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 11 - 20 of 23

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

Maybe you’ve heard the inspirational story about the starfish. It’s often told as a celebration of a young child’s hope triumphing over a curmudgeonly elder’s resignation to the inevitability of encroaching doom. But taking those signifiers out of the story, and it goes something like this:...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | May 25, 2022 | From Centering Gifts

“Hello, who are you?” “I don’t know; I’ve never met me before!” This dialogue is from a comedy skit a friend and I wrote for an elementary school talent show. My comedy career never took off, but this dialogue resonates with me these days, as we collectively emerge from two years of...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | March 15, 2022 | From Practice Makes Possible Blog

Opening words from Artist and Vibe Curator Eso Tolson: I don’t know who needs to hear this but rest is not a reward. You don’t have to earn rest. You need rest. You deserve rest. You are worthy of rest simply because you are a living being. And don’t ever feel guilty for taking time to rest.

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | November 22, 2021 | From Doing Our Inner Work

September is County Fair season in much of New England. In our UU congregations, September is also Ingathering time; water communion time; returning-to-church-time after far-flung summers laden with small jars of water from our travels and foot-long zucchinis from overflowing gardens....

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | August 23, 2021 | From Practice Makes Possible Blog

This video is a portion of the Conversations with Leaders: Dual Platform Future for All Ages webinar that was offered in April. In this video, Wren Bellavance-Grace, New England Congregational Life Staff, talks about trauma and how it impacts our congregations and returning to religious education...

Webinar | By Wren Bellavance-Grace | June 10, 2021 | From LeaderLab
Tagged as: Building Community, Covenant, Faith Development

We all come to Unitarian Universalism in our own way. For some of us, it’s a birthright—I have met a few folks who could trace their congregational roots all the way back over seven or eight generations! Some of us were brought in by friends...

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | June 1, 2021 | From Tending to Tradition

It’s been a hard fall. We made it through a virtual summer after our very first all-virtual General Assembly last June - and here we are already anticipating another all-virtual GA in June of 2021. The election season was both astonishing and surreal. As I write this, many of us are preparing for..

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | November 24, 2020 | From Centering Gifts

Taking a leap of faith can be a risky business. A hundred "what if's" can stop an idea before it starts. But if we aren't finding ways to make leaps of faith together, we will not grow, we cannot thrive. To leap may not feel safe at first, but the status quo is often less safe, especially if we want to remain relevant.

By Wren Bellavance-Grace | April 2, 2019 | From LeaderLab

Some congregations have reduced ministerial hours in recent years, some can no longer afford even a part-time minister, while others have never had ministerial leadership. Whichever category your congregation falls into, this workshop will affirm that this is indeed your church.

By Wren Bellavance-Grace, New England Region of the UUA | April 3, 2018 | From LeaderLab

For more information contact .

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