Greetings to all Members and Friends,
Your Board of Trustees has been working hard, and we are excited to share our progress with you. We are confronting some of the systemic problems that have hampered UCN over the past decade, and we’re starting the process of forming a vision (a congregation-wide endeavor) to guide us forward over the next decade.
Traditionally the UCN Board has had one retreat (a longer meeting, lasting about five hours, to dig deeper into larger issues that can’t be appropriately addressed in our monthly meetings) each year. This year we have already had two, with more to come. In addition, each member of the Board has read Moving on from Church Folly Lane: The Pastoral to Program Shift by Robert Latham. The book expertly examines the challenges frequently faced by UU congregations of our size. The problems identified match precisely with many of the issues UCN has faced and continues to face. We recommend all congregants read this interesting and insightful book. Copies will soon be available on loan from the church office.
We have agreed on six goals for the Board for the coming year:
1) Creating a Religious Mission Statement: As Reverend Latham convincingly explains, a church will stagnate unless it has a succinct, well-understood religious mission statement to guide it. The mission statement should be reworked on occasion so that the current members feel fully invested in it. We think now is the perfect time to reestablish our mission.
2) Forming a Behavioral Covenant: We are a congregation made up of kind, moral people, but we don’t always interact with each other as well as we could. Forming a behavioral covenant, steeped in UU Principles, will allow us to hold ourselves and each other accountable.
3) Communications, Plan, Procedures and Policies: The world has changed dramatically with new electronic communication (Facebook, Twitter, email, etc). We want to make appropriate use of these tools and enhance our church-wide communication systems so that information is shared accurately, quickly and respectfully.
4) Education on Size Transition: Our church has hovered in between a pastoral sized congregation and a program sized congregation for years. As outlined in Church Folly Lane, stagnating in that in-between zone for too long leads to all sorts of problems. We want to explore the causes of this stagnation with you, so we can break through this barrier and become a more powerful force for religious liberalism and social justice in Hampton Roads.
5) Analyze Our Organizational Capacity: We will examine whether we have the appropriate amount and allocation of staff and related resources to grow into the more dynamic and effective congregation we want to become.
6) Support Our Committees and Task Forces: It is vital that the Board provide support to the many groups doing important work in our congregation, especially newly-forming task forces like Dreamcatchers II, the Emergency Planning Task Force, our invigorated Membership Committee and the new Leadership Development Team.
We hope you join us after the service on Sunday, December 18th for the Board’s first Listening Session of the church year. UCN has many, many wonderful attributes already, and our potential is enormous. We are proud to serve as your Board, and are excited about the future of our congregation.
Sincerely,
Chris Holbein
Vice President
