From Your Minister

Dear Ones,

As the days are becoming shorter and the calendar turns toward October, I’m enjoying a vibrant beginning to our congregational year, the shift to cooler days, and the busyness of harvest. At the same time, it feels like turbulence is picking up. Sitting here on the cusp of the equinox, I’m watching the winds pick up – a reminder of the bluster of autumn. And, as we see in the news daily, electoral politics and geopolitical conflict continue amping up.

Within this context it is a relief that our theme for October is the Practice of Deep Listening. In times of busyness, chaos, drama, and change, one of the most important things we can do is get still, root down, and develop our skills and practices of deep listening.

This fall, deep listening is already bringing some beautiful and meaningful questions like: Where are we being called as a congregation? How are we living our vision of shared ministry? How can we grow as a space of healing, a beacon, and a sanctuary? How we can grow our listening skills to bring more healing in divisive times?

It’s exciting to already be engaging with these questions with our congregation’s lay leaders. To support this, right now I’m reading three books that are giving me various insights into practices that can help us engage mindfully with a changing world, and thus find ways to live our values. They are: “What It Takes to Heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world,” by Prentis Hemphill, “Team Habits: How small actions lead to extraordinary results,” by Charlie Gilkey, and “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements.” These books are all helping me listen to both what is and what could be for our congregation and wider community.

One exciting opportunity that has emerged for helping us lean into, or listen into, these questions, is the opportunity to work with the UUA’s Hope for Us team. You may have heard me talk a bit about this emerging possibility during my sermon on September 8 as I reflected on our shared ministry. During that sermon, I shared the metaphor of shared ministry – when minister, staff, lay leaders, and volunteers work collaboratively, in covenant, and with mutual trust and support toward a common mission and goals – as a dance.

As the Hope for Us coaches that we’ve begun talking with have shared, in a time when we’re experiencing so much turbulence in the wider world, in a time where we’re seeking new ways of engaging with conflict in our families and communities, in addition to in our congregations, it’s important to learn ways to do a different type of dance when we encounter conflict. These new dance steps can allow more listening, creativity, and flow in, and they can give us new opportunities to improvise. And then, when we do that, we can have more meaningful conversations, foster deeper relationships and spiritual growth, and engage more fully with living out our values, mission, and vision. As such, I’m excited about continuing this conversation and finding out where our mutual exploration leads us. You can read more about Hope for Us and our October 13 session with three of their coaches in UUS president Jeff Walberg’s column.

I’m also excited about the work that we’re doing with ministry teams to clarify roles and responsibilities of staff and volunteers. Now that we’re a few years into our transition to policy-based governance, we’ve gotten enough experience to know a bit more about what’s working, what needs to be tweaked, and what questions we want to work through together to improve our dance of shared ministry. Team leaders should have received an email about this from Jeff Walberg and me in late September. We hope that you’ll discuss it with teams and your staff team leads, as well as come to our next team leads coordination meeting on October 20. If you didn’t receive that email, please reach out to me.

In addition, we have many other opportunities to engage with the practice of deep listening here at UUS this month. I hope that you’ll read the rest of this newsletter and weekly emails to find out more about how to get engaged. For together, we are making this congregation a beloved community.

Love and Blessings,
Rev. Diana