Greetings from your Search Team! At our meeting this week we talked a lot about the service we will be leading on the 11th of September, the theme of which will be “Together on the Search”. The word “together” in that phrase has at least two meanings. As members of the Search Team, the seven of us are of course together in our assigned task of finding our next settled minister. But though we are assigned this task, we cannot possibly complete it unless the congregation joins us and works with us. That, we would argue, is the more important sense of the word “together”; to find a minister will require the work of the Search Team, but it also requires help and participation from everybody else who calls this church “home”.
In the weeks and months to come, we will be relying on you (yes you!) to play an active role in helping the search come to a successful conclusion in the Spring. Your first task will be to complete the congregational survey that we will be releasing on the 11th. We need to get at least a 65% response rate for the results to be meaningful to ministerial candidates, so please make room in your schedule to fill it out. We’ll tell you now, it will not be a trivial task, but it is *so* important to the success of our effort.
After the survey is complete, we will go deep into analysis mode and then build on the results with a series of cottage meetings and focus groups where we will talk in small groups about what we want from our next minister. In addition to attending one of these meetings yourself, we will need volunteers to host them, so if you would be willing and able to do so please reach out to us (contact details below). (We will also reach out to people individually if they are unable to comfortably participate in small group meetings).
And those are just the first two things we’ll be asking of you; believe us, there will be more to come! And throughout the process we want to hear from you: in the survey, of course, but if you ever have a thought about the search, however trivial you think it may be, we want to hear it. Send any and all correspondence to search@uucuc.org. Or, feel free to talk to us at church or wherever you happen to meet us.
In loving service,
Janet Revell Barrett
Wendy Graves
Chris Hannauer
Tanja Hodges
Pat McClard
Dave Sharpe
Angela Urban
As you may recall from one of our recent postings, during our retreat with a UUA facilitator we all composed poems about ourselves using a Mad Lib-style template. We will periodically post one of these poems to see if you can guess who authored it. Nobody correctly guessed the author of the first poem, so here is another chance for you to earn a shout-out in this space by guessing the author of this one. Please send your guesses to search@uucuc.org.
I am from boxes of books
From flowers and bread
I am from a quiet place.
I am from the lilac bush
whose flowers are here and gone all too quickly.
I am from the first class, the first row.
From Daddy John and Grandma Willie.
And from fighters and Friends.
I am from good Methodist roots and Second Sunday Musicals.
From caramel cake and pork ribs bathed in Open Pit sauce.
From Grandma Catherine, who taught herself to play the piano by ear
and always sang in tune.
And from Minnie Lou, a simple southern woman with a green thumb
and a smile that could light up a city block.
I am from the kid patiently seated at on the porch
waiting for a delivery from the junior reader’s book club.
I am from the moments made of boxes of books, flowers and bread,
with music in a quiet place.