Greetings, my name is Reverend Sunshine Jeremiah Wolfe and I serve as Congregational Life Staff for the Central East Region and I offer our greetings to you. On today's Vlog we are talking today about some incidents of folks disrupting worship, particularly in the past year. We've seen an increase in this across the region and across the country and just in the past month we've heard of a number of congregations experience incidents, everything from strangers, from the outside coming in and sharing their concerns about the congregation in the middle of a worshipful time. It could be during meditation or a sermon, it also could be during Open Mic time such as a TalkBack or during Joys and Sorrows time, or just a general discussion time that's happening during worship. And so it could come from people in the community or it could come from people who are visitors to the the congregation or who've never been there before. What we know is that there are some specific things you can do to help prepare for and respond to these incidents should they occur. I will say we do ask if you do experience something like that to report it to your primary contact, that just helps us track these incidents because we are seeing increases and we want to kind of know what's going on in our communities across the board. And if you want to know what those experiences are, you can always reach out to me or to your primary contact, they can help you with that. I'm not going to emphasize a lot on online worship today, we have a number of wonderful resources already created at LeaderLab and you can find the link and information about those resources on responses to worship disruptions such as Zoombombing in the the comments below this video. The things that we want you to pay attention to in any kind of a safety response, in any kind of an incident response, is three things. Preparation. What are the things you can do in advance of an event. so that you all know what to do. Response, which is knowing what those things are, how do you respond in the moment should it happen? And then After Care. What are the things that you do to help the community internalize, understand, process what has just happened and particularly those who may be most affected. And so in thinking about those three steps, if you have somebody who's disruptive the preparation work that you can do is for example, make sure that any paid staff, any key leaders, anybody on a safety team, ushers, greeters, and the worship team, are particularly prepared in deescalation skills. And you can get deescalation training all across the country. Some of it's offered online, some of it's offered locally. There are a lot of local organizations that will do deescalation training, even in rural or far out areas. So you might want to check locally and see what options there are. Also Showing Up for Racial Justice offers a number of online deescalation trainings and there are many others. If you're having a hard time finding one, please feel free again to reach out to primary contract, or to myself and we'll help you. Deescalation training just helps you prepare for the person who's coming in. And the other piece that you can do for preparation in terms of not just deescalation, is just to make sure everyone is greeted. You don't necessarily want to spend a ton of time talking with every single person, particularly if they're a new visitor, because that can scare new visitors off, but everyone should have one point of contact at least upon their entry into your building. Name tags are a good way to ensure that. Just to say that everyone needs to wear their Church name tag or to wear a visitor tag whenever they come in so that you know that the person is contacted, someone that they belong in the community and those kinds of things. And you want to make sure that you have a plan in place for what happens should someone disrupt during worship. So if someone say stands up in the middle of Joys and Sorrows and starts telling the congregation that they're dangerous and that they're supporting Satan or some other weird thing like that, who responds to that person and who helps keep the community calm so that they don't turn something that is meant to be a response into a reaction. And that's an important piece of language. A response means we're going to respond to the situation, we're going to go through number of steps. Reaction is usually not thought through. And so we want to reduce that kind of reactivity as much as possible. So usually the person who's in the chancel, they may respond to the person directly or they may just ask the community to be calm while, say users and greeters respond to that person and say hey we'd like to talk to you in the foyer. We want to hear what you have to say but this space is not the space for it. So whoever you think the person who should respond to those folks in the moment and how that might be disrupted, while also maintaining compassion. Because we do believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, just not the inherent worth and dignity of every behavior. And so if you keep things focused on, we want to hear what you have to say, we may not agree with you, but your behavior is not something that we can condone in this space. So if somebody says something offensive from the microphone, say hey we don't tolerate that behavior here and ask them to either stop talking or encourage them into a place where they can share their feedback but it isn't in the main worship space. So you're preparing for whatever the response will be in the moment. And the other thing to keep in mind is there should be somebody that's helping the community respond, because if you have 20 to 150 to 500 people in a room, they can get reactive themselves. And if they start yelling or shouting at the person, that actually can increase the anxiety in the room and make it harder to diffuse and harder to redirect the person who is engaging in the disruptive behavior. And then after you've done the response, you want to provide some after care to anybody who was involved and that may include the person who was disruptive. Maybe they're having an Alzheimer's moment and you know the dementia made them think that they were someplace that they weren't and they started shouting in worship. They may need some care around how do they calm down and re kind of regulate themselves. Their family may need some care in terms of not being prepared for what's going on. So there may be some pastoral care response you need to do. And then of course the folks who responded, how do we care for our ushers our greeters, our worship associates, our staff, anybody who may be involved in the response to a situation. And if it was in front of the entire congregation, then also is there care that needs to be provided for the congregation. Maybe a listening circle where folks can come and share, wow this really brought all of this up in me and I just need to be able to talk about it. Or direct contact with individuals that we know are having challenges. You should always know you can reach out to your UUA staff, to your congregational life staff, or primary contacts to get support. We do have designated individuals on each of the regions teams, I am the Safer Congregations Team representative and consultant for the Central East Region and I always work with whoever your primary contact will be. And then we provide a number of resources, as I mentioned before there's the one on dealing with Zoombombing, we also are including in this a link to a webinar, which is based on the safety conference that we provided in October called Threats from Without, Care from Within. And that includes literally hours of videos and they, individual videos, so you can watch like if you're just wanting a Safety 101, it'll talk about that. Or if you're wanting to learn more about what is the state of threat from White Christian nationalists, how to do trauma response, things like that there are tons of resources in that webinar and we encourage you to engage with that. And also you can go to the Safer Congregation page uua.org/safe and on that page there are tons of resources as well. I hope that this has been helpful to you. Please know if you experienced something like this, you're worried about something like this, you are not alone. As I've mentioned, we've had a lot of congregations deal with this one over the decades, it's not an unusual event to happen, and it has been on the rise recently. I think because of the state of the pandemic, the phase of the pandemic we're in, where it's not quite done and we're still recovering from the quarantine years, and the state of our political environment, the state of the world, just it's really got a lot of folks amped up. And usually if somebody's being disruptive in worship they're not intent on causing harm, they just want to feel heard, it's just not the right place for them to be heard. And so figuring out how we can navigate that allows us to hold our compassion for them while also making sure our communities have the sort of worshipful, spiritual experience that they need from the communities they choose to attend. I thank you again for all of your time and I wish you a fabulous December and all of the blessings in the coming year. Have a great day.