Wren Bellavance-Grace

Full name: Wren Bellavance-Grace (she/her)

Congregational Life Staff

New England Region in Congregational Life

Email: wbellavancegrace@uua.org

Telephone: (617) 948-4258

Wren loves working with lay leaders and religious professionals serving congregations of all sizes across New England. She serves as the New England representative on the national Safer Congregations Team, which curates best practices for safer church communities and responds to misconduct and ethical breaches.

Before joining the New England Region, wren was a religious educator. Through a fellowship granted by the Fahs Collaborative at the Meadville Lombard Theological School, she authored a paper, Full Week Faith, which proposed a new approach to our ministries of faith formation in response to the social, demographic, technological, and spiritual realities of 21st century America.

From Wren Bellavance-Grace

Displaying 1 - 10 of 22

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

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | January 29, 2024 | From Covenanting

We are a species wired for connection, for collaboration, for community; various fields of study have affirmed and documented this. But when did you know it? Maybe you were fortunate to grow up in a country, a culture, a church, a home where community was as central an element as water and air....

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | November 29, 2023 | From Practice Makes Possible Blog

Julian, do you not know? Do you not know about sorrow? And Julian, do you not know? Do you not know about pain? As our November newsletter was approaching final edits, horrific news of our country’s 565th mass shooting of the calendar year broke out of the city of Lewiston, Maine. As sometimes...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | October 31, 2023 | From Centering Gifts

My grandparents had a découpage plaque by their front door with President Kennedy’s famous words, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” A simple collection of words I could read for years before I started to really consider what they meant, and what...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | August 21, 2023 | From Practice Makes Possible Blog

“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...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | March 7, 2023 | From Covenanting

Leadership in our dominant culture tends to evoke images of politicians inspiring crowds with fiery speeches, or breathless heroes leading the charge. But church leadership isn’t a political campaign or an action movie. Many of us engage in church life through meetings — of boards, committees,...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | January 24, 2023 | From Doing Our Inner Work

It’s the waning days of 2022 as I write this; it will hit your inbox in early 2023. The turning of the Gregorian year begins with January, named for the Roman god Janus, the god of two faces - one looking ever backward, one looking ever ahead. God of transitions. Of liminal spaces. Of moving out...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | December 14, 2022 | From Tending to Tradition

“I will not sink to your barbaric behavior.” I was ten; my sister was six. I knew more multisyllabic words than she did and she leapt at me with her little fists. I just sat there until mom arrived and punished her for hitting. Of course I loved my sister, but I’d already learned that words...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | September 22, 2022 | From Doing Our Inner Work

“How are you?” I asked my DRE colleague on our recent phone call. Her response was not exactly typical, but becoming more familiar. She’d had a bout of Covid about six or eight months before. Although she’d been quite sick, it could have been much worse, and she was grateful for the vaccines...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | August 23, 2022 | From Practice Makes Possible Blog

Recently, I gathered around our dining room table with my daughter and her 7-year-old to play a game of Right, Left, and Center. It’s a portable game involving dice and chips that get shifted to the right, left, or into a center pot. As bedtime neared, we packed the dice into their box and my...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | June 16, 2022 | From Practice Makes Possible Blog

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photograph of a woman, head and shoulders, against a lavender background

Wren Bellavance-Grace, Safer Congregations, New England Region

Read the Fahs Fellowship project here: Full Week Faith