In this 6-part training, the UUA Outreach team offers tips, tools and exercises to help extend the outreach of your congregation!

Generous givers like a clear message about your mission within a culture of relationship-building. Make stewardship an organic part of membership.

Given the increasing shortage of UU ministers, congregations might wish for a simple way to evaluate their own fitness for ministry. Ministers, likewise, might find an objective scale helpful in discerning whether a congregation is ready for them. This scale is similar to the hoped for outcomes...

We're better together. You've heard this before. And often it is in the context of pooling resources to create something larger than we could offer as a separate entity....

As a movement, we talk about thinking big. We also need to think small. We need mini-ministries. We need to encourage and equip people to create communities and experiences where they are and with what they have.

Congregations are legal entities required to comply with all sorts of legal requirements. While religious institutions might be exempt from a FEW legal requirements, churches are NOT exempt from most. This includes many requirements stemming from being an employer. This post pertains to the UU...

I'm a "stealth greeter" in my home congregation. I go up to newcomers after a service and strike up a conversation about what brought them to church that day, and then I listen. 

Newcomers to First Unitarian Church of Dallas arrive at our doors seeking a path. The Unitarian Universalist tendency to tell people they can believe whatever they want and get involved in whatever they want is both overwhelming and insufficient....

The 1970's heart-throb boy band The Osmonds provided a disservice with their ear-worm hit song "One Bad Apple." They sang, ...

One piece of my job is working with new Unitarian Universalist emerging ministries. There are many ways of becoming a Unitarian Universalist group, including becoming one of the newly formed http://growinguu.blogs.uua.org/files/2015/05/Covenanting-Communities-Fa… Communities. See It is an honor...

Inspired by Full-Week Faith, created by Karen Bellavance Grace through the Fahs Collaborative, First Parish Church of Groton decided to hold a Blessing of the Backpacks. Here are some nuts & bolts, in case you don’t want to reinvent the wheel: Don’t Do It the Night Before School Starts: We...

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a traditionally operated under a model of church that doesn’t acknowledge the kept track of one aspect of involvement in church life, “membership”, which typically means signing a congregation’s membership book and making an annual pledge. But in reality,...

If we’re going to do effective outreach online, we need some insight into the experience of the large and slightly mysterious pool of people we call prospective visitors. Who are they? What do they want? And how do we design our websites for their positive UX?

Belonging to and being a part of a community is an important aspect of congregational life. Many of our members think of their congregations as a second home and think of the other members as part of their extended family. The relationships that we create and nurture by sharing the details of our...

The key to successful outreach amid the changing religious landscape, particularly with the unaffiliated or Spiritual But Not Religious sets, will likely be to speak to why people would want to show up in the first place, not just what can keep them there year after year.

Social media is a great outreach tool for today's congregations, but congregational leaders need to be savvy about how to balance the open-source nature of today's interactive internet with the need to articulate a consistent message in alignment with your congregation's mission and vision...

Sacred Path created a ritual of commitment for the beginning of the "church year."

During budgeting and pledging time, there are often questions about the UUA Annual Program Fund (APF). Here are some talking points!

Let’s get new people immersed in Unitarian Universalism! But how do we know what will delight them? What they’ll find meaningful?

Because our congregations run on money, it's tempting to bring--along with it--assumptions about how money operates in other parts of our lives.  We go to work and we get a paycheck.  We pay the electric bill and the power company keeps our lights on. We pay at the first window...