05/01/2017 by Shannon Day

The Candidacy of Rev. Carlos Martinez Has Ended

Candidating Week is a week of mutual discernment. It is an exciting and stressful process as a congregation and a ministerial candidate think deeply and reach clarity about whether the match and the opportunity are right for both. The Search Team put a lot of emphasis on the congregation’s role in assessing whether WSUU and Rev. Carlos were a good match for each other. It’s clear that Rev. Carlos is a gifted minister. We heard lots of positive comments.  At the same time, we heard a growing number of concerns and reservations. As the week unfolded, we also became increasingly

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04/26/2017 by Shannon Day

Aligning the Heart – Cynthia Westby, DRE

To what do you align your heart?  Ultimately, that is the quest of religious exploration.  The formation of our children’s spirituality comes through story, art, lessons, wondering, questioning, and discussions.  Exploring their feelings and understandings of UU, their personal expression of this faith, develops and evolves. Children and youth are accompanied on the journey of spiritual formation and spiritual self-awareness by our RE volunteer teachers and RE staff.  Together we grow and mature our faith.  Relationship building and involvement with the broader church community help our children appreciate Unitarian Universalism, and discover what it means to be a member of

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04/20/2017 by Shannon Day

Liquid Spirit – Tracy Burrows, Board President

The final preparations have been going on all week, and we are finally going to meet our ministerial candidate, Rev. Carlos Martinez, next week. We will put our best selves forward to welcome him. We are going to learn a lot about Rev. Carlos and, perhaps more importantly, we’ll learn a lot about ourselves. Who are we as a congregation and what are we looking for? Who do we want as a leader for the next years in our congregational life? We are a dynamic congregation, and the answers to these questions are constantly evolving. We’ve changed dramatically over the

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04/12/2017 by Shannon Day

Minister’s Musings Among the Mountains – Week of April 10

“May you live in interesting times” Many of us have heard this wise expression over the years. It sounds astute and supposedly it comes from Asian proverb sayings. The saying has been widely shared especially in these difficult days in America and the world. Another expression that says the Chinese character for ‘crisis’ are the symbols for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. We can find these two expressions in business circles, New Age websites and many other places online. Unfortunately, neither of them come from Asian traditions. The first expression “may you live in interesting times’ appears to have been conceived in

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04/05/2017 by Shannon Day

Minister’s Musings Among the Mountains – Week of April 3

http://www.blacklivesuu.com/uuwhitesupremacyteachin  Some of you may have read the information I put in the e-news last Friday about UUA President Peter Morales resigning effective April 1. His resignation was in major part an outcome of a highly controversial hiring in the Southern Region of the UUA. The compilation of the sequence of events is in this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10QbuEL7ADWpm5GvpRf-UdU2nbylllpK07DOgzM2dCpc/mobilebasic. You’ll read that hiring practices in the UUA continue to be overwhelmingly white and oftentimes male hires. This is clearly not in line with the aspirations of the UUA to become a fair and equitable hiring and promoting organization. A couple of days ago

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03/29/2017 by Shannon Day

Minister’s Musings Among the Mountains – Mar. 31

Some of you have asked questions about the why’s of the next steps in the selection of the new minister and what happens thereafter. I’d like to try to answer some of them but will defer to the Ministerial Search Committee and Paula vanHaagen as chair of the team for specifics. Why does the search process take so long? Interim ministers are hired very quickly but the search for a new settled minister is a long procedure. The search for a new settled minister does take a long time and is expensive. We should remember that our UU congregations operate

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03/20/2017 by Shannon Day

We’ve Gotta Talk (or email, or post, or tweet, or text, or IM or…)!

Get in on the ground floor of the organizing of a new communications team. We are looking for people with ideas, communications experience, social networking know how, marketing chops, and get-to-it-ness. Want to make a difference at WSUU, want to make sure everyone knows the low down, want to ensure people know how to get involved, want to make a plan and get something done? Come to a fast 45 minutes meeting, Sunday, March 26, at 12:15 PM in the Fireside Room. 

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03/20/2017 by Shannon Day

Join the Fun and Help Us Refresh Our Social Hall

Saturdays, April 8 & 15, 9:30 a.m. – 3 p.m. (or as long as you can stay) On two Saturdays in April we will be washing, preppping and repainting the walls in the social hall.  Please bring gloves, bucket, sponges, rags, sponge mop, or whatever you think we’ll need for cleaning. Church will supply cleaning products. If you have a favorite cutting in brush, bring it. Extra roller and pan, bring that too.

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03/15/2017 by Shannon Day

From Rev. Alex – March 15, 2017

Several people who plan to attend the Stewardship dinner on April 1 have asked me whether we have a keynote speaker lined up. I asked a colleague from another denomination if he’d be interested and he said yes. Vincent Lachina has worked with UU congregations and many others in his role as Pacific Northwest Planned Parenthood chaplain. Here’s what he wrote me as an introduction: “As Regional Chaplain for Planned Parenthood, I have had two primary responsibilities during my 13 years here. First, to assist with pastor care for our staff of over 400, and when requested, for patients with

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