Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Weaving the Web

November 3, 2006
Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern

As we set out on the journey of discerning what kind of religious leadership we want in our next chapter as a congregation, we are making choices about our most important priorities. I am a big fan of careful, conscious priority-setting. After all, we can’t do everything we can envision at any given moment, especially in a community like ours that dreams big and has endless creativity of imagination. However, as the discussions heat up and the anxiety level rises, I want to dispel the fears that we don’t have the resources to do everything we need to do, or that we have to make choices such as whether to have pastoral care or religious education. We aspire to be like a family, and a family takes care of all of its members.

As Ed Zebroski noted before we chose three particular priorities at last winter’s congregational goal-setting meetings, some of the tasks of the church are like eating, sleeping, and breathing. There are some things we will do no matter what, because they are the backbone of a church, the pillars on which we stand. Pastoral care is one; religious education is another. So are worship, social companionship, and justice. There is no configuration of staff or programming that would let any one of them fall.

Nor is any one of them limited to one generation. We all need pastoral care, for example, and as a religious community, we provide it to each other regardless of age. We have Baby Café to support parents when they first bring a child home, and Get Better Bistro to support members of all ages when they are ill or recuperating from surgery. Some of the pastoral care I have provided as a parish minister has been sitting with a member and his family as his life-support is shut off, sending cards to members who were once deeply involved in running the congregation but have grown too frail with age even to come to services, meeting with a couple with young children whose marriage is in crisis, counseling a member who is considering a dramatic career change, listening to a teenager who is in a stormy relationship, helping a couple think through whether to terminate a pregnancy, planning a funeral with a family. Because of her intimate involvement with parents, teachers, and children, Darcey often hears first about their pastoral needs, and we have been particularly fortunate that our religious educational professional has a gift for pastoral care as well as in-depth training in and comfort with these issues. We will ensure that whoever leads our religious education program next either has the ability and time to respond to them, or lets the minister(s) know about them.

We are very fortunate here. Our resources are not infinite, but they are so abundant that all our options are good ones and we need not compete with each other to meet our needs. Shall we have intergenerational worship during one of the Main Hall services or have a family chapel (or some of both)? Shall we hire more office staff and save volunteers some time, or use the money another way and require each committee to do its own copying, mailing and data entry? We are lucky to have such choices. Let’s make them in the spirit of a loving family, promising everyone that their needs will be fulfilled.

— Blessings,
Amy