Small Group Ministry
See You at General Assembly!
Wednesday, June 24 to Sunday, June 28, 2009
Unitarian Universalist
Association General Assembly, Salt Lake City, UT
- Small Group Ministry Booth: Resources, opportunity to network, share what you are doing in Small Group Ministry.
- Workshop: “Facilitator Training: The Key to Small Group Ministry Success” Rev. Melissa Carvill-Ziemer, Rev. Justin Osterman, Rev. Bret Lortie, Diana Dorroh
Small Group Ministry
Small Group Ministry (SGM) provides a format with which we nurture connections and explore spirituality within our congregations. In supporting Small Group Ministry the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) recommends a number of excellent resources to help you get started and to build relationships with others involved in SGM.
"Covenant groups are a transformational practice through which we, with others, can discover our own underlying assumptions about reality and examine our ways of being, some of which have become so habitual that they seem to us just 'the way things are.' The practice of Small Group Ministry does ask us to suspend judgment long enough to hear respectfully the understandings of others, even those vastly different from our own."
—Hill, Robert L., The Complete Guide to Small Group Ministry: Saving the World Ten At a Time. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2003."As Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregants and ministers, we are humanist, Buddhist, atheist, Christian, Jewish, pagan, eco-feminist, and more. This diversity of religious ideas and theological claims often makes it difficult to find a common ground, a place where we might all stand comfortably as Unitarian Universalists. This challenge is difficult, but not impossible if we step outside the language of classic, Christian theological discourse and undertake a social analysis of group power as a religious phenomenon. We can then affirm the foundation of our religious experience as the regenerating power of life itself. This affirmation unites us all as one religious people who have a diversity of theological perspectives on the human experience universal salvation. We thus begin with an explanation of the way in which we work together."
—Thandeka, The Life of Small Group Ministries.
Last updated on Monday, February 9, 2009.
