It's Over

GA is over.  Tomorrow we will pack our bags and leave.  I will not be attending GA next year, and I am saddened.  I strongly believe everyone should attend GA at least once in their life.  Even better if you can do it on the regular.

The GA choir looked and sang beautifully.  Thousands
of UU's gathered for this morning's worship.

GA has this awe inspiring power to simultaneously ground you in your faith and lift your spirituality to new heights.  As the Hymn goes, "Roots hold me close, Wings set me free."  I was reminded of this during this morning's final worship, as the speakers talked about connecting to something bigger than ourselves.  It was a call to action to do good by this world.  But, it was also a call to community.  A call to put our differences and petty arguments aside, so that we may finally reach out in love together.

I will leave you now with these two quotes from this morning's worship.  May they rest in your heart and take root in your thoughts...

The mission of our church is not to meet our needs.  The mission of our church is to heal our world.

Our different views of the holy matter less than what those views call us to do. 

Amen, Blessed Be, Namaste,

- Ms. Meredith

Be an Emissary

Emissary - a person on a special mission.  I would say this was the theme of the day.  Here's the breakdown...

Workshop #1 #UUsGetSocial Digging Into Facebook, Twitter and Video-Making and Sharing
Why, oh why didn't someone from communications attend this GA?!?!  That is what went through my mind as I sat through this wonderful workshop.  In short, three experts provided many concrete suggestions on how to effectively utilize Facebook, Twitter and Video Sharing sites.  This workshop was so packed with ideas, I don't even think I can effectively communicate them all on this blog.  So, hopefully I can connect with the communications committee when I return.  However, for all you other folks out there, there was one suggestion that stuck out - be a missionary (or, as some people are calling it - give witness).  Share your faith by sharing, and re-tweeting UU posts.  Check in to First Church whenever you are there.  Or, create some UU content of your own - a 1 minute video on how your faith feeds you; a post about how the latest news story reflects one of our UU values; do something nice for others, just because.

FYI, youth (or parents of youth), this workshop sparked an idea for a curriculum this fall.  I hope to vet the idea with Sharon, Katie and you before it is decided upon, but I just wanted you to know, interesting things are on the horizon!

Workshop #2 Beyond Ramps and Restrooms: Inclusion through Technology
The very last workshop of GA, and it was the workshop I was presenting.  Suzanne Fast, EqUUal Access Board Chair, Mark Bernstein, UUA liaison to EqUUal Access, and I each presented on a specific function of congregational life (Worship; Meetings/Gatherings/Small Group Ministry; and RE) and how we might improve access for people with disabilities through the use of technology.  If you are interested in what we shared, you can access all of our content by visiting my other blog Beyond Ramps and Restrooms.

In addition to sharing how technology could be used to make our congregations more accessible, we also demonstrated how technology could be used to fight for equal rights for people with disabilities.  In the middle of our workshop, we asked people to be part of our 'flash mob,' and to call their senators and tell them they support the Convention on Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD).  Here is Bill Schulz, president of UUSC about CRPD.

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote soon on the international human rights treaty known as the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). If ratified, this treaty would protect the rights of all people living with disabilities, in the United States and around the world. 

Progressive people of faith and other activists throughout the country are calling their U.S. senators and asking them to vote in support of this treaty. UUSC, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and EqUUal Access are all reaching out to supporters right now, so that together we can be a strong voice for the rights of persons with disabilities. Our goal is to generate 500 calls in the next three days in support of CRPD. Please participate — call your U.S. senators today!

Here is what Bill Schulz did not tell you - CRPD was modeled after the United States own American's with Disabilities Act (ADA).  In 2012, the US had the opportunity to ratify the treaty, but it was voted down by 5 VOTES!  Now, there is the possibility that the CRPD will be brought to the senate floor this July - but it will not be brought to the floor unless they can guarantee it will pass.  So, call your senator now, and let them know that you support the CRPD and they should too.  Here is how to call...

1. Call the U.S. Senate to voice your support for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Dial 855-782-5763 (toll-free) to be connected to the office of one of your U.S. senators.

2. When a staff member from your senator’s office answers the phone, please say the following:

“Hi, I’m [name], and I live in [home state]. I support swift U.S. ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We urgently need the protections for people living with disabilities to be supported and extended throughout the world. Please vote to support this treaty.” 

3. That's all you need to say! If you would like additional information, it is available at uusc.org/crpd.

We are asking you to make telephone calls if possible (rather than send e-mails) because we believe that phone calls from constituents to their senators will make the greatest impact at this crucial moment.  [sic]

There is strong support for this treaty because it aligns with respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This treaty is modeled on the Americans with Disabilities Act. It would bring greater legal protections to persons living with disabilities, including children, people who lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and others whose rights are currently being denied.

 Ware Lecture
Moving on, I attended the ware Lecture this evening (i.e. The Key Note speaker of GA).  This year, Sister Simone Campbell (The Nun on the Bus) delivered the Ware Lecture.  She shared poignant stories from her life and the lives of people she encountered.  She spoke about deep listening, though she didn't call it that.  She had some great one liners and since I cannot share her entire speech with you here, I will share her best quotes.

When you walk towards trouble there you find hope.

When you approach situations with doubt, not certitude, you are practicing faith.

Reality is more important than theory.

When you tell the story, you spread hope. (This was in response to a story that came straight from Cincinnati of a woman, Margaret Kisler, who died because she did not have health insurance).

 Unless I am open to the god [in others], I am in conflict with the god in me.

It is an unpatriotic lie that we are [a nation] based on individualism. 

In community, it all gets covered.

As you may have guessed, her end point was that we must be open to others (even our 'foes') and learn to live as one, or else, we build our own downfall.

Worship Witness, Water Fire
Finally, the day ended with GA's worship witness event - Water Fire.  I confess, I did not go to the opening worship, nor did I stay very long, but it was still a rather moving event.  Thousands of us (UU's and Non-UU's alike) gathered around the central basin.  We sang and watched as the fires in water were lit.  UU scavenger hunts were handed out to thousands of participants, and from it (as well as the map) it appeared as if there were several 'UU Centers' set up around the event.  Including but not limited to...

• A UU Stage for UU Bands
• A Love Tent
• A UUA Tent
• A Sidewalk Chalk Tent

Of course, we UU's were, then, called upon to 'give witness' and to 'reach out in love.'  I suspect the UU congregations in Rhode Island were be a bit more crowded this summer.

UU's at GA witnessed at Water Fire this year, where they light wood pile torches on
the river.  Thousands of Non-UU's and UU's showed up for the event.

Emissary, Missionary, Giving Witness and Reaching Out in Love, this is Meredith Plummer.  Good night First Church!

 

 

 

 

Best Day Yet!

What can I say?  Today was wonderful - full of wonderful ideas and deep thought.  Now, I know I can get rather long winded, but I hope you will bare with me through this blog post as I bring these ideas and thoughts to you!

Workshop #1 Love Reaching Home: Faith Formation Way Beyond Sundays
Best.Workshop.Yet.  Absolutely wonderful and overflowing with creative ideas that spawned other creative ideas from myself and the rest of the audience.  Here are the highlights.

The Big Ideas

• Faith formation never ends, and RE is only one component of faith formation.
• Faith formation is made up of 4 areas:
• Covenant (How do we agree to be in relation with each other?)
• Content / Curriculum
• Community (What defines us as a whole?)
• Context / Call (How do we serve our broader community?)
• Faith formation can happen at potlucks, while visiting hospital rooms, filling school bags for foster children... Anywhere.
• There is no right way or wrong way for someone of a single age to participate in church.  If the traditional offering is not fulfilling a persons spiritual needs, there are plenty of ways for them to spiritually 'fed' within our congregations (see previous bullet point).
• Furthermore, if the only way for children to participate in church is to go to their RE classes in the basement - separated from the church - we are not doing our jobs.

Faith Formation Ideas for at Home and at Church

• 7 Principle ornaments
• Home Altar (or a special place to store the 'sacred')
• UU Playlists (Have you been listening to the "First Unitarian Church, Summer 2014" Spotify playlist?)
• Sibling Covenants
• Trash to Treasure Chalices
• Downloading a Tapestry of Faith activity for the Home
• Make a Lego Chalice
• UU Quote / Inspiration Box (to read at the beginning of every meal)
• Other (There are a few suggestions I am not listing here because they take too much time to explain).

EqUUal Access Meeting

Today, the members of EqUUal Access met for their annual meeting.  It was a small gathering, as the meeting took place during a designated workshop time.  But, it was an interesting meeting.  There was some discussion about a video shown during the morning worship (full disclosure, I did not attend morning worship).  Apparently, this video showcased the features of the UUA's new headquarters.  Sadly, the video made a big deal about the sites new staircase, and did not mention accessibility as one of the new features (even though it is).  Sigh, it seems we still have a long way to go when it comes to raising disability awareness.  Lucky for us, EqUUal Access and the UUA are looking to launch their pilot program (which is like welcoming congregation) next year.  In other big news, EqUUal Access will also be getting a new website.

Workshop #2 Spiritual Practices

I originally chose this workshop because our curriculum next spring will be 'Spiritual Practices through the lens of World Religions'.  It was to my delight that when I arrived I discovered this was a youth caucus workshop.  Listen to me now, if you ever have the chance to attend a youth caucus workshop, DO IT!  Not only are they extremely experiential, but they are also deeply thoughtful and moving.  In this particular workshop, I and the other participants spent 10 minutes at 6 different spiritual practice stations.  They were...

• Journaling (see directions below)
• Hand Washing (an exercise in 'washing away' the negative)
• Mandalas
• Prayer Beads (UU prayers, of course - more a practice in Mindfulness)
• Yoga
• Guided Meditation.

If you want, you can try out one of these spiritual practices for yourself - try journaling about one of the prompts below...

This journaling prompt from the youth workshop on spiritual
practices ask participants to write down a few sentences in
response to one of the following prompts: What have you
accomplished today? What are you grateful for today? What
challenged you today? What will you remember from today? What
has made you feel on edge?  What has made you feel at peace?
What makes you look forward to tomorrow?

May you be filled with creativity,

- Ms. Meredith

I Wish I Had a Rubric

There is a lot of focus this GA on multiculturalism and anti-oppression.  Every workshop session there is at least one workshop about either class, or race, or ability.  It certainly provides a lot of food for thought.  Sitting at dinner with my parents tonight, I mused - "I wish I had a rubric.  One in which I could look at each program offered by RE and evaluate, is this program... Multicultural (check), Socioeconomic divers (check), ability sensitive (check), LGBTQ friendly (check), gender neutral (check), intergenerational (check)."  And, so on and so forth, until I had covered all of my 'basis'.  Of course, not every program could meet all of these needs - but, I surmise that if we knew what needs were being met, then we would know what needs were NOT being met and we could work towards welcoming everyone throughout a year's span.

Wonderful dream isn't it?  Too bad it requires knowledge that, at this moment, is outside the realm of what this middle class white girl from the suburbs knows.  Thankfully, there are people far wiser than I who are willing to share what they know.  Here is a snippet of the wisdom I gleamed from them today...

Workshop #1: The Sophia Lyon Fahs Lecture
Again, Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed spoke.  But, this time, he talked about our associations educational history, and the resources developed by Fahs herself.  He evaluated Fahs materials (and many more) through a multicultural lens and found them... utterly lacking - books and curriculum created for Unitarian children in the middle of the 20th century, "pure white" and pure middle class.  However, this curriculum stands in sharp contrast to the social activism displayed by many of our youth during the civil rights movement.  So, what did our Unitarian congregations do that made our youth into change agents?  Rev. Morrison-Reed put it simply, "the message was in the meaning."  In short, the congregations of the mid 20th century recognized that when it comes to teaching our children, it was relationships first, and content second.  And, it was through these intergenerational relationships that our youth learned about justice and compassion, and that they were put on course to activism.

Workshop #2: Doing Church in the 21st Century
My report on this workshop, I know, has been much anticipated, as Sharon highlighted it in her sermon on passion.  However, I am sad to say, this workshop was almost a complete let down.  I won't go into the details of the workshop (why I felt it was a poor workshop).  Instead, I will just leave you with a question, as well as the presenters main thesis.

Question - Compare the world of the 1950's to Today.  What differences can you name? (i.e. Nuclear Families V. Non-Traditional Families)

Thesis - If you have many UU congregations within a relatively small geographical area (say, the size of greater Cincinnati) everyone may be better served by combining congregational operations and creating satellite sites out of what were the individual congregations.

Workshop #3: Congregational History
A Living History Quest in the style of "The Magic Tree House", UU Tours of Cincinnati, and A Histories Mysteries Club - just a few suggestions how now to make First Church history come alive this fall.  And, that is all I have to say about that.

Workshop #4: Building a Just World Beginning with our Children
In a word, AMAZING.  2 public educators, and 1 DRE spoke about their efforts to involve children in social justice.  Throughout the workshop, we heard about children building their own foundations, instituting congregational programs and sharing deep discussions about the nature of love and loss.  The major themes running throughout this workshop: Child centered and community connections.  The most powerful quote of the day came from this workshop.  I offer it up to any parent, grandparent, educator or volunteer - "When we take children's lives seriously, our job is to act like an amplifier."  Now, my mind is abuzz with ideas.

Of course, more could be shared.  But, this post is already long enough, and if I am going to survive tomorrow, I must depart.

So long!

- Ms. Meredith

Exhaustion, Multiculturism and More!

Note to self, never start a vacation with an early morning wake up - you won't recover!  Okay, so it is only my second day in Providence, so supposedly there is still time to catch up.  But, if I keep going like I did today, the odds aren't in my favor.  Here is a brief recap of today's activities...

Woke up at 7am.  Checked in at the LREDA meeting at 9am.  Worshiped with LREDA until 10:30am (can't go wrong with a worship that included a quote from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure").  Then, LREDA's key note speaker, Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed lead us in a 2 hour exercise about race and multiculturalism.  If you don't know already, Mark Morrison Reed will be coming to speak at First Church in the fall.  A real interesting guy.  I suspect we'll have lots to talk about after his visit.  As for today, I'm still deconstructing all that I learned from his workshop, but I will share that I did come to one realization today.  And, it is this - In all that we do and say we teach our children the golden rule, "Treat others the way you would want to be treated."  And, yet, we all come from such diverse life experiences, it is ludicrous to think we all would want to be treated the same way.  So, we must do better.  We must teach our children to go beyond the golden rule, we must teach them that we are all unique individuals with unique needs and ways we would like to be treated, and to be in good relations with others we must do the hard work of starting difficult conversations and truly listening.

At 12:45pm, Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed concluded his workshop and we broke for lunch.  LREDA resumed at 1:15pm for the business meeting.  Just like in our congregational meetings, several members of the governing body spoke.  Perhaps it was the early morning wake up yesterday, or the contents of the business meeting, but this is when I started to falter.  Sheer exhaustion over took me and I truly wondered if I would make it through the day.  Luckily, the business meeting was over quickly, and then members of the Religious Education Credentialing Committee (RECC) spoke.  For those of you not familiar with Credentialing - it is a process in which DRE's undergo specialized professional development in order to gain competencies and be credentialed by the UUA.  You can learn more about credentialing at the UUA website.

I've been interested in getting credentialed for several years now, but conflicts of interest (my father is on the credentialing committee) and tight fiscal budgets have prohibited me from pursing it.  As it turns out, this may be a good thing, as the RECC is changing some of the credentialing requirements, so that they better suit the needs of the modern religious educator.

At 3pm (the time at which the LREDA meeting should have dismissed), we moved into our final breakout sessions of the day.  The Fahs Collaborative - which is dedicated to faith formation through education - organized several discussion groups about several hot topics of the day.  I participated in the discussion group about Full Week Faith (aka, Family Ministry) - an area I would like to explore in the coming year.  Sad to say, there were no new insights from this discussion.

As for the rest of the day - I registered, checked in at the Mid America table, and then proceeded to the EqUUal Access Booth.  For those of you who may not know, EqUUal Access is an independent organization dedicated to the full engagement of people with disabilities in our congregations and larger community.  I found EqUUal Access shortly after my daughter, Lily, was born prematurely and I have been an active member since last year, GA 2013 (In fact, it was upon EqUUal Access's request that I submitted a workshop proposal for GA this year).

And, so, there, at the EqUUal Access booth, is where I spent my evening (5pm - 7pm) - talking with lay members, ministers and fellow DRE's, informing them about plenary decisions concerning disability, and encouraging them to call their senators in favor of the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (more on this in a later post).  Truly fulfilling work - people and connections.

 Finally, at around 7pm, I joined over one thousand of my fellow UU's in carrying a banner in the banner parade - they, with their congregations or organizations banner, I, with the EqUUal Banner.

For the second year in a row, I carried the EqUUal
Access Banner during GA's Opening Ceremony.

Following the banner parade, I joined my parents for the opening ceremony.  But, my tolerance for loud noise and focused concentration were starting to wear thin, so I left early.  My plan was to relax in the hotel for a bit, and then venture out once again to experience a one of a kind worship service planned by The Sanctuary Boston.  However, this blog post seems to have taken more time than I expected it would, and now I have missed the start of service.  And... I'm okay with that.  Maybe I'll actually catch up on my sleep tonight, and be well rested for the four workshops I plan to attend tomorrow.

Until then, be excellent to each other!

- Meredith Plummer

I'm Here!

Well, after a delayed flight, a mad dash to catch a connecting flight a la "Home Alone," and ripped baggage - I'm finally in Providence!

I'm staying with my parents (give it up for multigenerational UU families!) and we've been pleasantly surprised at the hospitality we've been shown so far.  Almost everywhere we've gone, there have been signs - "Welcome, UUA General Assembly" they shout.  And, at the airport, the First Unitarian Church of Providence had set up a welcome booth with loads of information - tourist attractions, a specialized map of GA's meeting spaces, and even a bus schedule!

The First Unitarian Church of Providence handed out information at a welcome
booth at the airport.  Among their fliers and brochures were several catalogs
full of tourist attractions, a map of GA, and schedules for both the bus and tram.

All of this 'welcoming' is a good reminder of what it is all about: people and relationships.  I certainly hope to build some new relationships while I am here.  I'll start by attending the Liberal Religious Education Association (LREDA) professional day tomorrow.

Until then,
- Ms. Meredith

Welcome!

Welcome!

My name is Meredith Plummer and I am an accidental Director of Religious Education (DRE).  You may be wondering what that means, exactly, "How can anyone be an accidental religious educator?"

Well, I will tell you that I came to this profession with the hopes that I would only be a DRE for a year or two, and then move on to my 'real' calling - teaching.  However, it hasn't quite worked out like that.  I'm 5 years in, and it doesn't look like I'll be departing anytime soon.  Through every twist and turn my life has taken, the universe has made one thing clear, this is where I need to be.

What's more - I have become quite passionate about this work.  And, that has inspired my creativity.  Now, I hope to share that creativity with you.

I hope you will join me and find yourself inspired too!

May the energy of creativity guide you,

-M