Communities and Tools for Religious Education Professionals and Lay Leaders
By Lauren Wyeth
Your UUA’s Faith Development Co-Lab hosts quarterly Religious Education Meet-Ups for religious education professional and lay leaders. Register here to attend the 2024-25 year's Winter and Spring RE Meet-Ups.
As we dig into a new congregational year of religious education (RE), you might find it useful to try out a metaphor. As a religious education professional or lay leader, imagine you belong to a community garden. In this community garden, each UUA member congregation has its own plot. Each congregation's plot is part of the larger community garden, but each congregation makes their own choices about what to plant in their plot, how to nourish what they're growing, and how to use their harvest.
Here are some tools for your UU religious education garden.
In this metaphor, religious educators are gardeners. At the Fall 2024 Religious Education Meet-Ups, religious educators met with fellow gardeners in the community, shared seeds and gardening advice, admired what is growing in neighboring plots, and sorted through a well-stocked community tool shed.
We invited each participant to describe their religious education program as if they were describing a garden. We asked:
- Who is nurturing your garden?
- What has been planted?
- What is beginning to sprout?
- What is growing vigorously?
- What needs pruning back?
- What is dying off?
- Who is being fed by your garden?
The community garden metaphor is well-suited to describe the potential and the heartbreak that can be part of building and caring for a religious education program in a congregation. Many of us have a complicated relationship with gardening. Sometimes our seeds don't sprout, or we discover the soil isn't right for what we planted. We might expect the rain to keep our garden watered, and discover it, too late, parched and dying. Or maybe our garden is tangled with invasive species we can’t keep at bay.
We might have a complicated relationship with our religious education “garden plot” too. But we stick with the work, dreaming of what might grow. We know that sometimes the bushes are thick with berries. We stumble upon a perfect tomato. We can’t keep up with the zucchinis. A thriving garden is so full of bounty, such a source of joy and sustenance. We long for that kind of bounty for the children, youth, families and adults of all ages in our religious education programs: Lives enriched by a deep sense of meaning and purpose; striving to make choices that reflect their values; and knowing in their bones that they belong, are valued, are loved.
For a garden to thrive, we count on the everyday miracles of the cycle of life, and two more key ingredients: Community and Tools.

- We need vibrant, engaged Communities that work together to bring a religious education program to life. The community of a religious educator includes others in our own congregations – staff and lay people who value and share in the work of tending the garden – as well as companions we find in other places, who deeply understand what we're trying to do because they’re at work in their own plots in other parts of the community garden. We count on each other for support.
- And we need Tools. Best of all is a well-stocked communal toolshed, full of things that make our work easier, all kinds of tools we can borrow and try out to help our gardens grow. Tools religious educators might find valuable could include RE curriculum and youth group activity ideas, a job description for members of an RE committee, a youth safety policy, or an outline for a UU summer camp.
Communities and Tools for Religious Educators, a resource created for the Fall RE Meet-Up, contains links to your region’s UUA Congregational Life staff and Youth & Emerging Adult Ministry specialist and a variety of Communities designed for UU professional and lay religious education leaders. Tools are featured on the second page of the document. In videos shared at the Fall 2024 RE Meet-Up — compiled for you here — 12 presenters describe these useful tools, all available for use in your community garden plot.
An important reminder before you dig into the resources: Take care not to make your work harder by choosing more than you can carry. Vibrant communities and good tools should ease the burden of your work. Look for other gardeners who might become your encouraging companions. Look for tools that feel pleasing in the hand and won't make your back hurt. Take tools made for the state of your garden, as it is now, knowing you might find other tools useful in a different season.
May our gardens thrive, may the gardeners thrive, and may our religious education programs be life-giving places of wonder, joy, and community.