Northern Light June 2007

Outlined below is a summary of the financial reports
presented to members of your Finance Committee and
Board of Trustees for the month of April:

           Actual $ Budget
        Received (Expected
April, 2007   and Paid     Receipts &                                                             Payments)

Pledge Income $ 11,088    $ 11,889
Other Income    1,277 2,974
Total Income    $ 12,365    $ 14,863
Total Expenses    $ 15,327    $ 14,860

Year-to-Date

Pledge Income $ 53,612    $ 47,557
Other Income    4,622    11,896
Total Income    $ 58,234    $ 59,453
Total Expenses    $ 58,940    $ 59,440

Expenses for the month of April were over budget for the following reasons:

1.) Federal and states taxes for the first quarter were due and payable.

2.) Statement for natural gas was $680; the budgeted amount was $317.

3.) Flooding in the basement at the Nielsen House had to be resolved.

Until next month,
Nancy Remer

How rare is it that a true paradigm shift occurs. And, when it begins, the light bulbs seem to go off effortlessly and often. Such an event occurred (dare I consider this rapture?) during the Religious Education Committee’s committee retreat on May 18-19 with our hired consultant, Kate Tweedy Erslev. Kate helped us articulate our dreams for the next 6 or so years, and in that context, helped us see that we have the resources at hand to begin to make our most exciting changes occur now.

Traditionally, we, like many other religious education programs across many denominations, have thought of our children’s religious education as something that occurs during a separate pull-out program, like our Sunday morning age-specific classes. This certainly has its benefits, especially when there is much content to teach. If a religious education program sees its primary responsibility as teaching Torah and Hebrew (to draw from my personal experience), then teaching school probably make a lot of sense.

This is not the vision that our congregation has of religious education. We want to teach our children the importance of covenant, of the value of questions over answers, and, using the sources of our inspiration, help them begin to identify their spiritual path. With Kate Erslev’s guidance, the RE Committee is replacing the traditional paradigm of teaching school with a family-style model of learning. In retrospect, it was silly of us to think that we were going to create lifelong Unitarian Universalists in approximately 25 hours a year. Research is demonstrating that involvement in church life across time and situations are much more memorable than anything that happens in a one-hour class.

One of the questions that flows from this change in paradigm is, how can we involve our children and youth in the life of our congregation? I invite each of us to seriously ponder this question. How can the children and youth participate in the upcoming yard clean-up day? What opportunities exist for them in already planned Social Action projects? What about youth membership on our committees?

We have approached a family model of religious education during our summer months. The children and youth stay together as one group. This summer will be no different. Our summer program will begin on June 17 and go through August 19. Some weeks, we will be offering activities from a Summer Fun curriculum. Other weeks, we will have members of our congregation sharing their passions with our children and youth. These “Passionates” include Stephanie Henderson who has a passion for yoga and John Foreman who has a passion for geocaching. And, our youth will be invited to assist in some of the worship. We will get the schedule out to you as soon as we can.