowing! I watched enchanted as the trees gave their leaves to the earth beneath so freely, and the earth made room—both knowing well how leaves become the earth and, in time, the tree, again and again.

Around the potluck table, we danced the steps of our own tradition steeped in a similar wisdom, a lesson I am learning more deeply now. This willingness to feed each other nourishes our common life and rustles up our laughter; and this willingness to eat well together, too, is a work of nourishment, a feast of human grace.

This month in worship, our theme is “Giving and Receiving” as love shows us how. We are often taught to give generously, and indeed giving is an art to learn and constantly to improve; yet giving alone is not enough to nurture the health of ourselves or our communities. So much of life seems to teach us to retreat from the charity of others; yet it is the very illusion of separateness which rends the heart of our work together. 

What will it mean for us to give well and meet the needs of our community? What will it mean for us to be willing enough to acknowledge the presence of others, to receive in the places the community can be a gift to us? Join us in worship to dance with these questions in song, in word, in company shared. “There is a blessing for all of us there,” Aunt LaVerne would say. If we are willing, the journey can feed us all.

People tell stories. We tell stories about the day ahead of us as we wake in the morning; we tell stories about our lives, what they mean, and how we relate to and meet the ups and downs of our days. We tell stories as groups, too—things like mission statements of organizations we support and belong to, stories about meaning and purpose in our lives. Sometimes, these shared stories become culture. They tell us what’s good or bad, right or wrong, what it means to be human, how to love, what’s “inside the box” and what’s beyond the pale. In a very real way, we live inside these stories, and as these stories change, so do our lives.

This summer, our theme invites us into the stories we tell about ourselves, about each other, and about the wider world, asking us if the stories we tell are “big enough” to hold us? Does our story of gender make room for what’s true in our minds, bodies, and spirits? Does our story of the land have space for the earth to love us? Does our story of courage have room for our truth? And if and when they’re not big enough, what happens when we tell bigger stories together?

May is a season of regrowth. It is when spring really kicks into high gear. A time when the world around us comes alive again and some of us tell stories through what we cultivate. It is a time when we return to the earth because the ground is ready to receive us. Having released the cold hardness of winter, new life bursts forth, new blossoms telling the story of their time in seed and what they are becoming above ground. It is a story of life, of brightness and color, growth and joy which permeates the air. But it is short-lived, as is every life, really. The flowers of spring depart quickly for the sturdier growth of summer, and it can be easy to forget the frost-defying crocus and the sudden blink-and-it’s-gone burst of lilacs.

At a time when the stories we tell shape our world in palpable ways, the question who lives, who dies, who tells your story calls to us to grab hold of the chorus, to blend our voices and tell a richer, bigger, more multilayered and sometimes far more complex story of who we are and who we can be together.

May Worship:

Sunday, May 1, 9 & 11 a.m.
Earth Day & New Member Welcome

Sunday, May 8, 9 & 11 a.m.
Child Dedication

Sunday, May 15, 9 & 11 a.m.
Building Rededication

Sunday, May 22, ONE SERVICE at 10 a.m. at Minnehaha Park
Youth Sunday

Sunday, May 29, 10 a.m. worship
DRUUMM worship

“You’re broken down and tired
Of living life on a merry go round
And you can’t find the fighter
But I see it in you so we gonna walk it out”

Andra Day reminds us that we will rise up. Rise like the day.

Every day we rise. Sun up, sun down, sun up again. Like the tides. Like the phases of the moon. Like the seasons. We rise. And, sometimes, we get knocked down. Sometimes we travel to the edge, sometimes we fall off the edge for a while. And as the poet writes, “yet still we rise.” 

This month, we look at all of the many ways we rise. Rise above heartbreak, rise after getting knocked down. The everyday rise of those who care for others and those who care for the world. This month we learn the many ways that we rise, together.

The acorn and the oak are the same one. The seed come to life, the fruit grows the living, and both are one and the same.

As for our community of faith, we commit to tend each other, one-by-one; to nurture the neighborhood by loving our neighbors each; to strengthen the web of life right now, from right where we are.

Yet it takes only a glance to notice how other lands where hearts are beating beside us, hearts and lands to which we are just as closely connected, other lives no less entitled to care, with hopes and dreams as pure and true as ours.

Is it even practical to work for the promise of world peace right now? There are hearts, lives, families, institutions, laws, addictions, and relationships in need of peace right here already. How do we divvy the time? How do we halve the attention and still make a difference together?

What if they weren’t other lands and other hearts at all? How would we live if the borders of community and world good were just and only as tough as the acorn shell. What if loving the world and rebuilding the community close were the sign and sprout of themselves and each other, the acorn and the oak, one and the same?

What would we need to imagine to love the world as ourselves? A bigger togetherness. 

Our hymn “In the Bleak Midwinter” is a song often sung at Christmastime, but here in the Upper Midwest, we know that “bleak midwinter” is an apt description for February. Though well on the other side of the Winter Solstice, February is often dark, frequently bone-chillingly cold, and for many, it can be a time when the shadows of our hearts can speak more loudly. So, what better time to turn our attention toward joy and gratitude? This month, we explore in theological and practical terms what it means to love the life we’re living and infuse our days with gladness. But let’s be clear, this isn’t a saccharine “always look on the bright side” but rather a serious grappling with the joy and gratitude that our theological and relational commitments call us into.

Get in a Boat – Or, What Unitarian Universalism Says to Our Suffering

Everyone who is alive will suffer in some measure, and every faith tradition speaks to this reality in some way. For Unitarian Universalists, we don’t turn away from or sugarcoat the reality that life can be hard, nor do we look to supernatural deliverance or assume that it’s all part of some larger grand design. As Unitarian Universalists, we know that life has its measure of pain, but that we need not suffer alone—that pain is held most effectively in community, and that when we join together, not only can we hold more, but we can transform our individual suffering into collective action for justice to transform the systems that create our suffering in the first place. In other words, our pain is borne through community and collective work to create the beloved community here and now. This month, we’ll dig into what our faith says in the face of human suffering, and offer concrete pathways toward building practices of mutuality and care for the world.

Maybe it’s Moses parting the sea so the people could flee the Pharaoh, or the levees that protected the people of New Orleans from even worse suffering when Hurricane Ida arrived. Maybe it’s the memory of the empty highways and the parked passenger jets or the silent school rooms. Maybe it’s the reality of how you hold back your own tears trying to shield yourself or others from the depth of your grief. Whatever it looks and feels like for each of us, there are days and decades when we hold back the water for ourselves and each other, doing what we can to offer care and protection from threats real and perceived. 

Other times, the water is held back through no active intention of our own. As recently as a few weeks ago, the water that typically churns over Minnehaha Falls had slowed to a trickle, and restrictions on water use took hold in our city as the drought that passed over the plains landed here. In Flint, Michigan, and in communities all over the world, water we once trusted to sustain life turned toxic, and as the climate crisis comes home to roost the wells and taps so many of us rely on are running dry. 

Sometimes the water is held back for protection, and sometimes the water is held back from us, a signal, perhaps, to pay attention and change course quickly and with care. 

In these last 18 months, the water has been held back in so many ways. Construction delays keep us from a long-awaited return to our building on the schedule we had hoped for. The continued reality of Covid-19 keeps us caring for each other by connecting online or gathering in person in smaller groups and outside. We wait in patient and impatient expectation for the days when the waters of our community can flow freely again, filling us with the embodied experience of holding all of life’s joy and wonder and creativity and pain together. 

This month, we explore what it means to live in this present moment, when the waters are held back through no intention of our own and as we continue to hold back the waters for each other. Patience, resilience, doing what we can with what we have, and caring for each other and those most at risk of harm will continue to be our guides as we strengthen our spirits through story and song, joy and lament, moving together wherever we are in the shared rhythm of community.