On Monday and Wednesday mornings, I bring my son to school in South Salem where he will be from 9:15-12:15.  After dropping him off, I head to the closest Starbucks with my laptop where I work until it’s time to pick Zac up.

I once heard the manager here tell some new employees that she’d like people to think “Home. Work. Starbucks.”  She was clear with them that customers should feel comfortable enough here that they want to spend the day.  It’s a policy that works well enough that a little group of us are here so often we’ve become quite familiar with each other.

One of the regulars has gotten my attention today.  Because he’s here so frequently, I know that this middle aged man is the father of a teen-age girl and unmarried.  He’s currently unemployed and started to get sober in AA in October.  He’s here on Monday mornings with a sponsor or other AA friend, generally killing time.  He presents as someone relatively unable to find his way into mainstream culture.  He talks too loudly often speaking the kinds of things one might keep to himself.  He sits in many different seats over the course of a morning, borrows other people’s newspapers and relies on his friends to buy him coffee and breakfast.  They seem to take turns sitting with him, giving him money and offering their time and attention so he can get through the day without drinking.

Today, though, an interesting thing has happened.  Rather than being the one in need, he’s helping one of his caretakers through what seems to be some very complicated mathematical formulas.  It turns out, this man has a particularly sharp mind and in return for these months of companionship, he’s ready to give something back.

And it wasn’t just to his friend that he has demonstrated his new ability to see outside himself.  I’ve been sitting across from him today as I do many days in this crowded store.  An email came in that created an emotional reaction in me and tears welled up in my eyes.  As he was talking to his friend about something I really can’t understand, he handed me a tissue and offered a smile.

In a world in which so many people feel alone, in which so many feel overwhelmed by the system or powerless to change their circumstances, this man and his circle of friends have demonstrated the power of simple kindness and selfless generosity.  They have revealed a potent truth: Together, we are strong.  Together, we can inspire and sustain transformation.

I’m considering buying them all a cup of coffee.

On February 15^th, I celebrate my 6^th month anniversary as your minister.  Consistently, I’m hearing that attendance is up.  People are coming back, new people are showing up – and staying, and even those people who have been around for the last few years are reporting that they’re around more than they have been in a long time.

More people means more energy and can often feel like a sign of life and hope. But, there’s a down side.  Communication becomes more difficult.  In a small congregation, everyone sort of knows everything, but as more people are involved, that model is complicated and people start feeling like they are on the outside, looking in.

In an attempt to reduce that feeling of being on the outside, I will do my best to provide updates.  Specifically, I’ll try to focus on culture shifts and open conversations.  I’ll do this in the newsletter (when possible), in the Society Scoop and on this blog.  If you’re like I am, the best way to read a blog is to have it sent directly to your email so that you don’t have to remember to go looking.  If you don’t mind looking, check our new (and fabulous) web site (www.fusw.org) where you’ll find a link to the Minister’s Blog on the front page (on the left bar).  If you’d rather have it sent to your email, go directly to www.madnessoflove.com and find the “sign me up” box on the right.  I’ll try to keep it short and to the point.

And in that spirit, here are a few things you may or may not know:

•      We have convened an Ad-Hoc Space Planning Task Force to sort through the major issues related to our building.  These include our limited parking, flooding and crowding.  We’ve been meeting monthly and have been doing homework between meetings.  We are hoping to have recommendations based on solid research to present to the congregation before this church year is over.  The members of this Task Force are: John Murray, Susan Greenburg, Jane Lawrence, Ross Crolius, Jon Caplan and me.
•      We now have 11 Worship Associates!  We had our first meeting on January 8^th and agreed to two primary objectives for our work.  One is to provide a think tank for our worship experience, thereby helping me to make decisions regarding the Sunday morning experience.  Secondly, this group provides primary oversight for the details on “minister Sundays”.  They organize ushers and music and, hopefully, will take an active role during the service itself.
•      Our Social Action Committee is becoming our Social Action Council and is under the leadership of Barb Caplan and Irene Jong.  Vivacious and dedicated Joyce Fish is stepping down as chair, but will remain in a leadership position as Institutional Historian.  (Thank-you, Joyce, for all you’ve done over these years!)  The Council will provide oversight and institutional structure for a variety of projects; membership will consist of representatives from each of our social action efforts and the past chairs.  They will meet three times a year.
•      Earlier this year, we decided to create an Executive Committee to provide some managerial oversight.  Previously, the Council was charged with this task, but attendance at the Council was small and inconsistent.  The Executive Committee is a body many congregations use and is generally populated by the elected officers and the minister.  (In this case, because we created this body after the year had started, so our Secretary is not able to participate.)  The Exec meets on the 4^th Tuesday of each month.
•      One of the conversations some of us are having lately is about empowerment.  The current model is to locate authority in the Board so that most decisions, ranging in importance, get pushed up to the Board. My hope is to empower committees with the authority to make decisions and to inform the Board rather than relying on the Board for approval.  We have many very bright and competent members who are dedicated to a particular aspect of congregational life.  In a larger congregation, it makes sense to trust them and to let the Board do their job of governance rather than management.  This is just a conversation at the moment, but I think we’ll start to see some changes.

We’re all going to have to work together to keep information flowing and to make sure that everyone is feeling like the center of the action is exactly where they are standing.  No one is on the outside looking in!

Raise your hand if, every once in a while, you feel overwhelmed by a commitment you made to our Fellowship.  Keep your hand up if, from time to time, you wonder what you get out of all this Society-related busyness.  Keep it up one more moment if you’ve ever felt dread at the thought of showing up on a Sunday morning because someone would be there who is currently or will soon be expecting something from you or because you’re afraid that if you walk in, someone will want something, anything, and you just don’t have it to give.

OK, hands down.  I’ve been with you for five months and I can see it already.  You’re tired.  So much is happening and you, our members, are the engine.  You’ve got your eyes on the details.  The furnace needs to be bled, a key is missing, someone left a broken TV in the hallway, a renter wants a price break, we need ushers for the 2^nd service…Every day is something else.  And it’s not just these nuts and bolts things.  There are many exciting things happening, but for each one, someone is responsible.  Every Small Group Ministry needs a leader.  Every RE class needs a teacher.  Every party needs a party planner.  Do we love some of our work?  Sure.  Do we love being here together in such a busy, vibrant community?  Absolutely.  Can it feel like too much sometimes?  Oh yeah.

My goal, as your minister, is that you spend your week looking forward to Sunday morning.  In the middle of a difficult Wednesday afternoon, I’d love if you held onto the image of yourself at First Unitarian on Sunday morning drinking fair trade coffee and chatting with people you love, singing your favorite songs, resting in the silence, hearing friends share the important moments from their week and otherwise getting rejuvenated.  (OK, I’d love for you to look forward to being inspired by yet another genius sermon, but I’m setting realistic goals.)  I’d like for all of our members and friends and visitors and guests to be excited about Sunday mornings, as I know many of us are sometimes, but not necessarily at all times.

In order to do this, I’ve proposed a new way to do the business of the Society.  There are things that need to be done, and I’m trying to pick up at least my fair share of that so it doesn’t fall on all of you.  But I can’t do it all, even with the help of our fabulous staff.  So, given that reality, the Council and the Board have approved something new.

Every January, we’re going to spend the month populating our committees.  This means that every committee will be empty as of January 1^st and there will be sign-up sheets until Sunday, January 29^th for everyone to sign up for what they want to do.  This will allow each person to know that if you sign up, it’s only for one year.  Next January, the sign-up sheets will be out again with no names on it.  There are a few advantages to this.

You only commit for one year.  There is an exit strategy.

1. You can try different things.  Jump into Green Sanctuary or Social Action or Worship. Think you might like something?  Try it on!
2. Chairs are no longer committed for more than a year.  Every February, the new group will elect their new chair who will serve for 12 months.
3. But, don’t worry!  If you love what you do, you’re welcome to stay there forever.  If you like being chair, and your committee agrees, you can continue in that work.

Most importantly, this is a chance for everyone to think about what you love.  Who are you and who do you want to be at First Unitarian? What is your ministry?  What inspires you?  Rather than thinking about what you think needs to be done, think about what you want to do.  Will everything get done?  Maybe not.  Will we decrease that feeling of being overwhelmed or like there isn’t enough time or even that feeling of dread?  Yes.  And in the end, that’s what matters.  This is a community of faith, a community seeking ways of love.

Let’s not lose our way.

I’m in a rare moment of silence.  As I write, my two year old is asleep, as he has been since I got home from work almost three hours ago.  Today is Christmas.  Not December 25^th Christmas, but Clarke Christmas, which is its own holiday.  This means that my husband’s entire family is currently waiting for us at my in-law’s home in New Jersey.  People have flown in so that the family can, as we do twice a year, spend one full day together.  While I sit here at my desk, listening to the quiet of my home, 11 others are in Oradell, New Jersey laughing and playing and eating…and getting annoyed that the NY Clarkes aren’t there.  Or, at least the two year old.  (My husband and I have no illusions about our place in the pecking order.)

The moment Zac awakes, we’ll kick into high gear and rush him and ourselves out of the house.  But, for now…there’s silence.  It’s a Christmas gift, one of those unexpected treats that can’t be purchased or planned, but must be savored in its unpredictability.  The house is bedecked for Christmas, as is my way.  Every table and countertop was cleared, making room for Santas and nutcrackers and reindeer.  Evergreen garlands delineate the doorways and poinsettias fill every corner.  Gift boxes packed with cookies are piling up on the kitchen table and bags of wrapping paper are on the ready.

And it all sits silently, waiting.  Waiting for the children, waiting for the family parties, waiting for all the food and frolic that will soon break our momentary stillness.  That’s the Advent story.  The pregnant waiting for what is to come.  The silence of anticipation.  Every child has experienced it.  Those moments before the sun comes up on Christmas morning when it’s too early to get out of bed but much too late to try to go back to sleep.  It’s the lying in bed, watching the window for an acceptable time to rise.  Those final moments as the dark gives way to the light and the child is able to break the silence and run about the house yelling “It’s Christmas”.

I’m savoring this temporary silence, accepting it as both rare and precious. No longer a child, I know that the joy of Christmas is as much in the anticipation as it is in the arrival, that wrapping paper is at least as exciting on the box as it is torn and crumpled on the living room floor.  I accept this unexpected gift of stillness before the storm of laughter and music and pictures that are in our inevitable future, gratefully embracing the fragility of Advent.

He awakes.

Tis the season for multigenerational worship!  Both Thanksgiving and Christmas occasion our coming together to celebrate.  Regardless of age, we are joyful about who we are and who we can be, as a community.  Ushered in every Sunday morning with words like “Enter, Rejoice and Come In” or “Come, Come, Whoever You Are”, during multigenerational worship, these words are meant to greet everyone.  Our welcoming congregation is opening our sanctuary doors for all to enter:  young and old, walking or rolling or being carried, folks of all races and family histories and income levels and orientations, all being greeted by the strength of voices raised together.

And once we’re inside, squished into our seats, sitting on the floor, carrying in extra chairs, piling kids on laps, the energy is even richer.   Here we are, joined together by a shared vision of a new world, one where there’s always room, a world in which we have found a way to welcome the Other.

Children haven’t always been part of an excluded under-class, but it’s become that way in so many of our congregations.  It started with the best intentions: we want to meet the needs of different generations, we want to make sure everyone is comfortable, we don’t want anyone to have to be quiet or be distracted by a fidgety baby.  So, we moved the kids out of the Sanctuary.  It happened all over the country.  Unitarians, Universalists, Congregationalists, Quakers- we all did what we thought was the progressive thing; we separated the children from the adults.

But, over time, we’ve found unintended consequences that have serious implications for our congregations and movement as a whole.  If kids aren’t part of the worshipping community, it turns out, they don’t feel like part of the community at all.  Far too many teens claim that once their Youth Group disbands, they’ve lost their church; even though they’ve been going to the same congregation their whole lives, they never felt like they were really part of it.  Young children associate being UU with being in school.  Fun school, maybe, but not radically different from what they do the other days of the week.  On the other hand, children who join in worship feel connected to the community as a whole, understand instinctively what being UU is about in a way that can’t be taught in a classroom, learn skills in a very different way like how to listen and sit still, do things they rarely get to do like sing with their parents and, most importantly, they become part of our community.

Here are a few tips to worshipping with children:

•  Accept that children may not be as still or quiet you might like.
• Let the children around you know that you appreciate their quiet when they have succeeded.
• Introduce yourself to the children.
• Run your finger under the words in the hymnal as the congregation sings so they can follow along.
• Number the parts of the service in the program and check them off when each one is done.
• Families with children should sit in the front so the kids can see what’s going on.
• During Joys and Concerns, consider holding back at first so the children (who are not as easily seen by our ushers) have a chance to be heard.
• Bring a crayon so kids can draw in the program during announcements and other slow moments.
• Talk to kids during coffee hour (non-family) and in the car (family) about what happened in the service.
• From time to time, invite a child’s friend to sit with your family instead of his or her own and let your kids sit with friends or other families.  This encourages community building and normalizing.

At the same time, I’m making changes so that our early service has a more intentionally meditative quality and the later service is a little more animated.  If that will suit your needs better, Come, Come Whoever You Are!  Regardless of your particular needs and desires, we will make room!

Life today isn’t what it used to be.  Of course, you know that.  We all know that.  We may not know what it used to be, but we know…this couldn’t have been it.

As a working mom, I’ve often wondered why my life and the life of all my congregants and of all my friends (and, everyone I run into on the street, frankly) feels so frenetic.  Why does my day begin and end with the same feeling of not having enough time?  What is it, exactly, that I’m doing that, say, my mother’s generation didn’t do?

My mother got married at 18, graduated college at 19 and went to work.  She was pregnant with me four or five years later and left her job, but she didn’t leave the working life.  With two young children, my mother was a very active volunteer, fighting in the 70s for women’s rights and reproductive rights and strong schools for every child.  In our 3 bedroom condo, one room was designated for both the TV and her desk from which she, as far as I could tell, ran the world.

But, with all that world-running, she was still home at 3:00 when we got back from school and she still had dinner cooked each evening when my father returned.  She read us books and planned our birthday parties and somehow managed to have winter coats ready for the first snow.

And now, when she calls me and I tell her I don’t have time to talk, I remember that I never heard her say that to her mother.  There was time.  Even after she went back to work when I was in high school, there was time.  There was still dinner and parent-teacher conferences and rides to the movies and family vacations.

But, today, we seem to have run out of time.  Like too many natural resources, we may have used it all and are now borrowing from future generations.

I’ve been considering seriously how to recreate the experience of having enough time.  To do that, I’ve been carefully watching where my time goes.  Turns out…life isn’t what it used to be.

For instance, when my mother had an errand to run, my sister and I would climb into the back of her car and off we’d go.  If I have an errand to run, I have to put my son in a car seat with a 5-point restraint where he’ll be until he’s 8 years old.  After that, he’ll be strapped into a booster which could last until he’s 12.  (Seriously?  12?  At 12 I was in the driver’s seat learning how to pull the car out of the garage.) In the new millennium, each time we get in and out of the car, it’s in and out of the harness.

When my mother graduated from high school, she maintained 3 or 4 friends, two of whom she remains in contact still. A few times a year, they’d share a phone call and catch up with each other’s lives.  Because of FaceBook and other social media, I’m not only in regular contact with everyone I ever knew in high school (and a few I didn’t), but with everyone from every job I’ve had, and church I’ve joined and volunteer organization I’ve supported.  And their sisters.  I’m not kidding.  Not only am I in contact with a huge circle of people, but I’m in contact with their families- people my mother and her generation I’m sure had warm feelings about, but didn’t hear from weekly.

And with all that contact come far more social obligations.  There’s physically no way to attend every party to which I’m invited, but each invitation requires a response and sometimes a gift and always a follow-up after the event.  And easy contact also means regular contact.  Gone are the days of being inaccessible.  There’s a circle of people in my life who, after calling my home will call my cell and call my work and send a text and follow up with an email and then start again because it’s been half an hour and I haven’t responded yet.  When they get me, the first thing I hear is “Where have you been?” as if being out of contact for a few hours is the same as having left town for a week.  If it takes more than a day to return the call, I’ll hear instead “Is everything OK”?  No it’s not. I think I’m being followed.

I’m starting to suspect that we’ve created a world in which time disappears in tiny increments, not large swaths.  It’s not that my mother had a smaller life, it’s that she had a larger life.  Her life was filled with the big things like her work and her marriage and her kids.  I’m the one with a small life, filled with a thousand emails and text messages slowly pecking holes in my world leaving the time left for real living thin and fragile.

So, now I’ve figured out why we’re so busy.  Good.  Just in time for me to end this blog entry and move on to the next thing.

For the last few months, John Cavallero (our Director of Religious Education) and I have been working on creating this congregation’s first Committee on Ministry.  The Board has approved our plan and we’re ready to get working!

This might leave a few of you scratching your heads wondering what a Committee on Ministry is and why John and I would have prioritized it the way we did.

Committees on Ministry first came into fashion about five years ago after Robert Latham published his book Moving On From Church Folly Lane.  He didn’t create the concept, but he clarified it in a way that hadn’t been done before, making it more accessible to congregations and ministers alike.  Since then, COMs have become the norm in many healthy congregations.

The most important task for a Committee on Ministry is the support and evaluation of the ministries of the congregation.  Ministry is the work we do to fulfill our mission.  One of the first things a COM will do is define the ministries of the congregation (i.e., worship, social action, membership, religious education, stewardship).  Once that’s done, and they have determined the segments of the congregation responsible for each ministry, they begin conversations with the folks engaged in that work to determine how well we are living into our mission.  A Committee on Ministry is not reactive; they calendarize their work so that each ministry is considered on a regular basis, generally when no problem has been identified.  These “evaluations” are not done from the point of view of an outsider; the COM engages the folks doing the work.  In other words, the evaluation is internal.  The Committee on Ministry is only the catalyst for the conversation.  In this way, the COM helps us all know if we are moving in the right direction and if not, what we need to help us get to where we want to go.

Of course, for the Committee on Ministry to be effective, our congregation needs clarity around our mission.  Therefore, the work of the COM for this first year will be less about our ministry and more about defining our mission.  We can’t improve the methods of reaching our goal if we don’t know what our goal is!

The Committee on Ministry has no formal authority.  They do not make policies, they will not make any official changes.  Their power lies in their ability to make recommendations.  But, they do have informal authority because of who they are.  This part is tricky.  For a Committee on Ministry to be effective, the members must be trusted.  We give them authority because we love them and want to hear what they have to say.  John and I believe we have created a very strong COM, having invited Sarita Roy, Lisa deMauro and Mark Davis to be our first members.

In most congregations, members of the COM are hand-picked by the minister.  This is not a model with which I am entirely comfortable.  First of all, John and I have already broken with tradition by working on this together.  More than that, though, I think that you all should have a vote.  Therefore, as positions open, John and I will discuss names and make invitations.  We will then give those names to the Leadership Development/Nominating Committee who will ultimately add those names to the slate and put them up for a vote during our Annual Meeting.

I’m very excited about this new development here at First Unitarian.  I believe that Committees on Ministry demonstrate a collective desire to create congregational health and am thrilled to be on this path with you all.

This blog is almost active!  Stay tuned for regular musings, daydreams, rants and streams of consciousness.  And, yes, maybe even some important information.