Kim Wade,2025-26 President

Dear UU folks,

I felt a shift this past spring. Our Board of Trustees had invited Rev. David Pyle from the UUA’s MidAmerica Region to lead us in an all-day retreat. We met, powered by pastries, around a big table on a Saturday in March to dig deeper into practices that can strengthen our Board’s mission-based governance. Maybe that sounds a bit dry?

Really what we were doing was dreaming and feeling our way forward. Here’s partly what I mean: Line items in budgets are not abstract numbers; they are our values made manifest. So, how do we live up to this truth as we allocate dollars, draft policies, and dedicate particular resources to particular projects? How do we become enlivened and emboldened by our mission as we make these decisions?

Or, put another way: To what degree do our shared values, our commitments to courageous love and radical welcome, shape our budget and our policy decisions? What moves might we make to invite these decisions, these budgetary acts of courageous love, to become ever more courageous? These policy acts of radical welcome, to become ever more radical?

David recommends congregations and boards spend time in conversation around what he calls “powerful questions.” At the board retreat, he guided us in exploring one question that we decided to ask ourselves: What gets in the way of our congregation living fully into our mission? We first reflected in silence. Then we spoke, one at a time, pausing for five deep calming breaths between each speaker.
Kim seated and smiling

Something happened to me as we made our way around the table. Folks were heart-achingly open, speaking aloud things at once tender, fierce, and full of insight. I felt like I was seeing our board, each member, with fresh eyes. Who were these luminous people?!! I felt like the room had a centrifugal force, that we were speaking spells into the universe, that I had fallen into a portal, a place, a people to whom I had become devoted.

When viewed from the vantage of a powerful question, even budgets and meetings and agendas can, at times, be thrilling!

How grateful I am to serve with these fellow board members and to be a part of this very particular community. This congregation of luminous people. This congregation that shows up, and shows itself, again and again, to be a place and a people so welcoming and so deserving of our devotion.

Your Board of Trustees meets at 7 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month. Come check it out! You are very much welcome to attend any meeting to observe first-hand what your board is up to.

With gratitude,
Kim Wade
2025-26 President

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon, Minister

Dear UU Churchers,

What if what comes next, after everything collapses, isn’t a wasteland? What if it is a garden? Full of seeds, compost, dying and new life, plenty of work to do, and lots of beauty.

Our theme for the coming program year is “Survival Is a Garden,” and it is based on the following poem by Kyle Tran-Myre, which we first shared the Sunday after the 2024 Presidential election. We hope you will join us this year to nurture and cultivate all that is growing up amid the ruins.

Excerpt from “When it really is just the wind, and not a furious vexation,” by Kyle Tran My-ree:

How many of our ancestors have
already taught us: even after the world ends,
there is work to do. I see myself in that work: not
the leader, not a lone wolf, just another part of the
pack. Because in every universe in which

I am alive, it is because of other people. And I
don’t always like them, but I love them. In every
universe in which I am alive, it is less because I
could fight, and more because I could
forgive. Because I could cooperate. Because

I could apologize. Because I could dance. Because
I could grow pumpkins in my backyard and leave
them at my neighbor’s door, asking for nothing in
return. In every universe in which I am alive, I am
holding: a first aid kit, a solar panel, a sleeping

cat. Never a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher—
sure, maybe sometimes a chainsaw, but only for
firewood. I am holding: a cooking pot, a teddy bear,
a photo album, a basketball, a bouquet of flowers.
Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.

Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And
yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not
the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of
someone you trust applying the bandage, the
feeling of falling asleep in a safe place.

See you in church!
Rev. Molly