Ministers Musings
The Reverend Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry
A Time for Dreaming
You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth, for the hour of new clarity.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
A few weeks ago, we had the excitement of bringing lots of members and friends in the congregation together to meet with UUA consultants to help us chart a course for our future. In a packed weekend, we shared our history, learned about some of the challenges to being a congregation of our ‘size’, discussed our growing pains, and celebrated lots of things we are doing right!
One of the clear outcomes of this visit was an understanding that we need to sharpen our vision and mission as we embark on this new chapter of our congregation’s life. The Board is already making plans to have a UUA-sponsored Searching for the Future weekend early next Fall to enable us to move forward to this end.
I know the Fall seems like a long way away for folks who are ready to “move forward and together” toward creating physical space that matches our growing congregation’s needs. But it would be foolish to do so without clearly articulating a vision for who we want to be in this new space. For example, if in our visioning we fi nd that we want our Religious Education program to serve people all week, we would need a different kind of space than if we learned that our real passion is to serve immigrant workers. Our space should serve our needs, not dictate them.
Between now and then, however, what are we to do? Sit around and wait? No … sit around and dream! It’s time to engage our imaginations so that when the next big weekend comes, we’ve spent some time painting a picture for ourselves, individually and collectively, about who we are and where we are going. I’m not talking about structuring formal conversations; I’m talking about percolating together during coffee hour and in small groups, at 8 @ 8 Dinners, during the Talent Show, at Young Adult gatherings and committee meetings. Let’s start asking ourselves — in easy focus — things like …
- If our congregation were a chapter book, what would this chapter be titled? What about the next one?
- What is the metaphor for our congregation? The metaphor for the Chico, CA congregation I served was “a liberal oasis in a conservative desert”.
- Five years from now, what is happening on Sunday mornings? Who’s here? What kind of music is there? What programs are there? What’s happening during the week? What about 10 years from now?
Let us use this fallow time to open ourselves so that the future may enter us in its own sweet time.
With much anticipation and wonderment about our possibilities,
Lydia