Barbara Barnett Stewart, Board Member

We are halfway through our 2024-2025 church year, so by making this month’s worship theme love, UUCCH has, in keeping with our recently recontextualized UU values, quite literally put love at the center.

If you’ve been attending our recent services, you’ve heard quite a lot about love. Today, it’s your turn to talk about it. As you heard earlier, after service today, both in person and on Zoom, the Board invites you to participate in our Open Question Listening Circles, in which you’ll be asked to consider and respond to the question: “What does it mean for UUCCH to put love at the center and live into the new expression of our values?”

In these facilitated circles, everyone participating will have the opportunity to respond to that question with their thoughts, ideas, and visions for the future. No judgments, no “yeah buts”—just listening . . . and lots of notetaking, because this isn’t an empty exercise. The comments you share today are going to help all of us co-create the future of our church.

How exactly? Last year, when we held open question listening circles for the first time, the question was: “How can we nourish the hunger of all generations for community and spiritual connection in this ever-changing world?” When the Board looked at the responses to that question, a few common themes quicky emerged, and during our annual Board retreat back in August, we turned those themes into our annual vision of ministry: building a stronger foundation between our new minister and the UUCCH community, facilitating necessary infrastructure upgrades to our property, and helping the congregation develop a bigger interfaith presence. As Reverend Eric likes to say, this annual vision of ministry constitutes his marching orders for him and the staff to pursue during the church year, and it’s been exciting to see the strides being made toward those goals.

We therefore hope you will make your voice and your hopes for UUCCH heard through today’s listening circles so that the Board, the staff, and the congregation together can shape the direction the work of our church will take. Whether you are here for the first time or the hundredth time, we want to know what you think.

If you can’t stay for this afternoon’s circles, there will be additional circles on tomorrow evening and this Wednesday afternoon—you can find details in the Newsgram, and there will be an email blast the Zoom link for tomorrow night’s circle. And then, later next month, our Board president Jennie Stone will share a reflection on what we heard during these listening circles.

While the listening circles are focused on the future of our congregation, if you want to be involved in the future of our UU denomination as a whole, you might want to consider attending General Assembly (aka GA), which is the annual gathering of UU congregations for business, worship, workshops, and fellowship. This year’s GA will be a multi-platform event, with the in-person portion taking place in Baltimore.

Our church can designate up to five congregants to serve as delegates to GA, meaning you get to vote in the democratic decisions of the UUA. If you’re interested or would like more information, there are details in the newsgram, or please come talk to a Board member or Rev. Eric. GA registration is currently open, and applications to serve as a delegate are due March 14.

Now, as we move forward into the rest of our service, please consider how we as a church and a denomination can also move forward into the future while keeping love at the center.