DRAFT Mission and Vision Statements

Dear UUCBV Members,

I am pleased to announce that the long journey, to name and claim our church’s mission and vision, is finally entering the home stretch. It has been one year, as of the beginning of this month, since a workshop with church leadership, led by a congregational consultant from the Southwest UU Conference, kicked off this journey for our church. After months of study, preparation, receiving congregational input in multiple forms (from about half our members), synthesizing that input, and (most recently) writing and re-writing drafts, the Mission/Vision Team – the “Dream Team” – now have complete draft statements of mission and vision for you to consider.

Below are the draft mission statement, and draft vision statement. Please note: these drafts are not final. We are, once again, seeking your input. Do these statements, their language and wording, offer our good church a guide to become even better in the future? If you see changes that you believe would help, please share them with us. Based on your input, we will revise these statements, making them even stronger tools to support our ministries in upcoming years.
There are a couple of ways you can offer us this feedback. One is through our blog, The Mission/Vision Journey - http://brazosuu.blogspot.com/ - where the statements have been posted; feel free to leave comments here. Also, you can e-mail uucbvdreamteam@gmail.com with any comments; we will check this address regularly. We do ask that all input be received no later than April 5 – the first Sunday in April – so the Dream Team will have sufficient time to revise and prepare the drafts, first for preliminary board approval, then for our annual congregational meeting on May 17.

It is our intent to offer the final drafts for a yes or no vote to approve by the congregational meeting. We are well aware that attempts to wordsmith by large groups are rarely productive, and all-too-often contentious and heated. Our goal is not to take amendments during the meeting, in order to avoid these problems. Thus, we ask that even small concerns be shared with the Dream Team by April 5.

I cannot say enough good things about the time and effort that Dream Team members Mark Abel, Sue Bloomfield, Carolyn Clark, and Katie Womack have put into this journey. Their work together, to help clarify UUCBV’s shared sense of mission and vision, exemplifies the best of what our church can achieve when we unify on a shared path, toward a shared goal. I thank them greatly, and also thank all of you, for your role in this important work we do together. See you in church!



UU Church of the Brazos Valley
– Mission Statement (DRAFT)

With
Open Hearts,
Open Arms, and
Open Minds,
We seek to
Make Meaning,
Make Connections, and
Make a Difference.


UU Church of the Brazos Valley
– Vision Statement (DRAFT)

The UUCBV knows and values ourselves - and is valued throughout the
Brazos Valley - for:

Our love, warmth and care, with celebration for life’s joys and compassion
for its sorrows;

Our radical hospitality, offering hope and affirmation for all people; and

Our inquiring faith, explored with respect for many paths and sources of
religious inspiration.

In this spirit we, the UUCBV, seek to:

Make meaning
as an ever deepening spiritual community engaging with all we find
sacred;

Make connections
within our congregation and out to the wider community, across
diversities of all kinds; and

Make a difference
in empowering every member to serve others in daily acts great and
small to sustain the world and make it whole.

Suitcase Workshop - Summaries

[Here is the two-part summary from the Mission/Vision Team (AKA "The Dream Team") of the input gathered from our congregation during the "Suitcase Workshops" held in late September and early October.]
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Unitarian Universalist Church of the Brazos Valley
Vision/Mission Process through Holy Conversations

In our journey towards our Vision/Mission statement, we are trying to address three core questions:

Who are we?
What are we being called to do?
Who is our neighbor?

In the Suitcase Workshops held in September and October, we focused primarily on the first question, although the second began to be addressed as well. What follows is the summary of what we learned from those workshops.

Who are we? We see ourselves as a church grounded in fundamental values that we share with all churches: values like respect, commitment, and trust that sustain us in the past and present; and values like hope, promises/covenants, and acceptance of change that orient us to the future. As one person wrote, we seek to be “the best us we can be.” Our particular identity as Unitarian Universalists is expressed in a belief system that comprises our uniqueness: a deep valuing of individual liberty, autonomy, and freedom, but with a strong emphasis on acceptance and tolerance of diverse peoples, beliefs, and ideas. We see this as a kind of individual/interconnectedness continuum that gives rise to a deeply compassionate community that is loving and profoundly supportive, what one person expressed as “mindfulness of the Other among us.” While this could be true of a secular organization, what we see as constituting our identity as Church is how we express this through our practice of worship, which is shaped by our spirituality (unique for us in that we recognize and value each person developing their own spiritual beliefs) and by our commitment to intellectual inquiry. Our various church programs and especially our religious education programs for our children and adults is an outgrowth of this, as is the way we treasure our children and members of all generations for the gifts of life and wisdom they bring us. If we think of all of these characteristics as the lifeblood of ourselves as Church, other characteristics can be thought of as the “walls” that surround us: our buildings themselves, our delight in nature and all other forms of beauty, leadership, financial support, and humor.

We express who we are through our commitment to social justice, community service and outreach, and our involvement in social events, and this begins our answer to our second question, “What are we being called to do?” This was particularly evident in the time-journey stories that were generated in the workshops, in which several themes predominated: high visibility in the community, locally and nationally; resiliency and perseverance through difficulties that enabled us to become a thriving and successful church; growth in size and influence; a vibrant and highly effective social justice program; and being housed in a functional, energy-efficient building on beautiful grounds.

As we considered our journey into the future, the most noteworthy things that were left behind were unhelpful attitudes: negativity, divisiveness, inaction, unequal sharing of the load….these attitudes were seen as impediments to progress. Tangible things mentioned that should be left behind included property/building problems, the train (lots of hits there!), and some administrative structures and practices. Not surprisingly, many more things were in the suitcases rather than outside of them!

____

As we continue our Holy Conversations, we want to build on what we know about who we are and move on to a fuller discussion of the other two questions.

· What are we called to do? This is essentially the purpose question. Gil Rendle and Alice Mann, in their book Holy Conversations, elaborate on this question.

Based on what we know about ourselves and our situation, what do we believe we are to do? How are we to develop or mature?....Is this the time when we need to reach inside to address our fears and mature our spirits? Or, is this the moment when we need to reach out and serve others? Can we effectively do both? To what are we now called?

· Who is our neighbor? This is the contextual question. Where do we live in time and space? Rendle and Mann elaborate:

It has been said that the secret of life is knowing what time it is. Is what we are doing, at the congregational level, appropriate for this historical moment?....The [separate] issue of space is, in part, where we are located, but it is also about the area of influence that we have developed. Are we connected, are we called to be connected, to the people who geographically surround our congregation or to another [specific] audience not defined by geography?....Who are those others? How do we recognize and know them? How do we speak and relate to them in ways that can be heard and understood?
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[In a few days, we will also post summaries of the input from the November "Cottege Conversations." In the meantime, we welcome feedback in the Comments section of this post. (Just click the link below that says "# comments" - please remember to sign your post, and let us know who you are!)]

six-word memoirs capture UU wisdom

The recent best-seller, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (edited by Smith Magazine from submissions on smithmag.net), has helped launch what Time Magazine has called the "Haiku Nation" where "short is in....These days digital eloquence is defined by pithiness." Well, UUs are nothing if not hip, so those of us on the Dream Team thought this 6-word-memoir-thing would be a fun and useful way to explore some possible answers to the three great questions that we're using to frame our Holy Conversation about our future: Who are we? What are we being called to do? and Who is our neighbor?

We're starting with our first question, slightly reframed:

WHO DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

and our invitation to you is for you to post 6-word responses (as many and as often as you'd like) here on our congregational blog. Here are a couple that should encourage you, given their low quality level:

Little liberal church on conservative prairie.

Friendliness, acceptance, coffee--who needs more??

(see, you easily can do better!)

We'll select a few that we deem memorable/funny/clever/smart or something and highlight those at the service on Sundays. After a few weeks, we'll move to the second question, then to the third, so by then we'll all be experts at this!

But be warned: This is addictive!!

Thanks in advance--

Your Dream Team

[NOTE: To leave a comment, click on the link just below this line that shows the number of comments already made. Please do NOT leave anonymous comments - we want to avoid people outside our church making unwelcomed posts.]

Welcome!

Welcome to the Mission/Vision Journey. This blog will keep the members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Brazos Valley informed on the process of articulating our congregation's shared mission and vision. Check back regularly for posts by members of the "Dream Team," the team of church members who are facilitating the conversation around our mission and vision as a church. For more info, e-mail uucbvdreamteam@gmail.com, or contact one of our members directly. Thanks!
- Mark A., Sue B., Carolyn C., Katie W., and Rev. Eric P.