After 18 months of collaborative and contemplative work, the Visionary Goals were presented and approved overwhelmingly at the January 2024 Mid-Year Congregational Meeting. We would like to thank the hundreds of congregants involved in brainstorming and providing direct feedback on these goals. These Visionary Goals are meant to shape and guide the direction we will be taking the next 5 years.
Visionary Goals
The people of First Universalist practice Beloved Community among and beyond us. To do this we…
- Honor the richness of our Unitarian Universalist faith and embody its love within the walls of our church and beyond.
- Foster our connection with, care for, and action on behalf of Earth’s environment and all of life.
- Pursue our individual and collective work for justice, in relationship with those most affected by systems of oppression.
- Widen the opportunities for leadership participation and engagement in the many facets of how our church functions and thrives.
- Provide meaningful presence to one another in times of joy, grief, and change.
A History of Our Visionary Goals Process
Curious about how we got here? Read on to reflect on the process and read previous updates as we traveled toward our Visionary Goals.
Participate in a February/March 2023 Visionary Goals Workshop
The church’s Board of Trustees welcomes 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.
Visionary Goals Workshops are an invitation to listen together, not only for who we are as a faith community, but who we are becoming. As a congregation we are in a tender place. Envisioning our future is extremely important communal work that asks us to ground ourselves in our values, open our hearts, call upon our wisest selves, and turn our attention to what is moving within, between and beyond us. The Visionary Goals that come out of this process will guide all the work of the church for at least the next five years.
There are fourteen workshops—11 in person and three on zoom—scheduled between Monday, Feb. 20 and Thursday, March 16. Please give us the gift of your time and attention as we do this work together.
Intro to Our Visionary Goals Process
Recorded on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023
In this introductory session, Laura Park, Managing Director of Unity Consulting, as well as members of the board of directors share about the Visionary Goals process, including how it works, and what it produces. Visionary Goals are what the board uses to discern and guide the church’s overall direction, and from that, staff use the board’s direction to develop their annual work plan. The process of developing our visionary goals is a covenantal process of relationship in which we listen together, in small groups, to what we long for for ourselves, our relationships with each other, and the impact we have in the larger world. In other words, we do theology together, listening for where love is calling us in our diversity and similarities, listening for where love is flowing and lifting that up so that our board can help to steward us toward the future that is seeking to emerge from among us.
Visionary Goals Powerful Question
If we prioritized the joy and liberation of the most marginalized, what could our collective future be like?
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How was the powerful question developed?
A: The congregational conversation process is modeled on Appreciative Inquiry, a methodology that helps organizations understand their strengths and what they want to build on those strengths for the future. An Appreciative Inquiry starts with a Powerful Question to focus the inquiry on a meaningful and provocative topic. Your board, in considering the threads that are coming together for the congregation in this moment, chose to focus on joy and liberation, and the opportunity to prioritize the joy and liberation of people who are typically marginalized. After much discussion of how those threads weave together, the board ended the question looking at our collective future and its possibilities. There are no right answers going into the process of engaging this question, just the chance to look for bold opportunities that attract and inspire us.
Q: “Marginalized,” in the minds of many, often denotes BIPOC folk, sometimes LGBTQ folks, sometimes folks with physical and/or mental disabilities, sometimes poor folks. At First Universalist, it is likely that many in the congregation will, upon seeing the powerful question, think something like “we” are not “them” and will wonder how “we” can engage the question. Can you help us with that?
A: Ben Miles and Matt Keller recorded a video which addresses this question. You can view that here. Here’s more about that question too: Marginalized in a big word and its function in our powerful question is to invite us to connect from our hearts to what it means to be marginalized in our church and/or in the wider world, and to reach out with our hearts and spirits to imagine empathically what it would mean if we as a congregation committed ourselves to a future centered around the joy and liberation of marginalized people. This is not a question that invites representation, nor is it a question that asks us to survey others to find out what “they” want. Rather, it is a theological question that builds on some of the ways we’ve thought of ourselves previously, perhaps most recently in our capital campaign which we undertook with the vision of our church being “Not For Ourselves Alone.” Similarly, the work of this question invites us to move from an orientation of “who am I?” to “whose am I?” In that movement, some of us may well feel some discomfort. The question may well provoke some internal tightening, some aversion, perhaps even a sense of “this is my church, why isn’t this for me?” All of which is good information for you and others. As you wrestle with this question in yourself and in the groups that will gather, noticing what you’re feeling, pay attention to where you feel tightness and where you feel openness and aliveness, all of that will guide you, it will inform how your group engages the questions, and how our visionary goals are created from that. It is an old, old question in religion, cutting across traditions and time and space to ask “who is my neighbor, and how can I serve them?” This question invites that work.
Q: Which “most marginalized” are we talking about? Within the congregation? Within our neighborhood? How “big” is the question?
A: There are the people who are here now, and the future is built for the people who are yet to come. We don’t want to limit this possibility too closely as you think about what that could mean for your future. And, the process invites you into storytelling more closely connected with your experiences at First Universalist because this is about First Universalist and the community that you have here and now; the strengths that are part of that community and how you want to build on those strengths. So it’s a both/and.
Q: How can we answer the question then?
A: This process isn’t about answering a question and checking a box, it’s a process that’s designed to ground you in stories about your experience at church and how you’d like to build on the best of those experiences and stretch into a future that is beyond the horizon that we can perceive directly. This is imaginative work, it is heart work, it is spirit work.
Q: What’s the history of our current visionary goals?
A: In 2011, the board first articulated visionary goals, derived from congregational conversation about the congregation at its best, congregant wishes for the church’s future, and small group visions of what the future could look like if built on the congregation’s strengths. In 2016–2017, the board considered those visionary goals in the context of an antiracist multicultural future and revised the visionary goals to better reflect that work. Now it’s time to go back to the congregation, to ground the next set of visionary goals in our congregation’s values and vision for the future.
Q: Can you share more about how this process has worked in other congregations?
A: Many congregations renew them every five to seven years, partly because of how much has changed in the world in just that short amount of time. Every five years, it changes significantly. And the congregation changes significantly and in most large congregations 25% of the members are new within the last five years. And so this is also a covenanting process, a chance to renew our promises to one another and with the people who are new.
Q: Where does the Change Team’s work with the Racial Justice Rubric fit into this?
A: The Change Team will be sharing information regarding their work with the Racial Justice Rubric with the board that will also inform the board’s process with our visionary goals.
Q: Will this process result in our developing a theory of change?
A: A “theory of change” which is literally what it sounds like, a theory about how change happens in people and institutions, is often implicit in how people talk about change and the stories they tell. While this process isn’t explicitly designed to create a formal theory of change, the board will surface implicit theories of change in the process and may choose to include those in its presentation of visionary goals to the congregation or in supporting materials.
