Dear Families and Congregants,

Back-to-school season is a time for new beginnings at church, too. The summer months offered Ms Leah and me an opportunity to design a 2024-2025 calendar of experiences and activities for children to learn about themselves and others and the world we share. This will be our second year implementing the Soul Matters Religious Education curriculum. Last year’s Soul Matters framework, called “The Gifts of Our Faith,” introduced participants to the value terms chosen by the membership of the Unitarian Universalist Association as a new way to express our covenant. Remember the mnemonic the kids and I showed you during July’s Time for All Ages?–yes, I’m sitting at my desk right now with hands in the air and fingers counting off from one to seven: transformation, equity, pluralism, justice, generosity, love, and interdependence. The Soul Matters framework this year is “The Practices of our Faith.” This is the year to dig into the idea that love is at the center of what we do as UUs. How does love transform us? How does that loving care make us act equitably? How does it inspire us to honor pluralism, demand justice, share generously, and embrace interdependence? The Soul Matters curriculum leads participants to embody the love at the center of Unitarian Universalism by doing. Those verbs are critical. It’s not the static value terms themselves that are the practices of our faith, not equity, for example, but acting equitably. As they learn more about practicing Unitarian Universalism this year, there will be a lot of activity in the Children’s Sunday Morning Community indeed!

That brings me to another new beginning inspired by this summer’s reflections. Rather than calling the weekly RE gathering on the playgrounds and in the classrooms a “program,” I’m trying out a new name: Children’s Sunday Morning Community. This emerged from studying UU Theology during a course I have been attending the last couple months for DREs and other UU religious professionals involved with children and youth. “Community” in the new name chimes with this year’s focus on “Practices of Our Faith.” Learning to live in community with others, treating others with love and care on a Sunday morning and throughout the week, is practicing our faith. Whether we call our organizations fellowships, societies, or churches, I have long believed that UU groups at their best are model communities where people can practice working and playing together effectively based on the covenant we uphold. So, on Sunday morning our children, just like the adults in the sanctuary, gather not in a “class,” “meeting,” “course,” or “program” but as a community where we all care about, and work to ensure, each other’s well being.

Let us practice our faith this year and in the years to come, and may we live in Beloved Community, a phrase favored by Martin Luther King, here at UUFS and out in the world.