(This is part of a series of blogs related to the Minns Lecture “The Age of Collaboration” that I co-presented with Peter Bowden.)

“Hello, this is your life of meaning and purpose calling…”

We are in the age of collaboration. What this world and our hearts and spirits need requires all of us working together. Every one needs positive and meaningful work, art, and relationships. What we do to survive financially might not be what gives us greatest meaning.

Meeting trouble in our world, our sacred promises tug at our hearts and ask us to answer. That tug on our hearts is vocation. Answering that vocation is ministry. We do not need to be part of a congregation, on staff with a religious organization, or be sanctified, ordained, or approved. Because digital media increases our connections with another, we also have more opportunities to meet our calling without actually entering a congregation or picking up a page of announcements. This is why faith leaders are the people who connect us, helping us answer our calling.

Life takes teamwork, and thanks to digital media we can belong easily to lots of teams, and even form our own.

Pop Quiz: Who’s a minister?

A. Clara Barton

B. Alice Harrison

C. Olympia Brown

Professional religious leadership and ordained religious leadership are only two kinds of calling. Our roles and duties are changing. Increasingly, we need not to be experts or operations officers, but connectors, visionaries, noticers, and facilitators. This shift started decades ago, and digital media has only sped it up. What professional and ordained religious leadership do is a ministry, but we are not THE ministry.

Pop Quiz Answer: Who’s a minister? All of them.

Clara Barton - Laity

Alice Harrison - Professional Staff, Religious Educator

Olympia Brown - Ordained clergy

Faith leadership is not about official position or governing body authority anymore – and  our history proves it never was. Ministry belongs to everyone. How we answer that call will differ for each of us, as varied as our gifts and our limitations. Thankfully, we can trust, nurture, and encourage one another in faithful ministry together, so that our limitations do not prevent us from fulfilling our sacred promises.

There is more than enough ministry to go around. We need all of us, with our differing strengths, talents, and time. We are called, all of us. Let’s make sure we are undertaking answering that call together.

What’s your ministry? How are you serving for goodness’ sake?

(This is a continuation of a series based on the Minns Lecture, “The Age of Collaboration,” I offered with Peter Bowden.)

We ordinary people all have some extraordinary gift – maybe even several – to share. That gift might be just what makes it possible for someone else to do something great in the labor of creating global goodness. But we have to connect faithfully with one another to share those gifts.

We ask and want people to live with integrity. Unitarian Universalist Tim Atkins says, “I want to live my faith beyond Sundays. And I don’t think we need to go live in the woods for a month to be spiritual beings. I want to live my spirituality in everyday life, live it where I already live my life. And that life is, in part, on social media.”

We really are in this together.

We have a moral imperative to provide loving alternatives to dissolution and despair.

We can be inspiration engines, bearing hope and help.

We are called to join love’s great transforming power in world change.

We can only do this together.

This is the age of collaboration.

(This is part of a series of blogs related to the Minns Lecture “The Age of Collaboration” that I co-presented with Peter Bowden.)

As people of faith and faithful promises – that is, people pledged to a covenant – there are many changes we can make. Some of the ideas I will name here arose from social media conversations. Some of them are mine; some originated from others who gave me permission to share them here; all of them are the work of collaboration.

Covenant

Today’s connected age expects both transparency and accountability in our institutions. It is easy to share documents and build databases. Transparency can build not only trust, but improve resources, information flow, and application development. The ministry that needs to be done requires all of us and all our gifts and participation.

Covenant - Democracy

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly has started using tools to ensure better democratic practice.

• We have many more opportunities for direct democracy, from videoconferencing to live voting.
• We need to vote and discuss directly  issues that really matter.
• We have work ahead to continue in order to ensure lots of roof for, and solidarity with, historically oppressed peoples. Digital media can help us.

Many of us are familiar with Accountability Teams, who model right relationship, living in solidarity, and helping us attend to and repair broken relationships. In our connected age, we still can benefit from the help of coaches and exemplars like Accountability Teams. But we are all on the accountability team of life.

There are none of us who do not need to attend to how we are relating to one another and this planet. We have all inherited terrible inequities and wrongs that need addressing and repair. We have all left folks out or been left out. Many of us have been barred or disregarded so frequently and so thoroughly, we have stopped trying. When the rest of us meet that disconnection, reconnection is up to us.

We bear responsibility for one another, no exceptions.

Covenant - Transparency

Faith leadership is connective and transparent.

• May all of us engage in regular social media practice as inspiration engines and invite participation in our faithful labors.
• We can stream and provide transcripts for important meetings, and provide timely and easy access to agendas and reports.
• We can crowd source many new projects.
• We can use social social media to engage, especially with underrepresented groups, and to inspire.

If our covenant - our faithful promises - really means anything, then how we fulfill those promises and practice our covenant together matters. Today’s digital tools can help us, but only if we really want to live with integrity. I certainly hope we choose that course of wholeness, though it be challenging and even scary, since creative, risky faithfulness will grow from it.

Once upon a time, information and wisdom were expensive to accumulate and share. Schools, libraries, subscription organizations, professional associations, publishing houses, and media companies grew up as ways to share the costs of acquiring and sharing information, wisdom, and entertainment.

Today, thanks to how we have developed tools over the Internet and practices using widely available technology (mainly, mobile phones) information, wisdom, and entertainment sharing, creation, and accumulation is more available than ever before. But the practices we learned to manage gathering information and wisdom in the age of relative scarcity are often counterproductive today.

In the age of relative of scarcity, we were encouraged to become masters of subjects. Over time, as wisdom and information accumulated, it was harder and harder to have mastery of an area’s wisdom and information and specialization became more common. But now, even specialists cannot hold all the information and wisdom to their areas of knowledge in their heads. We store it in the cloud, with other people and other individuals, and we access that information. What matters more is how we know where to find answers, how to ask questions with others, how we share what we know and what we’re learning with others, and how we join in self-organizing systems to continue building world knowledge and deepening world wisdom.

The change in access to wisdom and information and in sharing faithfully together was one of the questions arising from an Age of Collaboration Minns Lecture Tweetchat February 12, 2013.

We need to learn new skills and practices to navigate, access, create, and share information and wisdom in our age of abundance. In the age of scarcity, we learned practices of discernment to help us decide whether an area or a question was worth pursuing for mastery. Today, we need practices of discernment to help us participate and contribute meaningfully in this amazing world that is exciting and new wisdom and knowledge is emerging all the time. As the Rev. Sean Parker Dennison observed in the Age of Collaboration Tweetchat (February 12, 2013) “I like [the] framework of discernment - we CAN have all information, but what is healthy for us? what is faithful?” 

Those of us who participated in the Feb.12 #minnslecture Tweetchat agreed strongly that our faith communities need to teach social media classes and skills. Our faith communities include our congregations and the networks we have and can reach out and create or join via those same social media. My Age of Collaboration co-lecturer, Peter Bowden, teaches programs to help faith leaders and communities learn how to use social media faithfully, grounded in our values. (You can contact Peter and set up workshops or coaching with him.)

We also learn by doing and by observing. How people of faith use social media teaches others how to use that media. In social media, religious leadership is demonstrated by people who speak openly of how they are living faithfully, ask big questions, invite and join with others in faithful action, study, and creation of resources. Those showing religious leadership may be sharing with others what kind of casserole they are making (Ethical Eating - UUA), and in that sharing they can be joining others in pursuing ethical eating, in care for their bodies, or connecting with others around food because that is a vital way we form community. Those same networks formed come into play again when needing to mobilize for social justice (Religious Institute) or to ask for help or to create together new inspirational resources (UU Media Collaborative).

How do we practice discernment?

Discernment questions ask us to connect with the values we hold as most important. As people of faith, it will help us to name our important values. For me these include: compassion, mercy, gratitude, love, learning, generosity, reverence, forgiveness, peace, life-affirming, interdependence, equality, dignity, and self-control.

I ask several discernment questions, some of which are old discernment questions I learned at the end of the world when one person could know nearly everything there was to know a single enormous subject.
Is it good?
Is it useful?
Is it just?


In our age of enormous numbers of choices, I ask:
Do I need to do this?
Does this challenge me to live more faithfully?
Is this something needed in one of the communities to which I belong?
How can I help?

You will notice there is a difference between the two types of discernment questions. In an age of abundant wisdom and abundant choices, there are also many more people to share in what needs doing. I cannot be involved in social media every minute of the day. Part of the spiritual practice of discernment is trusting that there are others who are part of the network who can share. There are some things I can do easily, like offer encouragement when someone shares a wonderful new resource with me. Sometimes I will check in on social media and discover that, yes, I really need to share something or create something or ask a big question or counter something harmful going on. This is about taking on my responsibilities as a person of faith, being motivated to be part of the community.

Discernment in today’s age is not about reducing risk or avoiding failure. When trade or creating or sharing are very costly, we seek to reduce risk. We might seek to reduce risk so much we become unable to do very much, because we are ruled by fear.

Part of what we need to discern today is how to risk faithfully, accepting that failure is part of the way to success. We do not learn anything new without failing at it first. We do not create anything innovative without failing at it first. If you have ever tried to create a really new sweet with none of the flavors and ratios of liquids to solids and fats to sugars worked out for you (no adaptation of existing recipes) and you think you are making a new cake but come up with an indigestible mass of goo seventeen times before you discover you were developing a new pudding, then you know the process of failing to succeed. As we risk faithfully, we learn through our failures as well as our successes, and try new ways of relating, new ways of creating, new ways of organizing.

Because the world is changing quickly and new ways of being are emerging rapidly right now, it is riskier not to risk failing. This is, in my opinion, especially true for religions and for people of faith. We have a moral imperative to provide alternatives to distraction, dissolution, and despair in this world. We have a calling to help one another make more compassionate communities and healthier and better places to live and to be better people than is easy for us.

Often, we are discerning: is this worth failing at? The answer is usually: yes. Yes, it is worth fumbling with and figuring out how to incorporate spiritual practices into social media based community life. Yes, it is worth failing many times in joining with others to make for an accountable government or to clean up a waterway or to build self-organizing learning centers like Hole in the Wall educational centers.  Yes, it is worth risking and failing in discovering how to join in the incredible generosity of many, many people. Yes, it is worth failing many times as we quest for knowledge. If something is truly worth succeeding at, then it is worth failing for, it is worth risking faithfully.

How are you practicing discernment with social media? Where are your limits? How are you risking faithfully? What are you doing to add collectively to the good, the just, and the useful?

Join us for the Age of Collaboration Minns Lecture March 9th in Boston. You can register now for this and for both terrific Minns Lectures March 8-9th; both events are free!

As Peter Bowden (@uuplanet) and I prepare for our Minns Lectures on the Age of Collaboration, we wanted to share some of our thoughts and invite yours by weekly questions between now and the lectures March 9th. (March 8th come hear a great lecture with Rev. Andrea Greenwood on Unitarianism & Children’s Literature).

Take up the question, blog and comment, and check out the UU Growth Lab on Facebook, where we’ll be posting the same question each week.

Join us for a Tweetchat February 12th at 8pm ET(US), too! #minnslecture

Here’s this week’s question:

What is it about Unitarian Universalism that makes it a faith worth living? how is your community changed by it?

Unitarian Universalism is a faith worth living because we teach that everyone is loveable, loved, and our work together is to make this world a more loving place.  I spent years convinced that I was unloveable and that the people who said they loved me did not really know me. I was fearful of being found out as not enough, not good enough to be loved, not kind enough to deserve kindness, not enough in any way. Unitarian Universalism taught me two basis for the assurance that I am loveable, loved, and that our work together is to make this world a more loving place.

First, the people welcomed me. When I showed up to my first Unitarian Universalist congregation, I visually did not fit in. The music was alien to me. The worship service was alien to me. But this congregation had a tradition of greeting one another. The one thing that showed me I was accepted was when someone bothered to warmly take my hands, look me in the eye, and welcome me — and remember me the next week. That kind of hospitality is lived faith, and it told me that even if the community has its moments of imperfection (we all do), we mean it when we say, “yes, you belong here.”

Secondly, Unitarian Universalism affirmed theologically that the Holy is Love. Universalism has long taught that God loves us all, imperfect, insufficient, and downright troubled. And that gave me a foundation for my heart to rest upon and open up. This faith changed me. This faith continues to challenge me.

I learned from that first Unitarian Universalist community that faithful risk mattered. Our faith would challenge us and change us when we answered problems in our larger community. If there were lots of LGBTQ teens in need of affirmation, then we needed to offer a safe and welcoming place. When there was a need for a kitchen to stage Meals on Wheels in our part of the county, we could be there. Every single missional action that congregation took in the larger community may have seemed to flow easily and naturally from what we believed. But it was always a challenge to us, a change for us, and a challenge and a change for the larger community.

Unitarian Universalism gave my heart a foundation upon which to open and discover my calling: to join with others in making this world a more loving place.

Real ministry and real faith has not been any different for me than that first community. Via social media ministry, I am constantly amazed at how we connect and work together for change. One of my favorite examples of this is the Side of Love’s social media campaign: sharing real stories of faithful risk, from all kinds of people (because Side of Love is an interfaith ministry, though Unitarian Universalists participate strongly in it), Side of Love challenges people to keep risking faithfully and change our communities for the better. We pass legislation for equality for all people. We work for more human conditions. We seek to reunite immigrant families separated by an unjust system. We mobilize and act, inspire and dream together.

The tools of connection available to us today have challenged me to keep risking faithfully and changed me, too. But for me, the core of my faithing always comes back to love, and the people who use every tools they can to help us make this world a more loving place. Social media are tools, but how we use them is about our spiritual practices. How we discern, how we reorient to and are encouraged to risk faithfully, how we care, share, and create are issues for people of faith regardless of the tools available to us or our community contexts. One of the things about faithing with social media, though, is that it is public faithing. My ability to live faithfully has been made better because I’m not focused on living in a safe place where I know everyone or am primarily in contact with other people who faith like me. Yet I still am part of a larger faith community that, thanks to the Internet, is connected everywhere around the globe.

I learned in my first Unitarian Universalist congregation that faithful risk is part of how we are challenged and changed and how we have a real and positive effect in our larger world. The ability to organize and risk faithfully now is simply so much easier and larger. Love is vast, and the people living their lives devoted to making this world a more loving place, who want to give and receive encouragement, who are seeking and finding and creating amazing solutions to real-world problems and making real-world successes is all much closer and more possible because of these social networks.

Successful faith practice helps me join others in making the world a more loving place, in sharing words of encouragement and stories of change, in finding out about problems and doing something helpful to address them, in joining together generously and whole-heartedly to love this world into a better place. I am a Unitarian Universalist because I believed that God is Love, that we are all loved and loveable, and that we are here to make this world a more loving place. It is a faith that has changed my life, and I know can be and is part of changing this world.

To learn more about Unitarian Universalism or locate a congregation, check out UUA.org

For several years now I have quietly maintained a Goodreads account. As my friends know, one of the first questions I ask after “how are you?” is “what are you reading?” I have not had to ask that so often in the past few years because of Goodreads; instead we  launch directly into conversation about a book that caught our attention. 

To my surprise, over the years, I have not only received many wonderful book recommendations from people who found me via their network of relationships, I have ended up in pastoral conversations about some of the books I am reading.

Unitarian Universalists love to read. We are a people of many books, newspapers (especially in the Nineteenth Century) or blogs (more every day) and have long been so. But this is true for many faithful people and religions: we write and read because our faiths matter to us.

Goodreads is thus a place where we can easily share what we’re reading and what we think and feel about what we are reading.

We can create reading lists, share quotations, form reading groups, and follow authors that matter to us. The asynchronus communication means more people can participate, as they have time.

And, most importantly, we encounter books we would never have met in our regular rounds, especially when we friend a wide range of colleagues, friends, family, and strangers.

A Unitarian Universalist Association posted yesterday, “Ain’t Misbehaving. Saving My Love For You” mentions that a significant number of people who are “free range” Unitarian Universalists - people who are Unitarian Universalists by faith, but without congregational affiliation - are former leaders of those congregations.

One of the regular tests of faith - and breakers of it for many - is serving faith communities, where we can carry over the same expectations and behaviors from the larger political arena over to our congregations. That is, leaders can be held to unliveable standards. Leaders can be gossiped about, cut sharply and severely in their friendships, and even find people treating their families poorly.

There also can be congregational cultures without models of generous and healthy transitions from formal leadership back into congregational life. Leaders know how to be followers, or they are not really leaders. Giving people the opportunity to move from one role to another teaches and offers them new blessings and allows them to use their gifts for goodness in different ways.

Yet there are even some situations where either rule or “best practice” is considered to be separation and absence from the faith community for three to five years. Those rules or practices arise from a fearfulness of misuse of power. But they don’t actually address how to participate again in religious life as another congregant. Professional and volunteer leaders both face these same dynamics and issues.

I’ve  witnessed these dynamics in many faith traditions. Breaking the faith of faithful leaders in the context of religious community, by breaking the leader’s relationship with the faith community is not a new problem. Faith communities seeking to sustain the faith of faithful leaders and community as a whole have to live into at least six realities.

1. Covenants are not behavioral rules to batter people with and gain power over them. They will not prevent troubles, only remind us of promises we’ve made in faith.
2. Covenants - even the ones with the Holy that are supposed to last for all time - are reentered and reengaged. The people recovenant with the Holy multiple times in the Scriptures. How could we expect not to have to do the same thing?
3. Leaders who serve faithfully might actually lead in a direction you don’t like or that is outside your comfort zone. Holding that against them for the rest of their lives, or being surprised when you serve in leadership and meet the same expectations of compliance with your friends’ views, is trouble. Faithful leadership is not doing what our friends believe in every instance. It would be extraordinarily unlikely, particularly in diverse communities facing new challenges.
4. Forgiveness is a way of life. Generosity and graciousness are spiritual practices, for every one, without exception.
5. We need mentors and faith friends all along the way, from our earliest days entering a community, through our serving faithfully.
6. Accountability is mutual. The Golden Rule goes a long way here. If we stop to consider how we would feel about what’s being said and done were we the ones being “held accountable”, we will move more often back to mutual relationship and not into throwing around rules and holy words to bind and control one another. Accountability is mutual responsibility for the health and vitality of the relationship. If anyone chooses not to attend to their responsibilities, or views accountability as a one-way situation (“they” are accountable to me, not all of us together and not me to “them”) then faith communities have work before them to draw those individuals back into responsible relationship.

Learning how to live faithfully together, in our diversity, without everyone agreeing all the time, without everyone being alike and loving alike, is one of the great purposes of religious communities. When we eject or make it extraordinarily difficult for people who have served the community to stay in community, we are avoiding that commitment of continued relationship, in all situations and times and risking the faith of others to protect our own. We all grow stronger and more faithful when we engage faithfully the difficulties of community life. There are amazing joys that can happen in religious community, amazing gifts and blessings that communities can offer the world. Leadership and service go together, and leaders who have served faith communities can only fulfill giving their gifts and blessings when communities make it possible for leaders to resume regular community membership.

Unitarian Universalist Association religious leaders speak often about covenant as an association of congregations, especially our relationships to one another.

Talk for five minutes and someone will haul out the Cambridge Platform of 1648.

Thanks to an excellent series of Minns Lectures by the Rev. Alice Blair Wesley, the conversations follow a predictable route. We are independent congregations who share responsibility for one another.

That Rev. Alice Blair Wesley was calling Unitarian Universalist Association members to a recovenanting is often skipped right over. She wrote, “we need to do two things: to reclaim and creatively adopt covenants in our free churches, in our own liberal way, for our own time, and to invent what we have never yet had, a Covenanted  Association of Congregations.” (Lecture 5, p. 3)

The conversations about

• Regionalization (shifting from District middle judicatories to larger regions of shared resourcing, faith community and staffing),
• living into Policy Governance (Board sets policy, General Assembly confirms it, Staff & Congregations figure out how to fulfill it), 
•  Fulfilling the Promise (anti-racism, anti-oppression work),
•  the Fifth Principle Project (making our democracy really work, especially for historically underserved and underrepresented peoples), and
• Affiliates (originally, a way to connect external organizations, then transformed into non-congregational, internal faith communities), and
• Congregations & Beyond (vital faith communities of many kinds in covenant together, serving the world together)

are essentially efforts to reclaim and creatively adopt our promises to one another and to the Holy (yes, check out the language of the Cambridge Platform of 1648) and figure out how we are called together in service as a faithful people.

The Orlando Platform is one of the ways the Southern Region of the Unitarian Universalist Association names that calling, particularly in relationship to Regionalization.

Our promises are binding, but how we understand and live out those promises over time changes, has to change, in relationship to our own spiritual growth, our changing world, and our changing appreciation for our shared calling.

Faith communities do not have to be congregations as we have known them to be faithful communities. How can an association of congregations live in covenant with emerging and new forms of faith communities that has a broader and deeper understanding of congregation. We have left behind the understanding of the Cambridge Platform that only the saints may form the congregation (the voting body and religious leadership of the worshipping community). The idea of congregation that many people have - that is is local, with a building, with a Protestant culture of worship, with occasional charitable good works, and with a lot of programming for its members - is only one way of being a faith community. There are many, many ways for faithful people to be called together to worship, to learn, to give thanks, and to give back. Now we have another opportunity before us to find a way to promise together in diversity to serve the Holy in this diverse world.

Sharing a concern that we actually live out the piece of our covenant where the Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees is responsible for creating ends and UUA staff and congregations for figuring out how to achieve them, how could Congregations and Beyond achieve our Association’s goals? This is my personal speculation, since a formal statement from UUA Administration connecting the two has not been released. The UUA Board ends are in bold type.

What are our goals as an Association of Congregations?

First, we have the preamble understanding:

“Grounded in our covenantal tradition, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association will inspire people to lead lives of humility and purpose, connection and service, thereby transforming themselves and the world.”

Our primary question, which we must always answer, is: how well are we leading lives of humility and purpose, connection and service, that transform ourselves and the world?

Congregations and Beyond must invite us further into living humbly, purposefully, connected to one another and serving the world with transforming love.

Congregations that unlock the power to transforms lives. People:

• develop a personal practice
• participate in meaningful worship
• learn and practice empowered leadership and generosity
• find their ministry in the world

The first two practices are things that probably primarily occur in congregations and faith communities. The second two practices, however, are ones that we can nurture both inside the congregation and as congregations risking faithfully in the larger world. If we focus only on achieving the first two, consider the third to refer only to congregational administration, and think of the fourth as highly individual, then no, there’s no requirement to live faithfully as part of the larger world, beyond the membership rolls and congregational walls. However, I believe that interpretation fails the first and larger understanding or really transforms people’s lives after a certain stage of faithing is reached.

Congregations and Beyond imagines more face-to-face opportunities for people, more opportunities for service, more ways for folks to connect with our religious movement, which surely must involve congregations as well as other faith communities.

Our congregations are:

• Vibrant - joyful and excited about their ministries
• Intentionally multi-generational and multi-cultural
• Embracing and struggling with issues of oppression and privilege
• Open and inclusive in their outreach and welcome
• Ministries deeply shared by ministers and the laity
• Active participants in ministerial preparation and development
• Growing in membership
• Living their mission in their communities

Yes! Joyful diverse faith communities where everyone’s gifts matter, are cared for, and useful in serving the larger world are exciting communities. They’re also communities that are not insulated from the rest of the world, but are deeply part of the issues and concerns of their local areas and our earth.

Congregations and Beyond will only be effective if it is a ministry of every body, working together, taking responsibility together, engaging our troubles, sharing our strengths, and serving our world with courageous love.

Congregations that live in covenant with other congregations in our Association through:

• A strong, articulated sense of Unitarian Universalist and community identity
• High expectations of their members
• Full participation in Associational life
• Networking with each other

Yes. Congregational life isn’t just about the First Congregation of Prudent Hope and Excellent Boundaries. Vibrant faith communities know who they are, care about other community members (not only membership rolls), attend to the stranger and make them neighbor and kin, and take responsibility for the vibrancy and health of the whole world.

Congregations and Beyond invites imagining how to better sustain and engage one another, the estranged and the seeking.

Congregations that move toward sustainability, wholeness and reconciliation.

Our congregations answer the call to ministry and justice work:

• grounded in the communities in which they live
• nationally and internationally
• with interfaith partners and alliances

The public engages in meaningful dialogue and takes action informed by our prophetic voice and public witness.

These ENDS are all of equal importance and are to be achieved within a justifiable cost, with their priority set by the President.

The invitation into the Unitarian Universalist Association is not currently the same as the invitation into Unitarian Universalism. Some of our faith communities operate that way, but many do not. We can change that. We can engage this faith even more fully and more generously, caring more attentively for our planet and for one another. We can work more often, better, and more faithfully  with local, regional, continental and international partners. We are the only ones who can decide to take up the faithful risks, to experiment, to fail and learn from our failures lessons other than not trying, to be more generous than ever before, and to live humbly, joyfully, and purposefully in service to and with transforming love.

Congregations and Beyond will be most effective if we know our strengths as faith communities and what we are offering to the world, and if teach each other how to share those strengths. The reality is that there are many vital congregations with ministries larger than serving themselves. Sharing the wisdom we already possess with one another is part of how we all grow stronger and better answer our larger call.

Let’s take a virtual trip over to Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist to explore another example of excellent ministry based in a congregation that serves well beyond the walls of that congregation. The Rev. Barbara Meyers leads a mental health ministry from MPUUC, one that serves the entire county the congregation is located in, through the Mental Health Matters television show.

I work with Rev. Barbara Meyers as part of EqUUal Access’ communications team. Consistently, I hear the greatest number of thanks for sharing resources via Twitter from Rev. Meyers’ Mental Health Ministry. Individuals and families living with mental illness and seeking mental health want supportive faith communities affirming every one’s worth and dignity and holding folks with loving care.

The Mental Health Ministry also educates religious leaders around the globe on how faith communities and leaders can support individuals and families in great mental health ministries. The Caring Congregations Curriculum is FREE and does not require special training. For communities ready to go further, there is a seven workshop form of the curriculum, priced modestly to support the MPUUC Mental Health Ministry.

An early adapter of technology to make sure the resources of this valuable ministry were available 24/7/366 and to the widest community possible, Rev. Meyers makes sure new episodes of the television show and other new resources are uploaded regularly.

Rev. Barbara Meyers is also a spiritual director, serving the larger community in her area. If you look at her spiritual direction page, you will notice the incredible flexibility and generosity of her rates, which encourages people to give back in service for goodness.

Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation is living its mission to serve the larger community for social justice and in accordance with Unitarian Universalist principles. The Mental Health Ministry is a ministry of dignity, caring, community, and transforming love. Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation and the Rev. Barbara Meyers are one great example of how a vibrant faith serves the whole world.

Mental Health Ministry: http://www.mpuuc.org/mentalhealth/mentalintro.html

Mental Health Matters TV Show: http://www.mpuuc.org/mentalhealth/mentalTVshow.html

Caring Congregation Curriculum: http://www.mpuuc.org/mentalhealth/caringcongcurr.html

Spiritual Direction: http://www.mpuuc.org/services/commSpiritual%20Direction.html