Dear Ones:
I’m very excited to share with you our Sunday Service schedule for August. In short, we will be virtually visiting a number of different congregations in the region. Here’s the schedule:
August 2nd: We visit the UU Society of Bangor, ME, where UUS:E member, the Rev. Drew Moeller, serves as the minister. (Rev. Drew and the folks from Bangor visited us on July 26.)
August 9th: We visit All Souls UU Congregation in New London, CT. They are offering a service jointly created with the UU congregations in Chelsea, MA and Groton, MA.
August 16th: We visit the Universalist Church of West Hartford.
August 23rd: We visit the Unitarian Society of Hartford.
August 30th: We return to UUS:E, and welcome our friends from the Hartford, West Hartford and New London congregations.
For each of these services, instructions for logging in will be sent in our regular Wednesday and Saturday eblasts. For most of them, you will be able to log in to the UUS:E Zoom site (as you regularly do on Sunday mornings) and experience the service from there. If there are any changes to this procedure, we will do everything in our power to get the word out in a timely manner!
I’m excited about this sharing of worship services for a few reasons. First, this sharing of services will enable our UUS:E members and friends to experience how online worship looks, sounds and feels at other UU congregations. It’s not like having a guest minister visit us in our meeting house for the morning. It’s literally having another congregation’s entire worship experience for the morning. This will be a different for all of us!
Second, at least for some of the services, we will be able to interact with members of other congregations, either through the Zoom chat or through the breakout rooms following the services.
Finally, this sharing ensures that our staff and lay-leaders who regularly work on our Sunday services will get a break. (It also ensures that the staff and lay-leaders at the other congregations will be getting breaks too!)
For most of us, our primary experience of Unitarian Universalism is through our local congregation. This sharing of online services reminds us that we are part of a larger association of congregations. It reminds us that we can work with other congregations to fulfill our purpose. It reminds us our congregation is not alone, that there are others very much akin to us on the religious landscape. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic we rarely, if ever, would have thought to share services in this way. It just wouldn’t have happened. But given that we’re all living with the pandemic, and we’re all conducting online worship, it makes perfect sense that we would begin to share services on Sunday morning. A pandemic silver lining perhaps….
I am very curious to know what your experience of these other worship services. Please feel free to let me know what you like about the services at other congregations. And please let me know if you’d like to do more Sunday morning sharing as long as we’re still conducting services online.
With love,
—Rev. Josh
