How will we commit to be with one another - in times of ease as well as times of anguish? What promises are we called to make to our congregational community? How will we act in alignment with our highest values? How does our shared covenant hold us in times of conflict, harm, and repair?

It’s September - time to welcome back our UU congregations returning for the 2024-2025 church year. Of course, not all of our congregations are on the agrarian / academic calendar, and whether we are returning to a brand new church year this month, or rolling into it from a busy summer of...

It will be Love that leads the course of healing for First Parish. A Love that will hold space for tears, for fear, for outrage and betrayal. A Love that will encourage (a word whose derivation is ‘to make strong’) the congregation toward not just healing, but growth.

Summer’s coming! Kick off those flip-flops and slather on the SPF! We’ve got five surefire tips to get more out of your congregational life this summer!

Love is the doctrine of this church….Love is the spirit of this place….We Side with Love…

“Have you been to the bathroom yet?” It’s not the typical pre-workshop conversation my colleagues and I share as we set up projectors, easels, and workbooks for participants. My answer was no, so my colleague proceeded to describe what she found there. There was a beautiful painting in an...

Each Sunday I step into the pulpit and call to worship the congregation sitting in the sanctuary of our 1842 New England Meetinghouse. The sanctuary is simple and elegant. Tall windows line each side, reaching up two stories to the high ceiling, with four chandeliers. The clear panes bring...

What is a covenant? For most of my time as a leader in Unitarian Universalism, I have understood covenant to be the words we use to describe the agreements we make to each other. What I have learned over time is that the words are more like a map. They help us understand the covenant....

As we have engaged UUs around New England in reflecting on living in covenant, we on regional staff have noticed an assumption so foundational that it is often revealed in storytelling but rarely said directly. That is: We can be either in covenant or in conflict, but not both at the same time....

We understand covenants as being an attempt to make promises together that are grounded in a shared understanding of something unenforceable but to which we want, collectively, to be faithful or obedient. However, lots of other stuff can tend to creep into our covenants, too...

So, friends, let’s practice together. I invite you to engage in some reflection about whether and how you are bringing that individualism into your practice of covenant and what a deeper practice of covenant can make possible for us.