Improving your User Experience (UX), online and in person (Part 3)

In this day and age, peoples’ experience with our UU congregations and groups typically begins online. They engage with our websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds, and the feelings and conclusions they develop will lead them towards, or away from, engaging in our communities. I blogged here this summer about the rising field of User Experience (UX): how it can reveal to us the unintentional signals we send to newcomers and how we can learn a lot from our new users.

If we’re going to do effective outreach online, we some insight into the experience of the large and slightly mysterious pool of people we call prospective visitors. Who are they? What do they want? And how do we design our websites for their positive UX?

Creating personas can help. It’s an imaginative exercise, one that helps us “insiders” see things from a different viewpoint.

For a General Assembly 2015 workshop on websites, I developed two personas and “looked” at two congregations’ websites through their lenses (with their blessing, of course!)

First persona: James from East Tennessee. James is a white male high school student, age 17, who identifies as gay. He’s been raised without religion, yet he has had some profound spiritual experiences he wants to talk about with peers. His ideas about the sacred don’t fit neatly into any box. He calls himself agnostic.

james
from Flickr ©Jasn/CC BY-NC 2.0
“James” the persona

James has some questions. He goes to the nearest UU congregation’s website, in this case Oak Ridge UU Congregation, and tries to find out:

  • Is this a place where I can talk about my spirituality?
  • Will they accept me as a gay person?
  • What is there for high school youth?
  • What are the other teens like?

I encourage you to click through ORUUC.org. Are you able to find answers to his questions? How hard, or how easy? It’s a beautiful website. You might notice that right away, the website speaks to his spiritual question. Yes! You might also notice that it doesn’t say it’s an LGBTQ welcoming congregation, though the FAQ indicates that there are transgender-welcoming bathrooms. And where does he know to look for information on the high school youth program? Under “Get Inspired?” “Grow in Faith?” “Be Involved?” He doesn’t really know what any of those three sections are. He’s kind of confused. Even though this is an extravagantly welcoming congregation for a gay teen like himself, he doesn’t know that. Looking at the website he is getting some really positive answers to some of his questions, and is not quite sure about the answers to some others.

family
from Flickr ©Jennifer Borget/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
“Tricia” and her family

Another persona is Tricia. She is 37 years old, an atheist, a teacher, multiracial, and a mom of two. Her husband is white and believes in God. Their daughter is asking them big questions, and Tricia is looking for a place where their whole family can explore meaning together. She lives in Eastern Massachusetts, and she Googles First Parish in Cambridge to find their website. She explores it with these questions in mind:

  • Is this a place that includes people of multiple ethnicities and cultures?
  • What do they believe? Will everyone in my atheist/God-believing family be respected?
  • What do they teach the kids about God and the supernatural?
  • Will the kids like it?

She explores FirstParishCambridge.org and immediately sees text and images that tell her this is an intentionally multicultural congregation. She is thrilled to learn this and thinks this bodes well. She loves what they affirm on their homepage: “You are loved… You are free… Your are called…” She wants to know more about what they believe. Where does she look? The navigation bar says “Home, Welcome, Get Connected, Worship, Children/Youth, Justice and Transformation, Y2Y, Pastoral Care, Giving, and Contact Us.” Hmm. No obvious place to click to learn about beliefs. So instead, she clicks on Children/Youth to learn more about the kids programs. She finds this great page called “What We Are Learning.” “Yes!” She says. She reads about “Spirit Play” and “Moral Tales,” which are both focused on the kinds of questions her daughter is asking: “Where did people come from? What are we doing here? What happens when we die?” She really likes this, and the programs sound like things her kids would love to do. She still doesn’t have the detailed answer she seeks about beliefs, but she’s willing to give the congregation a try.

Using these personas, we are able to imagine the experience of a user, and change our design accordingly. For James, we’d make our inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities much more obvious, with words, photos, and images. For Tricia, we’d create clearer path to find out what UUs believe. For both personas on both websites, we’d do some re-organization and re-titling of the sites’ sections, to ensure our navigation headings are clear, and help our users find what they need to find.

Do you see what James and Tricia helped us see? As Usability.gov makes clear, personas help us write for the appropriate audience, focus our content decisions, test and prioritize, evaluate new content and features, and more. They help us improve our users’ overall experience, by expanding our frames of reference beyond those that have become habitual.

Who do you as a congregation want to make sure you’re reaching? Try creating some personas, some real-seeming people with real needs that might be served by your congregation. You might develop five or six personas, or even more, and look at your website with the questions and concerns of people who are:

  • Different theologies/spiritual orientations
  • Different ethnicities/races
  • Different social classes
  • Different ages
  • LGBTQ
  • In interfaith families
  • Parents of young children
  • Single
  • Going through rough times and needing support
  • Not experienced participants in any religious community

Two cautions in using personas: one, beware of stereotypes and pigeonholing. Just because you changed your site to work well for your persona who’s a lesbian in an interfaith family, it doesn’t mean that all lesbians in interfaith families are going to like what they see on your website! Every person is unique. Two, don’t use personas heavy-handedly. For example, let your atheist persona help you find places in the site that are unconsciously marginalizing people who don’t believe in God. But don’t let your atheist persona demand removal of references to the sacred in order to be welcoming to her! We want our personas to help us clearly communicate who we are: an inclusive and spiritually-diverse movement that is seeking to grow our love and broaden our welcome.

In addition, real people come with a range of abilities, disabilities, and educational levels. Some users may be having a very difficult experience of the site because of the color contrast, the reliance on un-transcribed video content, or the highfalutin language. The UUA’s Web Team offers guidance and tools for building accessible sites. You don’t even need personas to work on making your site work for people of all abilities.

May personas prove to be a fun, creative way to build a more effective web presence for Unitarian Universalism. I would love to hear your stories of what you learn!

 

___________________________

SarahRev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, the UUA’s Outreach Associate for Digital Ministries, will be blogging regularly on Growing Unitarian Universalism about the connections between outreach, growth, websites, and social media.

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By The Numbers: pie for everyone!

I was on Church of the Larger Fellowship‘s The VUU last week on a segment we called Correlations and Covenants.  I talked about data and the implications of knowing who we are more clearly. That’s why I love numbers so much.  They can break down assumptions and help us see ourselves and our context more clearly so we can make better decisions as to how we change our behaviors and/ or allocate resources and so much more. I’m going to try to set aside Friday’s blog post for tastes of data in form of (mostly) pie charts.

 

While talking on The VUU I threw out some numbers and then immediately regretted not having pie charts ready for people to “see” the numbers.  I’d like to remedy that here.  I now present to you two pies…

2015 UUA Congregations by size tkr

 

What was your assumption before looking at the pie chart above? So many leaders at the regional and national level are from mid-size and larger congregations.  We often bring our assumptions that most of our congregations are like our own. And look at that!  Over two thirds of our congregations have <160 members!

 

Another common assumption is that most of our adult members attend the large congregations. Another way to look at that is assuming that most of our adult membership is carried by large congregations.

2015 UUA Adult Membership by size tkr

 

From this pie chart you can see that most of our adult membership resides in the Small and Mid-Size Pastoral size.  The rest of the categories are fairly evenly split.

 

How does this change your concept of who we are as an Association?  How does it change your concept of your own congregation in relationship to the collective? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment area.

 

____________________

red glassesRev. Tandi Rogers spends about an eighth of her job researching and analyzing data on behalf of the UUA Board, Leadership Council, and Congregational Life staff.  She also serves on the Faith Communities Today interfaith consortium of religious data geeks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Join our “cause,” not our “club”

CauseWe know that religion is changing in America, but in those changes there’s a hidden trend. Did you know that what attracts people to a congregation or religious community and what keeps them there are different things? What attracts people is the opportunity for meaning-making, and what retains them as members is the community and friendships they build. People don’t come because they are in search of friends or a community, per se, they come looking for spiritual deepening for themselves and their family and only then may they find a community which enriches the meaning-based experience and makes them want to come back.

This is clearly demonstrated through research. In his book “American Grace,” sociologist Robert Putnam digs through mountains of data to identify some key trends in American religious practice. Here’s a quote from his book: “Americans may select their congregations primarily because of theology and worship, but the social investment made within that congregation appears to be what keeps them there.” (pg 174).

You can see this dynamic at play within Unitarian Universalism, most recently in the multicultural ministries Sharing Project. This survey of UUs from marginalized groups (gender identity, race, ability, etc.) asked why respondents first decided to attend their congregation and then why they continued to attend. The top response for the decision to attend was “I wanted to deepen my spiritual life,” and the top response for staying was “I love the community of people”(page 15, or the 23rd page of the PDF).

Ok, you say, fascinating point, but what am I supposed to do about it? Simple: when you talk about what your congregation offers, think “join our cause” instead of “join our club.” Show what your congregation does, how it helps people live better lives and make a better world, instead of only talking about what a great community you offer. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a congregation say “all are welcome” (including UU, UCC, Catholic, even conservative evangelical!), well, I’d have a lot of dollars but no idea what I would be welcome to spend them on. It’s great that you’re not turning people away, but what are you actually offering them? Seriously, “all are welcome” at the movie theater, but I’m still not going to the movies unless I know what’s playing.

The key to successful outreach amid the changing religious landscape, particularly with the unaffiliated or Spiritual But Not Religious sets, will likely be to speak to why people would want to show up in the first place, not just what can keep them there year after year. Describe what we offer for learning, yearning and working for our values. We can’t assume people are already looking for a church on Sunday mornings, because in fact we’re competing for their time and attention against sleeping in, talking a walk, soccer practice, Facebook and brunch. We have to focus on what we DO as UUs, not just who we are.

To help you think “cause” over “club,” check out the values of the UU brand identity – boldness, compassion, reverence – that are geared towards the most active and authentic spiritual elements of our faith. They’re a departure from the pastoral, supportive, caring community connection values that we’ve often described in the past, but they’re well-positioned to help you get to the heart of our faith movement’s drive to advance our values in the world.

 

______________________________

cmcdonald_headshotCarey McDonald is the UUA Director of Outreach, total data geek and trend-spotter, as seen in his presentation Future of Faith.

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Covenanting Community Highlight: Commitment Ceremony

Sacred Path is a UU religious community in Indianapolis, Indiana that was welcomed into relationship with the Unitarian Universalist Association as a Covenanting Community.

 

“Love, above all things, is a commitment to your choice.” ―Rob Liano

 

commitment-sacredpath brighterAs we enter our fourth year together, Sacred Path held a ritual of commitment over Labor Day weekend. Sitting in a circle, we began by naming and honoring our ancestors: those who helped bring us to this place and time.

 

Our prayers were silent, spoken, and sung.

 

We lit candles and honored the ministers who have served faith communities we have been a part of in the past.

 

We lit candles for each of the Unitarian Universalist congregations in the central Indiana area.

 

We lit candles for our individual spiritual guides and teachers, sometimes speaking their names into the space, sometimes silently honoring their influence in our lives.

 

We named parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles. We named ministers, nuns, teachers, and entire congregations. Some of us named authors, philosophers, and theologians as well as familiar intimates. We named those who lovingly guided us as well as those whose lessons came through difficulty and hardship, all of whom helped us to grow.

 

Before the ritual, each adult, young adult, and youth was invited to bring with them a small token symbolizing their commitment to the community to be left on the altar. People brought stuffed animals, books, cds of music they had recorded, stones, geodes, beads, feathers, pinecones, shiny boxes, poems they had written, and even glitter glue!

 

When the time came, one-by-one we approached the altar in the center of the room and shared our commitments with the community. Sometimes our commitments were named confidently others more softly. Sometimes they were silently placed on the altar along with the tokens.

 

In the next round, we honored our commitment to self for the next year. One-by-one we approached the altar again, sharing our commitments to self-care and growth. Each person received an item from the altar that spoke to them in a special way, while the community bore witness to these commitments and agreed to gently hold one another accountable to them.

 

Finally we honored the joys and sorrows the community had shared over the past year, embodied in the strings of many colors wrapped around a prayer stick made of rosewood that a member had offered for this purpose shortly after last year’s ingathering.  We sang in gratitude then processed outside to burn the stick in a sacred fire, sending its prayers skyward. We concluded by singing, “Spirit of Life.”

 

Afterward, we held a feast outdoors under the stars and the canopy of trees that rises over the land we hold sacred in this time, knowing it is made so by the many who have walked and worshipped here in past generations.

 

We invite everyone in the larger Unitarian Universalist community to keep Sacred Path in your thoughts and prayers this next year. We know all too well the inherent risk in starting something new. It would mean so much to us to feel the supportive energy of others enveloping this emerging ministry!

 

_________________________

lori-photo-squareLori Stone Sirtosky has served as a lay leader with Sacred Path since its inception in 2012. For her day job, she wrangles the technology needs of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Unitarian Universalism’s congregation without walls. The biggest lesson she has learned in working with innovative and emerging ministries is to breathe. Whatever you are dealing with today, rest assured, another seemingly big scary thing is coming down the pike, and you will survive it, too.

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Improving your User Experience (UX), online and in person (Part 2)

UU faces taken during registration and other times
UU faces taken during registration and other times, Photo credit © Nancy Pierce/UUA

In part 1 I began to explore how the principles of User Experience (UX) Design can improve people’s experience of our congregations. Attention to the emotional and informational transactions of the “user” has become deeply important to me: not just because I’m a minister, not just because I’m in the UUA’s Outreach staff, but also because I’ve recently been new in a congregation.

 

I spent months last year exploring websites and visiting congregations with my toddler before I settled on the one I attend now. The incredible friendliness of that congregation made a difference. It wasn’t accidental: the congregation had put work in to their welcome.

 

The first time I visited, no one knew I was a minister, just a mom with a two year old. People greeted me warmly even before we’d crossed the street, and someone offered to carry the stroller that my child was refusing to ride in. At the door, a trained greeter met us, helped us create nametags, gave us a mini-tour, and helped my child find and feel comfortable in the nursery. The nursery was staffed by a paid professional, someone who exuded warmth and confidence. The worship was excellent too – but I was already deciding this was a good place to be before I even set foot in the sanctuary. I had a good user experience.

 

“User Experience design… is about giving people a delightful and meaningful experience. A good design is pleasurable, thoughtfully crafted, makes you happy, and gets you immersed.” (From UXMyths.com)

Let’s get new people immersed in Unitarian Universalism! But how do we know what will delight them? What they’ll find meaningful?

 

When we’re trying to attract new “users,” we can try to get there by thinking about what we like, but we are often not good judges of what a new user is looking for. Especially since many of the things that members like are things that come with time (like community, or ministry through life changes.) In order to design for new users, we need to talk with some of our relatively new users. While we get curious about who they are and we get to know them, we can also get curious about their experience, asking questions like:

  • How did you learn about our congregation? Why did you decide to interact with/visit us?
  • What were your goals when you started interacting with us (online or in person)? Did our congregation meet your expectations related to these goals?
  • What are the most frequent tasks you do on our website? (For example, finding out what’s happening this week.) Is it easy or difficult to accomplish those tasks?
  • What are the most frequent tasks you do when you attend? (For example, get a cup of coffee after the service.) Are there frequent tasks that don’t feel easy to accomplish? If so, why? (For example, having to wait in line for a long time for coffee.)
  • When you are interacting with us online, do you find anything frustrating that you wish was easier/different?
  • When you are interacting with us in person, do you find anything frustrating that you wish was easier/different?
  • What else would you like to tell us about your experience getting involved?
    (The first six bullets are from stackexchange.com, adapted for congregational use.)

 

What we learn from their answers can help us improve the experience of people who interact with us in the future.

 

We can also do some of this work without talking with new users: we can just try to see things with new eyes, as my old congregation did with the parking lot entrance in Improving Your User Experience (Part I). And we can do through the use of personas – another powerful methodology from web development that helps us design for particular audiences. I’ll discuss those in the third part of this series.

 

Even though we can’t control every element of a new user’s experience with a congregation, there is much we can learn, and much we can change, when we make the effort to understand the emotions we’re evoking in the people we’re hoping to serve. A “delightful and meaningful experience” at the front end can lead users to a faith that changes their lives profoundly. Let’s not let a clunky website or confusing signage get in the way. Unitarian Universalism saves lives: may a positive user experience make it so, all the more.

 

_________________________________

SarahRev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, the UUA’s Outreach Associate for Digital Ministries, will be blogging regularly on Growing Unitarian Universalism about the connections between outreach, growth, websites, and social media.

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MultiSite Ministries: the promise of partnership

We want to extend the reach of love in Northern Colorado.

Dana and Gretchen IVRev. Gretchen Haley and Diana McLean kicked off the partnership between Greeley and Foothill churches and explored the theology of a good partnership. I highly recommend their podcast, The Promise of Partnership.

 

“This ministry partnership is not just a partnership between ministers and staff, but also the people of two congregations.. What does this mean? What kind of relationship is it? .. The goal for us (Greeley) is to have excellence in worship every Sunday, and consistency in ministerial presence. The goal for Foothills is to help spread the Universalist faith. We will both benefit from economies of scale, as three ministers will be in relationship with one another and with both churches. This will leave more time for ministers to be with congregants and performing other ministries.” ~ from their podcasted sermon

 

As we began our year together, the lay and clergy leaders gathered to create a covenant to document what we each understood as the promises we were making in their partnership.  To do this, we went around a circle, with each person getting a chance to say one response to the question “What do you think we are doing together?” Responses were invited without comment or dialogue until everyone felt they had said everything they could think of.  Then, we talked through what we each meant by those statements, and fleshed out precisely what we hoped for in the coming year.  From these hopes, we created the following covenant.  As you can see, it includes both practical and visionary promises.  It is understood as an evolving document that we will return to again and again throughout this experimental year.

 

Covenant of Partnership – Unitarian Universalist Church of Greeley and the Foothills Unitarian Church

We the congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greeley and the Foothills Unitarian Church, united in our shared commitment to Unitarian Universalism and the Spirit of Life and Love, and as religious communities each with our unique missions, vision, values and histories, covenant with one another:

  • To grow the Unitarian Universalist faith and strengthen each of our congregations and our impact, growing in openness to new possibilities and claiming a broader vision.
  • To utilize and contribute to the resources of the Unitarian Universalist Association, including providing input about our experiences so that we may learn from and benefit others who are engaging in similar experiments.
  • To form heart-to-heart connections between the ministerial team and congregants as well as across our congregations, creating opportunities for the congregations’ members, lay leaders and staff teams to see one another and build relationship.
  • To share three professional ministers who serve as a team in both of our congregations.
  • To roll out our partnership in partnership – respecting the need to build buy-in in each of our congregations before moving forward on initiatives while also discerning when we need to lead our congregations towards leaping ahead to the next opportunity.
    • We will not merge our congregations, but rather we will act as partners, thinking like a “we” on decisions that affect both congregations.
    • We will work from the assumption that our congregations are equal in faith if not in size or in budget.
    • We will acknowledge and value the different gifts and skill sets each of our congregations bring.
    • And we will “date” so that we might see if we “fall in love” – which means we will pace ourselves.
  • To remain flexible and to keep a mindset of “experimentation,” assuming good intent and bringing up issues before they become problems, and to create a Partnership Task Force who will help facilitate this communication.
  • To leverage economies of scale across both churches, sharing administrative resources especially in the realm of bookkeeping and membership administration, and professional knowledge, including across our religious education and music ministries.
  • To create patterns of interaction that create in both congregations a sense of relief rather than overwhelm – with the value being that this is a mutually beneficial relationship for both communities in both impact and efficiencies.

We acknowledge that we are each new to this partnership and so we assume we will stumble at times and encounter challenges that test the well-intended explicit and implicit promises of this covenant. When these challenges arise, we promise to come together in conversation, and seek help from outside resources as we may need, to seek and offer forgiveness generously, to learn well from our experiences, and to begin again.

 

______________________

Gretchen

Rev. Gretchen Haley is entering her 4th year as the Associate Minister for the Foothills Unitarian Church and as of August, serves as part of the ministry team serving the UU Church of Greeley.   She finds great inspiration from Alice Blair Wesley’s 2000 Minns Lectures, The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church: The Spirit and the Promise of Our Covenant.

 

 

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Improving your User Experience (UX), online and in person (Part 1)

Entrance
Photo by Curtis Cronn, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In the spring, I blogged here about our websites being our front doors. Our websites, our social media presence, and our events that involve the broad community are all important entry-points for prospective Unitarian Universalists. This season, as many congregations return to full all-ages programs and worship, we would do well to think about our actual front doors, as part of our consideration of the overall user experience (UX) of the congregation.

User Experience is a new way of looking at online development: one that has incredible relevance to congregations, online and in person. It’s a holistic way of examining and evaluating the process of getting to know a congregation. The user – in this case, the person who’s exploring your congregation – is going to make decisions about participation based on their experience. That may seem obvious – of course they would. But UX offers tools for analyzing that experience, and becoming more intentional about “curating” that experience.

A user experience occurs in touch points. Every time a user interacts with (or touches) your organization, an emotional or information-based transaction is taking place that can positively or negatively impact the user (the person you’re trying to reach). (Josh Neuroth from “Curating Your User’s Experience.”)

What are the touch points the typical user has when they experience your congregation? They may not be obvious to you. Regular participants get used to the way the congregation is and stop noticing what they noticed the first time they walked in the door.

In my first year as a congregation’s minister, we hired a Membership Consultant. She evaluated the experience of a newcomer outside the hundred-year-old building – a building that had an awkward relationship to its parking lot, which was behind the church. She took notes and pictures, and presented these interesting observations to the Newcomers Committee:

  • Someone arrives in the parking lot. They see four doors to the church.
  • One, up a steep cement staircase with only one handrail, looks official but unused. Probably an emergency exit. That must not be the way in.
  • Another, at the end of a long wing of classrooms, is friendly and attractive—but its sign says it’s a preschool. That must not be the way in, either.
  • When you get close to another door, you see it leads to the trash area. Definitely not the way in.
  • Another door, the one that actually works to go in to the building, is a plain gray painted door, hidden in a corner, with no sign.
  • Someone finally makes it through that plain gray painted door, and the first thing they see upon entering are two refrigerators, one with a sign on it saying it’s out of order.
  • Then they find themselves in a rather dark hallway, which is actually just below the sanctuary where worship is about to happen, but that may not be obvious.

What kind of emotional and informational transactions were taking place there? All sorts of frustrating, confusing experiences – before they ever got in the door or heard a single word.

Let that sink in: before even meeting anyone, or hearing the welcome and announcements when we proclaimed “whoever you are, wherever you come from, we welcome you,” people were having a frustrating and confusing time with us. Our newcomers didn’t know how to get where they wanted to be!

The congregation was a great place for people of all ages, with meaningful worship and vibrant programs. But everyone who participated regularly had figured out the ins and outs of that hundred-year-old building. Their user experience was no longer the same as a newcomer’s – they couldn’t see what a newcomer saw.

In response, members and staff set about creating better signage, moving those old refrigerators, developing a small welcoming area where the refrigerators had been, brightening up the dark hallway, and stationing friendly greeters there every Sunday morning. The newcomers’ user experience immediately improved.

We often focus so much on the messages we deliver from the pulpit, the values we embody in the youth group lesson, the stories we tell in the children’s workshop. But those intentional messages are only one part of the user’s experience of our congregations.

The early parts of the user experience are formative. The old adages about first impressions are true: they really stick, and you never get a second chance to make one.

How can you become more intentional about your new users’ experience? We’ll explore this question as our series continues in coming weeks.

 

_____________________________

SarahRev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, the UUA’s Outreach Associate for Digital Ministries, will be blogging regularly on Growing Unitarian Universalism about the connections between outreach, growth, websites, and social media.

 

 

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Skinner House Update

Life never stops sending new spiritual challenges our way. How do we, as individuals and communities, find the path forward on crossing cultural borders, grappling with grief and loss, navigating growth and change, striving for justice and action, or questioning conscience and belief? Unafraid to tackle the thorniest issues, we bring you insightful writing for every age and stage. As an imprint of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), we sit at the intersection of your progressive values and life’s biggest questions.

Spiritual, practical, engaged—We are Skinner House Books.

Skinner House

Skinner House Books are available from UUA Bookstore and wherever books are sold. Follow Skinner House Books on FaceBook, Tumblr , Scribd and Twitter

 

New Titles

 

BecomingBecoming: A Spiritual Guide for Navigating AdulthoodKayla

Edited by Kayla Parker

 

This elegant volume offers itself as a spiritual companion for young adults and all who live amid transitions and tensions. Dozens of carefully selected readings address themes that are prominent for people in their twenties and early thirties. The topics include: passion and purpose, identity, community, losing and finding, and justice and creation. Each section features reflections from Unitarian Universalist young adults, as well as poems, prayers, and opening and closing words from contemporary and ancient peoples. This treasury of uplifting and thought-provoking meditations can serve as a guide and provide comfort on our never-ending journey of becoming.

 

Pamphlets

 

Justice pamphletUU Justice Partnerships

Susan Leslie (Unitarian Universalist Association)

An introduction to the dynamic new wave of interfaith and community partnerships that UU congregations are joining for social justice. Includes information on congregation-based community organizations and the Standing on the Side of Love campaign. Plus a helpful list of best practices for successful congregational justice ministries.

Susan Leslie is Congregational Advo­cacy & Witness Director for the UUA. She has worked in the UUA’s national social jus­tice and multicultural staff teams since 1991. Prior to her service at the UUA’s national office, she worked as a research associate for the New England Municipal Center, a community organizer with the New Hampshire People’s Alliance, and as a Boston-based freelance organizer.

 

 

family prayersFamily Prayers (redesigned)

Edited by Irene Praeger (Unitarian Universalist Association)

A lovely collection of multigenerational chalice lightings, graces, and prayers for the home. Contributors include Eva M. Ceskava, Mary Ann Moore, Betsy Darr, Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, David Herndon, Gary Kowalski, John S. Mackey, Joyce Poley, Richard Fewkes, Rikkity, Percival Chubb, Edwin C. Lynn, and Susan Maginn and Peter Campbell.

 

Irene Praeger serves as the director of religious education at First Parish in Needham, Massachusetts.

 

 

Recent News and Reviews

 

We’re pleased to announce a newly created web page for the inSpirit series, formerly known as the meditation manual series. Visit the page for a complete list of the titles in the series, some historical background, and links to purchase your favorite inSpirit books. We hope that the series continues to enrich your lives!

 review

Check out this great review of Landscapes of Aging and Spirituality in Spirituality & Practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trending in the UUA Bookstore

The following have been particularly popular in the month of July:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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For White Activists Devastated and Feeling Defeated by Racist Violence

aCan't BreathThe following is reprinted from the Good Men Project with permission from author Chris Crass.

 

Chris Crass has a guide for fellow white anti-racism activists who are overwhelmed by recent stories about racist violence.

1. Take a moment to appreciate the fact that you are devastated by brutal racist injustice and that while your heart is broken, another alternative is that your heart has been hardened by the scarring of internalized white supremacy that has divested you from loving your own full humanity and the humanity of others.

Your devastation is the result of your heart being alive and refusing the socialized indifference, amnesia, and straightjacketing of your consciousness that post-Civil Rights movement white racialization aims for. Your internal capacity to be devastated by this murderous racist system is a source of power that serves you well and is what can help you be part of bringing this system down.

2. Focus your attention on momentum for justice, and decentralize the roadblocks and jerks. There are millions of people in motion for Black liberation at this moment, and courageous Black feminist leadership is front and center and the vision, strategy, inspiration, and guidance of the leaderful ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement is where our attention should be, rather then on the right wing jerks, militantly post-racial racist trolls, people in your life who just want to argue or other energy sucking dementors that can grab and hold our attention – often making it hard to see the people around us in motion or ready to move for racial justice.

Ask yourself – am I letting jerks who want to maintain supremacy systems occupy my heart and mind – which we are also socialized to do, socialized to undermine our efforts to get free. Or are we choosing to open our hearts and minds to the leaders who give us energy, who give us hope, who connect us to ancestral liberation movements and movements of liberation and humanity loving people today?

3. Be loving with yourself, supremacy systems want you to exhaust yourself by beating yourself up, for not doing enough, for letting jerks demobilize you, for “not being good enough” to be the activist you want to be. Tell these voices of supremacy systems that they cannot have you, that you are stronger then they would ever allow you to believe, and that our movement is far more effective and stronger then supremacy systems want us to understand, to feel in our bones, to feel as tears of pain and sorrow roll down our face.

4. Take time to learn about grassroots Black Lives Matter organizing happening, led by Black activist, but also what racialized as white activists are doing as well. Try to know three inspiring, life affirming stories of resistance for each story of devastating racist violence. One of the key challenges before us isn’t just awakening white racialized people to the reality of racism, but to help ourselves and others truly believe we can bring it down and build up robust, complex, living and breathing Beloved Community. We are carrying on the legacies of our movement ancestors and the impact of our efforts is beyond what we often dare allow ourselves to dream.

5. What you do matters. You are not alone. For every Ida B. Wells, Anne Braden, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez, and Alicia Garza, there are millions of people whose names we don’t know, but threw down and are throwing down, in many different ways, giving what they could with the talents, capacities, and other responsibilities they had/have, and united by vision, strategy, culture, and love and rage, this is what makes movements move. What you do matters. You are not alone. Let courageous liberation leadership move you, and protect yourself from the forces that seek to demobilize, defeat and undermine you and forces for collective liberation.

6. Reach out to others, as you are, and generate mutual support, as many are having or have had these same struggles. Refuse the isolation supremacy systems seek for you. Accept the interdependence liberation calls us into, even when supremacy systems tell us we aren’t good enough to experience it.  Love is on our side.  We will get free, all of us.

 

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Chris CrassChris Crass is a longtime social justice educator and organizer who writes and speaks widely about anti-racist organizing, feminism for men, lessons and strategies to build visionary movements, and spiritual leadership for social justice. He is the author of Towards Collective Liberation and is a Unitarian Universalist working to build up the religious left.

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What I Learned About Worship by Watching the Food Network: the art of worship planning

worship blogProfessional chefs and bakers adhere to a strict commandment: mise en place. (If you want to sound especially authentic, it’s pronounced “meese on ploss.”) Mise en place, which means “putting in place,” is the ritual of arranging and organizing ingredients before any actual cooking begins: you chop the chocolate into uniform bits, measure out the flour and brown sugar, line your pans with parchment paper… all before you put on your imaginary chef’s toque and start mixing ingredients together.

 

Personal experience has taught me that this is a Very Sensible Plan. Without practicing mise en place, you’ll discover at highly inopportune moments that your hands are too sticky to use a knife safely, or your cookie sheet needs to be washed, or your brown sugar supply ran out last week. (There are two kinds of people in the world: those who prepare the bake sale goodies, and those who purchase them. I’m the latter.)

 

In the cooking world, mise en place is the secret sauce. It eliminates rookie errors, streamlines the cooking process, and results in better food, but — this is key — all of this preparation is rendered invisible by how effortless the meal appears. In other words, the more energy and thought that go into planning, the more tantalizing the final product.

 

The same principle applies to worship, my honey-loves. Much like preparing a meal for guests, worship-planning and worship-leading are acts of hospitality.

 

Our people — our beloved guests — are giving up the gift of a weekend morning to bring their hunger, their numbness, or their broken hearts into our sanctuaries. They deserve a worship experience in which leaders hold the vessel mindfully, having walked through each transition (verbally or physically) before worship begins.

 

The mise en place of worship goes beyond setting out matches for the chalice, testing the microphone, and placing hymnals on the chancel (although you get a donut with sprinkles as reward for doing so). We worship leaders are responsible for planning and preparing every ingredient of the feast that we offer to those who hunger. Our guests can’t relish the worship experience if we leaders heap our figurative dirty pots on the Welcome Table.

 

I’ve attended — and squirmed through — services peppered with awkward logistical conversations that disrupt the worship experience and drain spirit of out of the room. Here’s a real-life example: “Which microphone are you going to use? You should come up here.” “Oh. I thought I was going to use the floor mic.” “Well, if that’s what you want.” “Hang on: I left my papers on my seat.”

Dearies, this is like biting down on an olive pit in your salad: painful, unnecessary, and avoidable had more care been taken in the preparation process.

 

The mise en place of worship has little to with perfection — an unrealistic, sterile goal. Even Julia Child reminded her viewers that sometimes the soufflé falls in the oven. As worship leaders, all of us are eventually required to model imperfection, or embody grace in response to an unplanned worship disappointment. (I call this “channeling your inner Julia Child,” but I don’t recommend doing it out loud in the pulpit.)

 

Preparation and planning matter. The soufflé might fall anyway. Still, no chef worth her salt (pun intended) skips mise en place, and neither should worship leaders. We communicate respect and love for the people we serve when we prepare worship as carefully as we would plan a dinner party in our homes.

 

May your worship services be a welcome table, set for all to enjoy;

may you bring reverence to your worship role, as you create space for guests to be fed;

and may you fulfill your worship responsibilities with zest.

 

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ErikaWhen she’s not thinking Grand Thoughts about worship (which is a lot of the time), Rev. Erika Hewitt is usually officiating a wedding in one of Maine’s innumerable seaside villages. You can connect with her through the WorshipWeb Facebook page, where (ahem) Erika is still taking orders for Worship Web stickers.

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