Looking After One Another

This is my last report at Board President and I want to thank you very much for a wonderful time of discovery and deepening commitment. I am very honoured to have had the opportunity to serve you. During my term as Board President, my goals have been to enhance an already vital and vibrant community, by improving communications among church leaders, helping our church to be a safe place to take risks, and supporting a new concept for our church, Shared Ministry.

I am very pleased with the progress toward these ends, especially the creation of our Shared Ministry Team (Don Ayre, Barbara Fuller, Carolyn Hill-Carroll, and new member, Pat Lane) and their hard work over the past year to work together with Millie to create a plan for the 2011-12 church year. The mandate of this important group is “to strengthen the quality of the congregation’s ministry”, with Ministry defined simply as what the congregation does in pursuit of its religious mission among its own membership and the wider community.

As you may have read in my reports (perhaps too many times) since Millie’s installation, ministry is not just the responsibility of the minister. We each have a responsibility to “minister” to each other. In the UU denomination, Shared Ministry teams are designed to track the heartbeat of ministry within a congregation - how the members take care of themselves and each other, as well as how the lay leadership and the minister serve a congregation. Shared Ministry teams seek to understand, assess, support, and advocate for robust ministry throughout congregational life.

On the road to this lofty goal, your Shared Ministry Team is organizing a Covenant of Right Relations workshop following the service on Sunday, November 6th. You will be hearing more about this initiative in the coming weeks and please see their article in the Communicator newsletter and on our church website.

We currently don’t have a covenant of behavior for the congregation. Essentially, a covenant establishes some agreed to "ground rules" to support positive relationships through times of change. And since change is constant, no better time than now! So, I hope you will support the team’s proactive initiative at a time when things are going well….certainly better than waiting until we are in the throes of conflict! Our Covenant of Right Relations will be created by us and for us and personally, I think the process of developing it will be as important, if not more so, as the final product.

For examples of covenants from other Canadian UU congregations, please click on the following links while connected to the Internet:

• Unitarian Congregation of Saskatoon
• Lakehead Fellowship in Thunder Bay
• North Shore Unitarian Church in Vancouver (click on Covenant of Good Relations)

In Faith,

Craig Edwards