doing something. the full week faith
We have no road map or blueprint for how the future might shape our faith. But we can choose a direction, make some choices and strengthen our position as we stand at the fork of a multiple-choice path. The time is now to choose one way and try it out. Experilearn.
Full Week Faith is one proposed direction.
This proposal asks us to carry forward the best of our current Religious Education programming and to let go of those pieces that are unsustainable or no longer serving our families well. It invites religious professionals to reimagine roles and responsibilities and shared ministries. It dares our congregants to put the Living into the Living Tradition by supporting one another to live as Unitarian Universalists seven days a week, intentionally and interactively, and not just on Sunday mornings.
Consider suspending your traditional every-Sunday-morning religious education program, and engaging in a model of faith formation ministry that is intentionally multigenerational and which will include multiple points of congregational engagement throughout the week. Congregational and associational leaders may together curate resources that support such a shift, so that professional staff will not be required to invest significant hours in creating new material as they experilearn with their congregation, and will be able to focus primarily on community and relationship building.[1] Congregations that take on this adventure should commit to faithfully engaging in the experiment and thoughtfully assessing its impact on the life of the congregation and on the spiritual formation of the individuals and families who participate. Let us willingly, and gratefully and joyfully acknowledge that there are siblings in faith among us who are doing these things already, and to great effect. Thank G-d for them and their power of example! They have much to teach us. The invitation from this Fahs Fellowship project is to imagine our world if such intentional faith-driven lives were more the norm than the notable exception; a world in which this is our denominational reputation.
what is this ‘full week faith?’
Full Week Faith can be described as a mash-up of good old-fashioned family ministry, first century-style mission driven church, and a faithful leveraging of technology and social media to expand the reach and breadth of our ministries. Obviously, on their own, none of these things is at all new or innovative. My hope is that Full Week Faith pulls these strands together in an innovative way and expands the conversations, which have been bubbling among a minority of Unitarian Universalists to a much broader crowd of participants. It brings together the best of our collective thinking about faith formation, both from our ancestors and our contemporary colleagues, and it will benefit enormously by the reflection, adaptation and experilearning of many more partners.
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[1]. This is already beginning to happen in regional field offices, in the office of ministry and faith development and the resource development office of our UUA, among other places. It is my hope that these curation efforts will be strengthened and more widely publicized and accessible in coming months.
We have no road map or blueprint for how the future might shape our faith. But we can choose a direction, make some choices and strengthen our position as we stand at the fork of a multiple-choice path. The time is now to choose one way and try it out. Experilearn.
Full Week Faith is one proposed direction.
This proposal asks us to carry forward the best of our current Religious Education programming and to let go of those pieces that are unsustainable or no longer serving our families well. It invites religious professionals to reimagine roles and responsibilities and shared ministries. It dares our congregants to put the Living into the Living Tradition by supporting one another to live as Unitarian Universalists seven days a week, intentionally and interactively, and not just on Sunday mornings.
Consider suspending your traditional every-Sunday-morning religious education program, and engaging in a model of faith formation ministry that is intentionally multigenerational and which will include multiple points of congregational engagement throughout the week. Congregational and associational leaders may together curate resources that support such a shift, so that professional staff will not be required to invest significant hours in creating new material as they experilearn with their congregation, and will be able to focus primarily on community and relationship building.[1] Congregations that take on this adventure should commit to faithfully engaging in the experiment and thoughtfully assessing its impact on the life of the congregation and on the spiritual formation of the individuals and families who participate. Let us willingly, and gratefully and joyfully acknowledge that there are siblings in faith among us who are doing these things already, and to great effect. Thank G-d for them and their power of example! They have much to teach us. The invitation from this Fahs Fellowship project is to imagine our world if such intentional faith-driven lives were more the norm than the notable exception; a world in which this is our denominational reputation.
what is this ‘full week faith?’
Full Week Faith can be described as a mash-up of good old-fashioned family ministry, first century-style mission driven church, and a faithful leveraging of technology and social media to expand the reach and breadth of our ministries. Obviously, on their own, none of these things is at all new or innovative. My hope is that Full Week Faith pulls these strands together in an innovative way and expands the conversations, which have been bubbling among a minority of Unitarian Universalists to a much broader crowd of participants. It brings together the best of our collective thinking about faith formation, both from our ancestors and our contemporary colleagues, and it will benefit enormously by the reflection, adaptation and experilearning of many more partners.
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[1]. This is already beginning to happen in regional field offices, in the office of ministry and faith development and the resource development office of our UUA, among other places. It is my hope that these curation efforts will be strengthened and more widely publicized and accessible in coming months.