It is an act of faith, to insist on Joy, and always entails some level of risk. Just as the crocus pushing through mud risks an April snowfall, we are also part of the nature of things that rise up from the muck over and over again, season after season.

[This post is a follow up to "When We Wonder Together" (Practice Makes Possible - March 7, 2023)] In March, the theme for the bi-monthly gathering for our community of practice Spiritual Leadership for Culture Change (SL4CC) was "Discernment for Faithful Risking." We distinguished discernment fro...

In our experience, most Unitarian Universalist congregations are not culturally predisposed to using discernment as a way to determine direction, focus or action. Our congregations generally use "the democratic process" in which group decisions are made by majority vote....

The following is based on content presented as part of the “Staying the Course” workshop at the New Day Rising Conference in February 2021. The full workshop is available to conference registrants through Whova and to new participants who enroll in the UULI course. To stay the course in our...

As we go about our work at this time, the NER staff team keeps learning about the faithful ways UU congregations are meeting the challenges of being and doing church during a pandemic.

Earlier this year, just as the reality of the pandemic was unfolding, the New England Region was planning to host a workshop on “Faithful Risking,” one of our Practices of Spiritual Leadership. Ultimately we ended up cancelling the workshop. While we could have adapted to an online format,...

Faithful congregations take faithful risks. In this post, we lift up examples of the faithful risks New England Region congregations have taken recently. The UU Meeting House of Pittsfield, ME When they lost their longtime minister and realized they could not afford to hire another professional...