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I just finished writing a very long post about this photo. A post which I saved several times as I edited it. And when I finally pushed “publish,” it disappeared. This has never happened to me before with WordPress, so I’m both surprised and distressed. Oh well! I’ll say a few words about the photo and I’ll try to reconstruct the post a little later once I’ve calmed down. I took this picture this morning at the Mary Louise Smith Resource Center at the Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa’s David & Elizabeth Kruidenier Center in Des Moines. This is where we’re holding a combined Junior High/Senior High OWL (Our Whole Lives) Training this weekend. The resource center is the largest comprehensive sexuality library in Iowa, and the Kruidenier Center is a ideal spot to hold a training. Now, if only I could remember what I said in the post that’s disappeared….
Last night three members of the Mid-America District Staff Group (Prairie Star, Central Midwest, and Heartland) presented our first shared online workshop. It was part of a series we’re doing called “Ten Good Ideas.” In this case, it was “Ten Good Ideas about Getting Your Church Ready for Fall.” Things went extremely well! Dori Davenport Thexton, Ian Evison, and I used the Persony software that’s available from the UUA to show a PowerPoint presentation on our Ten Good Ideas on participants computers, and we were able to give our oral presentation telephonically using a bridge line. I was in Saint Paul, Dori was in Wisconsin, and Ian was in Illinois. The participants came from all over the Prairie Star and Central Midwest districts: Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri (unfortunately, no one from Heartland was on the call). We shared our ideas and heard some good ideas from the participants–which included a minister and a lay leader from a UCC church who found out about the workshop via Google–and at the end of an hour and a half, the general consensus was that the technology and the topic worked well.
As I mentioned, last night’s workshop was just the first in a series–in fact, we’ll be repeating it next week. Other workshops in the series will include Ten Good Ideas about: Effective Meeting Leadership; Multigenerational Worship; and Adding a Service. Registration is limited to about 22 participants per workshop, and each workshop will be presented twice. You can find out more and register here.
And to give you a taste of what the workshops are like, here’s the presentation we used last night, along with the list of our Ten Good Ideas. (And thanks to Tandi Rogers Koerger for six of them. We swiped them from her article “Thirteen Steps to Start Your Church Year Strong.”)
Good Idea #1: View greeting as a ministry.
Good Idea #2: Review your webpage with the eye of a newcomer.
Good Idea #3: Keep track of who visits and, even more important, who comes back.
Good Idea #4: Look over your facilities with the eye of a newcomer, starting with the sniff test in the bathroom.
Good Idea #5: Do a Facilities Audit with your Buildings & Ground Committee AND some members of your Board.
Good idea #6: Check that sound system, check it again, and make sure people know how to use it.
Good idea #7: Take the extra trouble with details—this is what says you really care.
Good idea #8: Fill the pamphlet rack with a good selection of introductory information about Unitarian Universalism and about your local congregation.
Good idea #9: Give a gift. Giving a gift establishes a connection.
Good idea #10: Create a team—formal or informal—to see how other congregations greet newcomers (UU congregations and non-UU).
Bonus Idea: Good Idea #10: Make use of the great free resources from the UUA.
I’ve been seeing a lot of both these words lately, and that’s a good thing. It means that more and more people in our congregations (and in our association) are thinking about the benefits of having multiple generations interacting in various ways. Of course, the most obvious way the word intergenerational has been used in our congregations is in reference to worship, as in “Today is an Intergenerational Sunday. Children will be with the adults for the entire worship service.” And that’s one of the main reasons I prefer to use the word multigenerational now. It has less baggage and it actually is more precise. See, intergenerational technically refers to two or more generations. So by that definition, every worship service is intergenerational (unless you had an all Boomer or all Gen X service). But multigenerational implies (at least to me) more that two generations. And when three or more generations are gathered for worship, some serious give-and-take needs to occur. Even among our “elders” there are significant differences between the G.I. Generation, the Silent Generation, and the Boomers, just as there are major differences between Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials. And if we really take seriously the task of bringing generations together in order to create a single Beloved Community, the stakes are even higher. For my money, multigenerational is the better word for describing who (but not what) is involved in addressing that task.
The Executive Committee of the Prairie Star District Board had it’s end-of-the-church-year meeting last weekend at the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis. I couldn’t help but notice the banner that FUS has next to it’s main entrance. I’ve seen banners here before (I believe they had the “Civil Marriage is a Civil Right” one up for quite some time), but I was especially impressed by this one since it does so well something that I think is crucial for a congregation to do in order to get it’s message out: the words on the banner offer an easy to remember, easy to understand proclamation about what First Unitarian Society believes. It follows nicely the basic threefold pattern for a memorable message: Religion making sense, People making connections, Values making a difference. And it doing so, it emphasizes both sides of the vital components of this congregation’s beliefs–religion, people, and values on one hand, reason, community, and change on the other. I wish that every member of every UU congregation in the country would able to tell a stranger what their religious community is all about in a similar clear and straightforward way.
I was in Milwaukee last weekend to do a presentation on Family Ministry for religious educators and other interested folks from the Central Midwest District. I plan on posting most of my notes from the presentation because: a.) it’s been awhile since I posted a series on the importance of family ministry, and b.) I told the folks there that I would. I’ve got most of the notes ready to go, so I’ll probably start posting them tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a photo of a friendly face familiar to people in both Prairie Star and Central Midwest. It’s Beryl Aschenberg, former DRE at the UU congregation in Lincoln, Nebraska, and current DRE in Milwaukee. Beryl also did some of my current job when she was in Prairie Star, working with the district youth. It was good to see her again, along with my colleagues Dori Davenport and Michelle Richards. At any rate, keep an eye on this space…more to come!
Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie 
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