Saturday, August 26, 2006

Love and Justice

For a parttime minister, I sure feel like I've been working a lot lately! It's because we're getting ready to launch a new church year, but there have been many demands on my time and tonight, after attending an all-day workshop with my Whidbey folks on "building healthy congregations", I'm tired.

Some of that tiredness is frustration. As I listened to our very competent and knowledgeable facilitator and to the questions and concerns of the congregants attending, I experienced a sense of weariness that I can only attribute to the impossibility of doing everything this congregation needs me to do in the amount of time they can afford to pay me for. We need to revamp several committees, look at our mission and vision, re-up a capital campaign, AND start work on our building.

As our speaker talked, I was thinking: what is the mission of this group? What engages them? How would I characterize it in my own words, find a slogan that fits? I like the phrase "offering love and justice to the people of Whidbey Island". Love and Justice seem to me to be the words that best fit my own concept of what an effective UU church offers.

1 comment:

Robin Edgar said...

I guess that means that the Unitarian Church of Montreal is not an "effective" Unitarian Church then since it offers neither Love nor Justice to me and indeed other people. . .