Closing ritual/reading for small group gatherings

The following reading is shared by the Rev. Amy Freedman. She is the senior minister of Channing Memorial Church in Newport, RI. The Rev. Freedman and the people at Channing have a wonderful small group ministry which I have been fortunate to see grow over the past few years. I just so happen to be married to the Rev. Amy Freedman!

This is a wonderful reading to keep on hand. I have a copy of this in the binder I take to group and facilitator sessions. I encourage all small group leaders to collect great "all purpose" readings and meditations.

I hope you enjoy this one.

Hands by the Rev. Amy Freedman

Become aware of the hands that you are holding.
Their warmth, texture, and weight.
As an infant these same hands reached outfor the nourishment of milk.
As a child these hands shakily wrote a name on paper for the first time.
These hands have wiped away tears, clenched in anger,waved hello and good-bye countless timesand embraced loved ones.
And now these hands are the tangible link that connect us to one another.
These are hands that have worked, are working, and will work to make the world a better place.
I invite you to look around and see those around you who have experienced so much that is life.
May the circle be open but never broken.
Go in peace.
Go in love.
Work for justice.
Go forth and bless the world.

Copyright 2005 by The Rev. Amy Freedman. Permission granted to use in Unitarian Universalist worship services and Unitarian Universalist small group ministry sessions with attribution.

Reading in a Word Doc

Hotel Earth small group session

"Hotel Earth" and Global Warming Session.


If you are meeting with a small group in one of our congregations, please try this session. As part of our association's larger social action process we are ALL called to consider this issue.

On a personal note, I live in Newport, RI (East Coast) . It would be nice if I could take my grandchildren on a tour of my old neighborhood without scuba gear. I'd appreciate it if you'd give this session a try.

To help people connect with this issue I developed this session with the UUA's Washington Office. It looks at the underlying spiritual /conceptual issues relating to how we view and care for the Earth.

So far, good reports on the session. Give it a go and send me your feedback.

Please share the following session with members of your church, small groups, etc... I welcome feedback. Also, sessions submissions to are always welcome.

What's our certainty and making a UU-Turn

During the UUA's Large Church Conference someone asked Don Cohen, the keynote speaker, if he could imagine a UU mega church. He replied that a UU mega church is hard to imagine because certainty draws more people than ambiguity. An Evangelical Christians do certainty better than we do. Not an exact quote, but fairly close.

Personally, I can imagine a UU mega church. I think we have great "certainty" which we can offer people. The trick, I think, is for us to "contain" all of the questions we hold so dear and the "self guided" spiritual development in a stronger culture of certainty and higher expectation.

It is true that what you "have to" believe is not certain. In fact its pretty open, within reason. But how we live in this world, our responsibility to it and each other, and our path toward making a this world a more just, compassionate and caring place is as clear cut and defined as a major interstate highway.

Can't you see it? A big giant highway with a UU-Turn sign. A giant call to turn around and head our world in another direction. I think we can help the world make a turn for the better. But we need to offer what we have in terms of certainty and precise pathways and processes.

All you need to do to find our certainty is look to the hurts and hopes of our world.

As you work on your elevator speeches about what Unitarian Universalism is, make sure you frame it in terms of what we know and what we are called to do in this world. There are plenty of absolutes we can offer people. Think of our faith as having a hard, one pointed side, and soft and malleable side. When you try and hand it off to someone you need to give them the harder side first otherwise they won't be able to grasp it -- literally. Their neurons will not know how to tie it to their existing knowledge.

Social Capital and Small Group Ministry

Recently the UUA held a conference for our large congregations, those over 550 members. Held in Boston, MA, this event's featured speaker was Don Cohen, co-author of In good Comapany: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work.

Attending this event on behalf of our UU SGM Network was... what shall I call it... affirming. In his presentation Cohen upheld small groups as one of the two most important factors in generating social capital, or an organizations wealth or resources in terms of human connections, trust, social/personal networks, and sense of community. The other was have a shared higher or larger purpose.

We are just scratching the surface of our potential to use small group ministry to multiply our ministry and effectiveness in bringing about social change and justice.

Even ministers of our largest churches told me over this four day event that their small group ministries are still just at the stage of being another pogram, far from being the primary social architecture that serves as the foundation for larger and mega sized churches in other denominations.

Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression, & Multi-Culturalism and Small Group Ministry

If you are a Unitarian Universalist, grab a copy of Soul Work (Skinner House). This book contains...

Papers and discussion transcripts from the UUA Consultation on Theology and
Racism held in Boston in January 2001. Addresses such questions as: What theological or philosophical beliefs bind us together in our shared struggle against racism? What are the costs of racism, both for the oppressors and the oppressed?

In the introduction the editors discuss how UU leaders have realized we need to do more with to engage in the spiritual work of anti-racism. In the conclusion there are recommendations including one suggesting the appropriateness of small group ministries to engage in this work.

I am starting to explore this idea and would love to hear from you if you have done any work with these issues either in your small groups and with your facilitators.

IMAGINE if our ministers and facilitators engaged in a series of sessions equivalent to some of the weekend UUA AR/AO/MC trainings. IMAGINE if every group had a facilitator who could, in the course of discussing the general topics, bring up, as appropriate issues of race, power, oppression, and so on.

In suspect that doing this work at teh small group level will result in significant cultural changes in our faith, and in time, our larger world.

Note: I'm specifically thinking of SGM's that are congregation wide small group / cell group systems, not explicitly anti-racism focused groups using a covenant group model. Plenty of people are using covenant groups in their AR, transformation team, identity groups, and other meetings, etc...

I'd love to see more SGM sessions on issues related to race and power. If you have developed material like this please submit it to our network.

UUA Social Justice resources for congregations

Religion as a tool

Have you read Lisa Earl McLoud's November 2004 article Did religion steal our spirituality?

In it she states that "purpose of religion is to provide people with a language, a process and a community that supports them in deepening their spirituality." Thinking of religion as a tool, or set of tools, to facilitate a process of awakening to our own inner spirituality, the proliferation of small group ministry makes sense to me. We've suffered without some essential tools for far too long.

In our UU congregations we have not done enough to create in our communities structures that assist in spiritual growth at all levels, from beginner to advanced. I have known many people to leave my church to go to do more advanced work at zen and yoga centers and other organizations offering more rigorous programs.

We will become irrelevent if we can't figure out how to offer, as some have called it, graduate level church.

How would you use a small group ministry system to offer various levels and areas of study?

A Continuum of ministry

The following is a quick core dumping of my thoughts after reading a brief chapter of Discontinuity and Hope, by Lyle E. Schaller. So, please don't sweat any typos. Just enjoy the rough content...


In Discontinuity and Hope, Schaller shares four primary reasons for our congregations' paradigm shift from minister centered to ministry centered.

One of these is the professionalism of a large segment of the population. Years ago the minister in a community was one of the most educated people in terms of years of schooling.

Just consider how much access people have to information these days, including information on religion, spirituality, ethics, morality, spiritual disciplines and more. We can access more than the contents of a seminary library at will with just a few clicks on the computer and a credit card.

An ongoing topic in my conversations with lay leaders and ministers is our concept of what being a "minister" and "doing ministry" is. Many of us -- ministers and laity alike -- are still using a ministry concept from this era when the minister had all the information, at least education wise. There are many things that complicate this issue, including issues of safety & trust, language and more. I tend to gravitate to how our language around ministry relates to what we feel "lay people" are capable of doing.

I believe that as our congregations continue to adopt shared ministry models, particularly small group ministry, how we talk about ministry and ministers and how we develop ministry become increasingly important. These can either facilitate or impede the process of empowering and equipping the people in our congregations to do ministry.

Though there is growing talk of sharing ministry, I see very few people, ministers included, who uphold lay members as ministers. We applaud their work, but do not as readily fully acknowledge it as ministry and hardly ever, in UU congregations at least, share a "minister" designation. We have lay leaders, people on lay ministry committees, ministry and worship associates, but very few lay ministers. I have heard many ministers, Ministerial Fellowship Committee members and UUA staffers discuss that in terms of ministry training and development we don't have many options -- you are either a lay person or you go to divinity school.

I think we need to radically reform our language and conception of ministry. These days I am thinking in terms of what I call a "continuum of ministry."

When we talk in terms of a continuum of ministry we look at the role of the minister and the church in different ways. With the continuum the function of the church shifts from seeing that the ministry needs of the congregation is fulfilled by the minister to empowering all people to minister to one another, with each only doing those functions which they are called, empowered, trained and authorized to do by their own gifts, the church, and the universe with all pain and wonder.

In small group ministry we have group participants who are encouraged to minister to each other, facilitators or group leaders who are responsible for the overall ministry of the group, and lay coaches who's ministry is to care for the group leaders. Instead of having a binary system where one is either a lay person or THE MINISTER, small group ministry creates multiple ministry roles, each involving more mentoring and responsibility for larger and larger numbers groups. In a congregation with a small group ministry we have people who are not in groups, participants, group leaders, coaches, and the minister -- already five distinct layers of ministry. And this is in smaller congregations (under 500). Imagine how many layers you'd have when we empower lay people and have faith communities of thousands...

It isn't easy lay people and ministers to let go of the binary ministry system.

When congregations give all the ministry to their called professional minister and she or he takes it on, something horrible happens. No, I am not talking about burnout, though that is common. When the minister takes the ministry away from the congregation (or they refuse to take it) the majority of the opportunities for spiritual and personal growth go with it. Did you catch what I just said? Doing ministry is how we stretch, learn and grow spiritually. Give away the ministry and you give away the very reason for church. Well, there are many people who do like pew oriented religious experience where the minister is called upon to do all the ministry, grow spiritually, and preach on related learning to the congregation, challenging all to reflect on the lesson in their own lives. This is backwards.

Our professional ministers need to walk from their end of the ministry position as the most highly trained and experienced person ministering within the congregation and come to the "lay" end and start pushing everyone along. Remember when we just had secretaries? Today we have executive assistants, associates and many kinds of administrators.

We are all called to minister. We are all ministers. Period. There's no getting around the fact. Especially if you're a church leader or religious professional in the "business" of help every bit of love and ministry surface in your community and our world.

I think adopting a new way to talk about ministry might change how we go about doing church. Ultimately, what I think we need to do is to mentor, train, support and encourage our members to be ministers -- title or no title -- we must think of each as a minister in the rough, waiting to be given permission to serve the community. This isn't about ordaining people, its about respecting them and their gifts.