The conventional wisdom in Unitarian Universalism is that without a creed to define us, we’re called to be a covenantal faith. That is, we are defined by the promises we make to one another about how we will just be together as a community.

When I arrived at UU Berks, it was clear that the creation of a congregational covenant was a top priority – the work had begun once before and been sidelined by the pandemic. This year, we’ll begin anew with our work towards an explicit covenant. I say explicit because there already exist some implied covenants among UUs: the words in our principle and our new shared values; our mission and vision statements; the words of welcome at the beginning of each service, and others.

Our new Covenant Steering Team met for the first time at the end of July to begin preliminary talk about the work ahead of us. Your Covenant Team is: Nathan Brown, Jean Cocuzza, Rev. Sage Olnick, Jane Rohrbach, Martin Smith, and Nic Stotlzfus. Together we’ll be designing the process for creating the covenant and facilitating various small and large group events for collecting your hopes for covenant.

During this church year, we’ll be gathering you together to hear what you promises you hope your church community makes to you, what you wish to promise to each other, and what it means to be out of and welcomed back into covenant.

By the end of this year, we hope to have a draft statement to present to whole congregation for a vote.

Watch for more detailed communication as the year progresses

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In other community news, we have recently begun using new software called Breeze for our member database and are currently migrating all the data there. Breeze will allow us to better track and communicate with our members and friends. As we do this update, it seemed to us that this is a good time to get updated information for you all (I’ve dialed a few wrong numbers out of the church directory, myself). To facilitate this, we’ll be sending out a congregational census form early on in the church year. In addition to updating contact info, you’ll also be presented with a questionnaire about service and social opportunities at the church. This is a chance to indicate some of the ways you’d consider serving the congregation, helping to take care of one another, and build more connection to the congregation.

Again, watch for more information will be coming soon.