Archive for January, 2006

Gave nothing, why?

Friday, January 27th, 2006

Twenty UUA member congregations gave (I refuse to say paid until covenant rhetoric is swapped for service provision rhetoric) nothing to the UUA Annual Fund last year. The list is here. This post probably plays up this fact more than anything said publically by the Administration, so I won’t say the congregations are being […]

Fix the UUA: Pay for what works

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

Money talks. You can complain and grouse, but money talks. It may not always be used well — and some volunteer or unfunded activities may produce profund results — but it shows what we value.

UUA leadership — staff, yes, but I’m thinking more of elected and volunter “true believers” — has been keen to […]

Bootstrapping a church

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

I won’t mention a certain ill-fated church in Texas, but before someone else starts a church the same way, I’d recommend the organizer read this –

The Art of Bootstrapping (Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki)

Not everything applies, but some good ideas.

Fix the UUA: Demand open standards and open licensed resources

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

Think of a traditional wedding service. “Dearly beloved . . . ” This image of the traditional wedding service (no doubt) became traditional because most American Protestants used some variation (depending on which edition was authorized when the adoption took place) of the US Episcopal Church’s wedding service as their own. To a lesser degree, […]

PDF download: 1902 Universalist General Convention Board of Trustees rules and Theological Schools notice

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

The PDF file linked from this page is in the public domain.

This is a little experiment in both open licenses (public domain, really) and getting hard-to-find documents “out there.”

This is the inside back cover of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Trustees (1902) of the Universalist General Convention, the national denominational body. It […]

Memo book resources

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

Does anyone else out there use a six-holed ring-bound memo-style organizer? (I think this is the same configuaration as Franklin-Covey compact, but a half-inch narrower). The pages are 3.75 inches wide by 6.75 inches tall.

I have a snazzy six-hole punch (Franklin-Covey, in fact) and I am making up a calendar and planner, with a few […]

My favorite churchly site

Wednesday, January 25th, 2006

We all know the Desert Island game — immortalized on the BBC with its Desert Island Disks show — where you are limited to x number of books or records for an indefinite amount of time.

Not quite in the spirit of the game (unless one had it cached on a solar-powered laptop) is the […]

What made Universalist churches Universalist

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

Before I start suggesting changes to the UUA, I’d like to talk about the fused Unitarian and Universalist polity pieces we have. Well, mostly Unitarian, meaning it is at heart a service bureau, a meeting of ideas, and a ministerial settlement service. But the Universalist idea of church — especially postbellum — was local and […]

Fixing the UUA: a prologue

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

Unlike a lot of other bloggers, I don’t mind that the UUA, via the General Assembly and the Administration, steps up and makes political statements. I usually agree with the content of these statements, too.

What I mind is that there’s energy for these, and a number of other non-core activities, and much less evidence that […]

Who complains about the UUA?

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

I don’t want to debate “the merits of the case” now but only respond to an assertion Steve Caldwell made on his blog about popular feeling about the UUA. (While I’m at it: Chutney, I think you over-read Steve’s call for research, and over-reacted. At least, I don’t think it unfair to expect those who […]