While all churches often struggle with summer attendance and engagement, small congregations often find this to be a particular challenge. Here is an innovative way that two small congregations outside of Toledo, OH found to engage their members over the summer.

First Universalist Church of Lyons, OH is a small congregation in a rural part of Ohio. They decided to try a summer experiment to see if their members were more engaged. Here is the story told by the congregation's moderator, Megan Bovee.

Briefly, our impression is that church attendance in general, and summer attendance in particular, is challenging, especially for small congregations.

In Lyons, we decided to try a 13 week Sunday evening program to replace Sunday morning services June through August. We had an outside consultant from Toledo UU graciously lead a 1 1/2 day organizing/planning meeting, we set the agenda and budget, promoted it, and were pleased with the results.

We called it our Summer Series. We rearranged our sanctuary into a more circular arrangement to represent inclusion. Most programs began with 20-30 minutes in the sanctuary with joys & concerns, poems and discussion on the topic of the evening. We then usually had an activity related to the topic. Sometimes we moved outdoors or to the kitchen/basement. These are a few examples:

• Flower Communion: discussion of Norbert Capek and the flower communion tradition followed by creating porch planters to take home and share with others
• All Creatures Great and Small: presentation on the interconnected web and our responsibility to care for all creatures followed by introduction of a local animal rescue group and interaction with some of their animals (kids loved this!)
• Joys & Concerns: dedication of the entire service to the value of sharing our joys and concerns and supporting each other followed by making beeswax candles for home and church use.

Our summer attendance was up, our younger people were more engaged and we welcomed some folks who we don't see very often. We are compiling ideas for Summer Series 2025.

At the same time, the Maumee Valley UU Congregation in Bowling Green, OH, also a small congregation, tried running a similar Summer Series. They explained their process as follows:

Since we are lay-lead, setting the schedule for the full 13 weeks made life so much easier on our leaders. We kept the schedule posted at the church. A day or two before each service, we sent out an email reminding everyone of the program for Sunday night. Every Monday we shared a photo collage and a reading or poem from the Sunday night service with everyone on our email list. At our final Sundae Sunday Summer Series Celebration, we summarized the highlights from each service and put up a photo display. We are leaving it up in the basement to remember our summer energy. We also now have giant sticky notes near the photos so folks can write down programs they would like to see included next summer. We would be happy to share the topics we used for all 13 sessions.

If your congregation is looking at new ways to engage members and your community during the summer months, please reach out to your Primary Contact and we can connect you with these and other congregations experimenting with new formats. Both of these congregations are willing to share their topics they used and would love to talk with other congregations doing similar things or those who are interested in replicating their process.