The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

Featured Articles - March, 2005

President Carol Kerr Announces a Critical Meeting of All Members

The future is coming, and our church’s spiritual and financial health cannot be taken for granted. How we prepare for that future, our future, is of the utmost importance. Our church is on the verge of some of the most significant change it has ever been through. We have been planning our building expansion program for some time, and with your support, we are delightfully able to pursue it adjacent to our church building instead of across the alley. We have been working on enhancing our many church programs, and they are on the whole vibrant and well attended.

Now, as a congregation, we must look ahead and make some important, if not critical, decisions about the priorities, direction and foundations of our church — not just for the coming year, but for the next five years, and beyond. This requires some “out of the box” thinking about a task that most of us ignore: building an operating budget.

How many of our members come to the annual meeting each May with little or no sense of what is in our operating budget and how we intend to pay for the expenses we outline? How many of our members sit through the financial presentation with no real grasp of where pledge monies are spent? How many of our members vote in favor of an operating budget without believing passionately in the programs and services that we are committing ourselves to fund?

Do you?

On Saturday, March 19, an important planning workshop will be held in Forbes Hall. We need as many members as possible to attend. Your specific insights, beliefs, vision, passions, and commitment are essential to framing a successful plan to help us build a viable operating budget for 2005–2006 and to navigate the next five years. The priorities and goals determined by our annual operating budget simply cannot be decided only by the board, the Finance Committee, or our minister. We need our members to guide us in a meaningful way.

Please make plans now to attend this facilitated workshop on Saturday, March 19, at 9 a.m. It may be the most important four hours you will spend in our church.

-- Carol Kerr

Once in a Lifetime...

We need your help. Once in a lifetime, the opportunity presents itself to participate in something that makes the world a better place. A better place for now. A better place for the future.

Our capital campaign is in the beginning stage.

We are on our way to completing the funding to have a larger sanctuary, safe and adequate room for our kids, a lovely building and grounds.

UUs are renowned for their service to the community. Now is the time to provide that well-known service to our own community.

In the course of the capital campaign, more than 100 people will provide volunteer service to make the campaign a success.

The campaign will need luncheon organizers, writers, stuffers, canvassers, designers, music makers, teachers, talkers, givers of time and money and hard workers who share a desire to complete our building program.

Volunteer. It's what we do.

-- Ron Crane, Capital Campaign chair

New Telephone Outreach Program Will Connect Members One on One

If you don’t have a lot of extra time, but would like to make a difference in someone’s life, we have a new program you’ll want to hear about. Can you spare half an hour each week?

Starting now, UUCCSM is recruiting members of our congregation to do telephone outreach to other UUs in our congregation who would welcome and benefit from your calls. The calls can be made on a day and time you reach by mutual agreement. The goal of the program is to enhance connection to the church community for our members who live alone, or are socially isolated or frail.

Soon there will be an initial two-hour training session for callers, and monthly follow-up sessions will monitor the program’s progress.To learn more about becoming a volunteer, please call Anita Brenner. We look forward to hearing from you.

An Invitation to Everyone from Small Group Ministry

A warm welcome to explore our Small Group Ministry is extended to each long-time member, newcomer, and visitor. In the Small Group Ministry, souls are fed through personal connections. An empty chair in the circle symbolizes a place for others to join. Personal sharing is the process. Members of these small groups practice the art of being present: breathing, listening, and just witnessing without judgment. Being present provides the opportunity to understand oneself and others by willingly working through conflicts and building relationships.

In this circle members who struggle to articulate their truth in their own experience and to trust an environment of acceptance, often have powerful insights. In the words of Robert M. Pirsig, “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.”

The current groups are growing roots; there is strong bonding, a high level of member participation, and deeper exploration in the fifth month of meetings.

The Small Group Ministry is growing. Our minister will lead training in March for eight facilitators, which will add at least two new groups in April and then again in September, if all goes as planned. The Covenant Group Implementation Team is planning material to add to the actively-visited church website, considering a permanent place in Forbes Hall for a display of photos and informational brochures, and polishing the resource guide and policy manual for future planners.

Valuable learning continues for everyone. There is pride, excitement, and hope about Small Group Ministry and what it can mean for individuals and the larger church community. This is an inclusive program where everyone is invited to share in the expansion of our lives and what it means to be human.

Please visit the information table after Sunday services, during coffee hour.

— Carol-jean Teuffel

At the Newsletter Meeting, a Passion for Punctuation

What do your newsletter volunteers discuss when they get together for their semi-annual face-to-face meeting? They eat, introduce new volunteers, and review workflow. But would you believe that the largest part of the February meeting was taken up talking about punctuation — that these were not just intellectual conversations, but volunteers passionately taking sides of arguments?

Would you think that an em-dash — dash the length of an “m” setting off a parenthetical remark in a sentence, versus en-dash – used for numbers (3–5) but also created automatically when doing a space dash space in Microsoft Word — discussion would bring on equally vigorous loyalty from a majority of the writers, editors, and designers in the group? There was a clear split between those whose background was academia and those who worked in publishing. The decision was tabled for now.

And it didn’t stop with a dash. Other topics of passionate discussion included whether the hour of the day should be written 7 a.m., 7 am, 7 A.M., or 7 AM. One person opted for 7:00 a.m. And should our surrounding city be written as LA, which everybody says, but is also the abbreviation for Louisiana, or L.A., which is an easily defensible standard? A corollary to the arguments was that removing the periods would make the line cleaner and free up valuable line space. The periods stayed in.

One of the designers was a passionate advocate for the academic style versus the newspaper style. She brought down the house when she offered to trade AM for an em-dash without spaces.

There was also a line drawn, and sides taken, on how to identify titles of books, movies, etc. The book world italicizes books and movies; the newspaper world uses quotes, always. There was one unanimous agreement though — no underlining (it's so typewriter). Final verdict: you will see quotes around titles from now on.

The nice part of this discussion was that it was full of laughter, because everyone knew that though these things ARE important, they are not world- or churchchanging. Carol Agate, the newsletter coordinator, commented that laughter was not as large a part of other meetings she attends.

Whether you, the reader, know it or not, there is a payoff for you, too. Writers, editors and designers want the general reader to read an article and not be distracted by word and punctuation confusions and inconsistencies. There is serious interest in making sure you can focus on content.

So twice a year you’ll find the writers, editors, and designers laughing at the serious job of making your reading of the newsletter easier. The other 363 days the conversation continues electronically across the Internet.

— Nels Hanson

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