Digging into the Rules of the Unitarian Universalist Association, a church-planter would find Rule 3.3.5.f, which begins: A congregation should be incorporated when possible under the laws of the state in which it exists. A congregation shall include in its articles of incorporation or other organizing documents a clause providing that the assets of the [...]
Review this map. (Note that the District of Columbia is colored in.) And now think about church growth. The title is a big hint to where I’m heading. More later. Share this article Hide Sites $$(‘div.d4188′).each( function(e) { e.visualEffect(‘slide_up’,{duration:0.5}) });
A Universalist history note. In places where there was more than one Universalist parish (also called a society), the churches — by which was often also understood as the building — had a distinct name. Confused? It gets worse when you consider some parishes didn’t have churches; that is, that they didn’t have a covenanted [...]
So, returning to the question of congregational size and spending, I wanted an answer to a question: what congregation spends the least money per member, and what does that “get you”? That honor goes to the Joseph Priestly Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Its 28 members reported 2009 annual expenses of $800, or about $28 [...]
Better, I think, to do this in parts, interspersed with other topics. I have been opining that we’ve had the return of the Fellowship movement within the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). I think, however, the real mystery is why there is a lack of variety in new congregational development. Why the insistence on “full service” [...]
Last time, I begged patience for a review of Unitarian Universalist congregational expenses over membership. My goal isn’t to see trends — I have neither the data nor the statistical chops to do that. What I’d like to see — or, rather scan — is if there are loose clumps of congregations based on their [...]
The blue pins in the emerging congregations map I posted last time have puzzled me. None is less than two years old and yet these are congregations that have been (putatively) developing into UUA-member churches. Today that’s carries the burden of being “full service” (a term I associate with old gas stations) but that’s a [...]
Almost exactly two years ago, I mapped the emerging congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association. That is, those that had begun the process of organization, but which had not been admitted to the UUA. This is our defacto model of church development. I revisited the list and mapped the changes. Blue pins mark congregations that [...]
A couple of years ago, I noted the emerging congregations — that is those founded and developing but not in fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association — resource EmergingUU.org. I gave it a pass because it was new, and then last year it vanished. It’s has since reappeared and there is some content on it, [...]
My preferred computer operating system, Ubuntu Linux, upgrades later this week. One approach for improving usability was for the community that supports it to attack “a hundred papercuts” at the same time others improve more complex systems. The project, defined: A paper cut is a trivially fixable usability bug that the average user would encounter [...]
