Ministers Musings
The Reverend Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry
This ‘n That
I find myself with a few items of interest to share as we move forward into 2008 together.
First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed celebrating December holidays with you this first year as your minister. It can be pretty challenging to meet all the needs that surface around this time of year, and I hope that some of what was offered here at the Fellowship touched you in a meaningful way. This year we explored the holidays through the eyes of children. We started the month off remembering the miracle of all birth as we dedicated ourselves to children in the congregation. We then moved on to looking at birth stories through various traditions — Buddha, Confucius and Venus — for our holiday intergenerational service. On the third week in December, we reminded ourselves of the magic of imagination so prevalent in children, and often lost to us adults. Our final week before Christmas included a lay-led service that filled us with Christmas stories from various perspectives, an intergenerational winter solstice celebration complete with a labyrinth walk, and two Christmas Eve services — one complete with shepherds and stars, the other full of the music of the season. Thanks so much to Katie Erslev for all her extra preparation during December, and to the Fellowship Singers for gracing us with traditional Christmas melodies during the second Christmas Eve service.
January seems like a good time to reflect upon goals that were set way back in September. At my Start-Up, we agreed that I should focus on three primary areas for my first year of ministry: worship, long-term planning and visioning, and what I’ve called ‘care and feeding of members’. Here’s the update:
- A new Worship Committee has been formed and will be meeting in February. The purpose of this committee is to oversee a year-long program of quality worship services that nurture, inspire and challenge the congregation to grow spiritually and intellectually. Please let me know if you are interested in being a part of this committee. I’m looking forward to working collaboratively to brainstorm topics of interest, assess and recommend changes to our Sunday service elements, and include more people in the creation of worship services.
- Visioning and long-range planning is underway with the coming Assessment in February. Please see page 4 of Connections for more information.
- And finally, I’ve been working hard in conjunction with the Caring Committee to better serve the pastoral needs of the congregation. We’ve reorganized the Committee and have two dynamic cochairs — Jill Nichols and Elena Slusser. We’re well on the way to satisfying my personal goal to assure that quality pastoral care is provided to our members and friends, knowing that I am unable to provide for all of that care myself.
February will prove to be a busy month. First of all, I want to encourage everyone to attend the Saturday morning session of the Assessment weekend — February 16. It’s vital that we have a good cross-section of the congregation represented at that meeting. This meeting is the beginning of our charting our vision for the future, and your input matters.
At the end of the month, I’ll be using a portion of my study leave to attend the UUA Conference on becoming a multicultural denomination. Increasing my own awareness of how institutional racism has ‘colored’ my views is important to me. Sheila Brown and Gini Fink are also attending, and we are all looking forward to bringing back information and ideas that will help us all unlearn racism and ethnocentrism.
Unfortunately, I’ve offered our pulpit to colleagues as a professional courtesy the weekend before and the weekend after this conference, which means that I’ll be away from the pulpit three weeks in a row at the end of February/beginning of March. While I’ll miss leading worship with you, I expect the benefits of the conference to greatly outweigh this disappointment.
It continues to be a joy and an honor to serve as your minister,
Lydia