Dreaming Together

Dear Evergreen friends,

As I shared with you last Sunday, I find inspiration in equinox's celestial balance of twelve-hours of day and night. That inspiration is still inviting me all these days later to take notice of our balance of spiritual readiness as a congregation. Readiness isn't just about finding our next long-term home or pinning our hopes and imaginings up on the walls. Readiness is about the home we build through our shared promises, our covenants we make and honor with one another.

I want to invite you to read the outcomes of our first two "envisioning our next home" sessions last year, what I call "Evergreen's Book of Dreams." You can read those two documents here and here. So many of you contributed your written or sketched responses to our blue sky questions during our Sunday BrUUnch visioning sessions last January and June. Afterward, I took it upon myself to transcribe every post-it note you wrote or sketched into a bullet point or photograph -- a task that informed my ministry with you all like nothing else could.

When we first embarked on these sessions together last year, I wasn't sure what shape they'd take. But what you have contributed via post-it notes put onto paper panels on the walls are positively inspiring facets of how each of us centers love in our life here at Evergreen. It reinforces my belief that the congregation who allows themselves to dream together, stays together.

Dreaming and imagining our future isn't frivolous, friends. Dreaming together is crucial. Our collected dreams make the foundation for how we will continue to transform our individual longings into collaborative small group ministries, all ages faith education, new community partnerships, and more. In short, our congregational life and any home that may house it begin with dreaming together.

As I shared on Sunday, our dreams will serve us well if we braid them with reality. Like rivulets joining into one river, our challenge this coming year is to weave dream and reality so they trace and hold the contours of our volunteering capacity, family needs, staffing levels, pledge totals and more.

I encourage you to hold in your heart and mind that ours is not the only beloved community learning how to balance dreams with truths. Throughout our UU Association, congregations large and small are also becoming the place where faith is rooted in covenants, liberation, and expansive pluralism just like we are. When we

watched this year's UUA Ingathering video together on Sunday, a few of you shared with me afterward how you saw your own dreams mirrored back at you. The beauty of our covenantal faith is that we belong to a broader community of congregations, each a place that is also becoming.

In the church year to come, we'll continue our Sunday BrUUnch visioning sessions for the place we are becoming and our next home that may house it. We'll continue widening our welcome via guest preachers, social service mornings intertwined with local nonprofit partners, new adult education courses and small group ministries, religious exploration connections for families of all ages, hosted dinners that transform hospitality into new friends, faith-based social justice that brings our dreams of liberation for all souls to life, and much more.

Friends, I invite you to thrive with us as we learn how to balance our spiritual readiness with the truths impacting all souls today, to co-imagine how we can embrace Evergreen's living experiment in progressive faith through the seasons ahead. We won't graduate into beloved community, we'll practice our way into it, again and again.

With love and gratitude,

Rev. Joe