Transcript: UUA Southern Region April 2024 Vlog on

Choose members who are well respected and trusted based on their spiritual maturity and deep listening skills. Conflict transformation requires vulnerability, which requires trust.

The need for our congregations to effectively engage with people online has never been greater! In this free five-session series, Peter Bowden shares video-based strategies to support online visitors, increase engagement with weekly worship themes, and amplify advocacy and witness efforts.

People of faith who long for a transformed world are called to claim their Spiritual Leadership. Our souls need it. Our congregations need it. Our world needs it.

Volunteer considerations and strategies that will help to create a culture of generosity in your congregation or organization and therefore, sustainability.

Unitarian Unviersalists often look to the Seven Principles as a guide for ethical discernment, but there is another source that should inform decisions, especially for leaders in our congregations: The Five Smooth Stones of Liberalism as imagined by Unitarian theologian and ethicist James Luther...

S-H-I-F-T is a way to remember the basics of emotional systems (Self-Differientation, Homeostasis, Identified patient, emotional Familiy field, and Triagulation) and how they operatin in congregations.

Question our assumptions, include everyone, and choose how we decide.

Congregations become "smarter" as systems as they develop feedback loops that enable the system to learn from its past successes and challenges. Here is a tool that you can use to improve your ministry as well as the experience of your volunteers.

Our living tradition calls us to be lifelong learners, and this is especially true for our leaders. There are many skills and sensibilities that today's leaders need to help our congregations be ready for the 21st century. The UUA has many training resources to assist you!

Leaders understand that processes, tasks and outcomes will not necessarily be the same next week as they were, and they remain agile in approaching situations and answers to questions and issues that arise in their work with congregations; they know that they have to be continually learning and asking “is this the best way to get what we want to achieve at this time?”

Leaders are not only financially generous (although they are that indeed!) but they have and encourage a generous spirit and appreciation of the world; they are quick to inspire others, to give of themselves as well as their time, talent and treasure, and are working to find ways to be a “permission giving” organization that empowers others to move forward with ideas that help fulfill the congregation’s mission.

Leaders understand that it’s not just about skills, but it’s about being able to learn (often together) what’s necessary in congregational life; they understand the difference between technical and adaptive challenges, and find themselves at ease in the discomfort of adaptive work, understanding that no one knows the answers, but that together a way can be found.

Leaders know that so much of congregational life is about being present to and with one another; they don’t have all the answers, but they know how to be with others through the journey of their lives, and the journey of shared congregational life.

Leaders know how to work and play well with others; they understand it’s not about who is right, but how people can work together to ensure the best possible outcome in both task completion and relationship building/sustaining.

Leaders don’t need to be the hub through which everything flows, and they know how to help people come together for specific (and general) purposes; they can connect people to ideas, to each other, and to a greater whole.

Leaders are networked in a couple of ways — first, they are aware of how community can be created, sustained, and nurtured through the use of technology; they realize that today on-line connection serves to deepen what a congregation can offer; second, they are not afraid of technology, and know how to learn through electronic means, and are able to find what they need, or find the person who knows, what they need moving forward.

 Leaders understand that what they might want may not be what others want, and they are open to learning and understanding how the world is different for other people; they understand, too, that those who have been historically marginalized have places in our congregations, and our congregations need to expand their understanding of who is welcome in order to open wide the doors to those who find value in Unitarian Universalism.

Self-differentiated Leaders know who they are well enough that they also know where they stand, and what they will and will not do; they understand the necessity of boundaries, and work within the congregation to ensure that healthy boundaries are in place and are supported; they can be clear in who they are, without requiring others to join them in that same place, but instead to be true to their own self.

Leaders know where their buttons are, and know how to manage their own anxiety; they recognize that anxiety serves little purpose in moving a congregation forward, and instead can lessen that anxiety and help the congregation focus on the issues involved, rather than the anxiety and fear that uncertainty can create; they are comfortable in and with ambiguity.