Erika Sanders, Beloved Community Staff Team
Unity’s engagement with the wider community happens, in large part, thanks to the work of nine dedicated Community Outreach Ministry Teams. Each team has a distinct focus, such as environmental sustainability, racial justice, or affordable housing, and each team partners with one or more organizations in the community to engage in education and advocacy. At the beginning of 2021, our teams began a process of reflection and renewal. To learn more about this, I interviewed Rev. Shay Mackay, Coordinator of Community Outreach Ministries at Unity Church. ES: Tell me how and why the Community Outreach Ministry Teams renewal process began. SM: In the past, each team reapplied every two years to ensure that the team’s work remained relevant and connected to the congregation and its community partners. In this time of so much transition, as well as deepening antiracist multicultural work in the congregation, leaders decided to ask the teams to reapply and also to engage in a process of reflection. We hoped that the renewal process would expand the ways that team members experience and articulate how their activities connect to their spiritual growth. This renewal process began in early 2021, and I joined the effort in July 2021. We hope it will be completed by June of this year. ES: What types of reflection are part of the renewal process? SM: Each team engages in the process a little differently, based on their focus, but in general, they reflect on questions such as:
ES: What are the most joyous things that you’ve seen come out of the renewal process? SM: The process has generated a lot of wonderful dialogue within teams, and excitement for continuing to grow in this work. For instance, as a result of working with the Double Helix Model, most team members have taken the Intercultural Development Inventory and are working on their individual Intercultural Development Plans. Each team is looking more closely at its relations with community organizations. They’re asking important questions about how those partnerships are or are not mutually beneficial, what each member wants from the relationship, and what team members’ aspirations are for the partnerships. We all want these partnerships to be authentic relationships of mutuality, and to avoid anything that feels like “white saviorism.” We also believe that these reflections and partnerships will help teams grow in their understanding of whiteness, of their own cultural framework. By interrogating our work we can transform how we engage with others, and it takes our understanding of how we are accountable to ourselves and to others in a much more nuanced, sophisticated direction. Ultimately, I think that this process is making Unity’s Ends more real and present in our day-to-day work. Being able to articulate who we are and why we do what we do is very powerful. Watch for Part II of “Renewal and Commitment,” about how one team has been transformed by this process.
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Mary Pickard, Welcome Team member Being respected and being treated well are not the same as having a feeling of belonging. -- Barb Cederberg ![]() The Welcome Team — otherwise known as greeters or ushers — is reinventing itself at Unity Church. It might not seem obvious. We still hand out orders of service, pass collection plates, and clean up the pews after service. The transformation is happening in our hearts and we hope you will notice in your heart. The shift is rooted in the church’s desire to become more antiracist and multicultural, to create the Beloved Community, moving the emphasis away from the tactical to the relational to fulfill the Welcome Team’s new mission, “Nurturing Mutual Belonging.” “Welcome Team work is a spiritual practice and part of our covenant to provide a continuum of care here at Unity,” says Madeline Summers, team coordinator. “Nurturing mutual belonging starts with us as individuals — our own sense of belonging, knowing who we are, what we’re passionate about, and how we might be perceived by others. Then, it extends to our practice among team members.” Each team now meets 30 minutes before the service to check in, sometimes with a reading or reflection, so members can be grounded and know each other more deeply. By nurturing belonging within each team, we can better nurture belonging beyond to congregants. More focus is being given to interacting with people, so Welcome Team members aren’t going to be found behind tables anymore. Rather, we are circulating in the Parish Hall engaging in conversation. That’s not always easy, says Welcome Team member Barb Cederberg, a self-proclaimed introvert. “We want to do things right. We may not do it right, so it inhibits us from trying. How do we have the courage to try and live with the discomfort? Unity Church members have so much generosity, if mistakes are made, we can overcome.” Barb is passionate about the work. “I can feel where I belong and I can feel where I don’t belong,” says Barb. “Being respected and being treated well are not the same as having a feeling of belonging. I worked in corporate America for many years. I did not acknowledge my spouse, Judy, or that we had children. Nurturing belonging is a feeling of acceptance of self and others. At Unity, I can be myself. How do I encourage others to be themselves?” “Mutual belonging is more complicated than passing the collection plate or picking up Kleenex boxes,” says Jim Oberly, another Welcome Team member. “I’m an old white guy. I’m conscious of that. You know the images of deacons in the old churches — conveying an air of authority as if to say, ‘your money is safe with us.’ I used to wear a coat and tie. I dress differently now — a sweater and slacks.” Continues Jim, “When people enter the church, we greeters are likely to make misinformed judgments based on how someone looks. We need to stay open and curious. I do my best to help visitors figure us out — what might be expected during a service, where things are located, how to get more information — and I try to share something of myself in hopes they will share something of themselves with me.” Nurturing mutual belonging isn’t just for visitors. “It is a good direction for all the groups we have at church,” says Barb. “We should increase our awareness of how the interactions are among us. If someone is standing alone in the Parish Hall, start up a conversation.” She recalls when she was standing in line to greet the ministers and the woman ahead of her looked very sad. “I asked her if she was OK. She had just lost her husband two years earlier – about the time I lost Judy – so we got talking and now we’re good friends.” Jim has seen the value of mutual belonging in other aspects of his church volunteer work. In recent months, he and his wife have been escorting elderly women to church on Sundays. “As so many people came up to greet and fuss over them, I saw the elders come alive! It made them so happy. How many friends and admirers they have!” I guess that’s proof that whether we’re on a Welcome Team or not, all congregants are part of nurturing mutual belonging. If you are interested in joining the Welcome Team, contact Madeline Summers. All church members, including Welcome Team members, are encouraged to take the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a tool to help build our self-knowledge so we can develop our personal and congregational capacity for welcoming all. Further, as we move forward in the spirit of transformation, Welcome Teams will be engaging with the Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracist Multicultural Work to deepen our practice of welcome. Erika Sanders, Beloved Community Staff Team ![]() Last autumn, Unity congregants met for a program called SoulWork, a rich learning opportunity in which we explored how spiritual development and racial justice work intersect. During the gathering, Rev. KP Hong, Laura Park, and Angela Wilcox introduced the Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracist Multiculturalism. To find out more about the development of the model, I interviewed Laura Park, Director of Membership and Hospitality and member of the Beloved Community Staff Team. ES: What was the motive behind the creation of the double helix model? What was your goal, or what need were you working to meet? LP: For some years, we have been working to define pathways of spiritual development, to be more explicit about the possibilities for faith formation at Unity. We asked ourselves how we could describe those opportunities for spiritual development in the categories of within, among, and beyond in ways that made sense. As our congregation moved more deeply into antiracism and multicultural efforts, the question of how that work intersected with faith formation became powerful. We asked, “What does it mean to be a person of faith who is also actively antiracist?” Over the course of 2020 and 2021, we worked to identify the specific links between faith formation and antiracism multicultural work, and find a metaphor for the growth we hoped could come from this work. Was it a river? A garden? Rev. KP Hong came up with the double helix. Then, we began to think about how the parts of a double helix enabled us to communicate in a visual way. The bonding between the two halves of the helix—faith formation and antiracist multicultural work—are a powerful image for growth. ES: What do you think are the strengths of this model? LP: It evokes the life-giving nature of this faith tradition, and grounds our antiracist, multicultural work in specific church contexts. It’s visually compelling — the components of the model share space in a way that makes it hard to overlook any one component. And it’s a model that we can engage with repeatedly over time since it doesn’t represent growth solely as a linear process. ES: Do other congregations use anything similar? LP: Not to my knowledge, so far. I’ve shared our model with my colleagues at other congregations, and no one has seen anything quite like this. What may be unique about this double helix model is how it invites people to think about their own behavior, and to be accountable for specific practices that get us to antiracist outcomes. Truly, I think this model is unique to this congregation, and has grown out of long-term work we’ve done together. ES: How will Unity groups use the model, and what characteristics of the model are most important as they do so? LP: We have invited small groups to consider their among practices in depth — that is, the practices that help us “go deep quickly” and “engage antiracism and multiculturalism together.” First, do we have a practice that brings us together as we start our work in small groups? If so, what readings do we use? What questions do we ask during check-in if we include one? What do we say as we light the chalice? As groups begin using it together, it should feel approachable as a team. Later, we’ll invite people to consider what happens during meetings and other encounters with each other. What are the practices that deepen intimacy and shared vulnerability? What are the practices of accountability to antiracist multicultural work? The emphasis on how we do work among ourselves as a church community is crucial for this model to be effective. ES: What do you hope people will discover as they begin to use the model? LP: I hope it opens up a sense of possibility and exploration about the intersection of faith formation and antiracist multicultural work. I hope that it helps us examine things we take for granted — for instance, the lighting of a chalice — and compels us to ask new questions and try new things. Ultimately, we hope the model encourages us to make deeper and more meaningful promises to ourselves, each other, and the world. It’s sometimes difficult to talk about promises and Unitarian Universalism as a covenantal faith. A model like the double helix may make those conversations more concrete. For more information on SoulWork, see Beloved Community News-October 2021 and the SoulWork playlist of videos on Unity’s YouTube channel. |
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Team Dynamics House of Intersectionality Anti-Racism Resources in the Unity Libraries Collection Creative Writers of Color in Unity Libraries The History of Race Relations and Unity Church, 1850-2005 Archives
June 2024
Beloved Community Staff TeamThe Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) strengthens and coordinates Unity’s antiracism and multicultural work, and provides opportunities for congregants and the church to grow into greater intercultural competency. We help the congregation ground itself in the understanding of antiracism and multiculturalism as a core part of faith formation. We support Unity’s efforts to expand our collective capacity to imagine and build the Beloved Community. Here, we share the stories of this journey — the struggles, the questions, and the collaborations — both at Unity and in the wider world.
The current members of the Beloved Community Staff Team include Rev. Kathleen Rolenz, Rev. KP Hong, Rev. Lara Cowtan, Drew Danielson, Laura Park, Lia Rivamonte and Angela Wilcox. |