Most of us have the front door pretty well covered on Sunday morning. We have our greeter teams in place, we make our visitors use red coffee cups or special nametags, we introduce them to our friends, and we make sure they know where the bathrooms are....

If any committee is a natural for Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations, it should be the booktable committee. A bookstore, booktable, or bookstall can not only feed the hunger of congregants for UU-related books, but can make it easier for religious education classes and other groups to get the...

When the UU Church, Eugene, OR (214 members), started holding two Sunday services to relieve overcrowding, the reaction was mixed. Most people felt that the change, although it upset familiar routines, was necessary for growth to occur, says Martha Osgood of the membership committee....

Think back to the last time you were asked to chair or serve on an important congregational committee? Did it feel like: I thought you'd never ask. I was just going to ask you if I could do that. A death sentence. It may be too much to expect that we will be overjoyed when we are asked to take on...

The voice of experience belongs to Deirdre Shaw when it comes to attracting young adults to Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations. Three times in ten years she tried to form a Young Adult group in her own congregation. Twice she failed. But the third time she succeeded and now on any given...

When you first joined a Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregation, were there questions you wanted to ask, but no one to ask them of? Were you reluctant to bother the church staff with something you were sure they had heard a hundred times before?...

We see them under our coffee cups at social hour. They are the little people darting around our kneecaps. Or they are the teenagers and young adults lurking on the edges of our congregational gatherings. We see them but we don't always have much to do with them, busy as we are with our own...

Q.My church has about 175 members. We have always had a fulltime minister and part-time secretary and custodian, but we began paying our half-time director of religious education about ten years ago and recently began paying a quarter-time music director....

Congregations that want to grow might think that advertising is the only way to attract members. But there's another option for UUs who are willing to put their principles to work. Social action can help build your membership, even as it boosts your local community. It's also much less expensive...

When visitors come through our doors most of us are pretty good about making them a nametag, introducing them around, and making sure they know where coffee hour is held. But once they become members, sometimes we're a little less sure of how to relate to them....

Could your bathrooms pass the sniff test? How you answer that and related questions can make all the difference when visitors decide whether your church is worth a second look. When Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations think about attracting visitors the very next thought is often of...

How many of these vignettes sound like your congregation? At your last annual meeting, twenty-seven of your 181 adult members showed up. The budget and a proposal to hire a part-time bookkeeper couldn't be considered for lack of a quorum....

There are moments in each of our lives that stand out because they mark the beginning of a significant chapter—graduation from high school or college, the birth of a child, achieving a major career goal. Many of us can also remember with great clarity the first time we stepped inside the church...

Religious educators have always known that making Religious Education (RE) programs fun is the best way to attract children. Some have also discovered that it's the best way to attract teachers, too....