Tag: ministerial transition

Transition?! Updates on Behalf of the MTT

The Ministerial Transition Team wants to make sure the whole congregation is on the same page with the vital, confusing, and joyful work of our ministerial transition at UCV. We’re in the home stretch! Our last big project is to ask “What’s Next?” To do that, we’re looking for congregants who can facilitate Visioning Circles! These circles will be a time to reflect, share, and let loose all our biggest ideas about what a future at UCV can look like. We want to take all those visions and distill them down to the essentials of what our Search Committee and new minister need to know. Exciting times! Are you interested? Email me below if you are.

Read on to find out what we’ve been up to lately. And to refresh our memories, here’s the five main tasks of a congregation during a ministerial transition.

  1. Claiming and honoring its past and healing its griefs and conflicts.
  2. Illuminating the congregation’s unique identity, its strengths, its needs, and its challenges.
  3. Clarifying the multiple dimensions of leadership, both ordained and lay, and navigating the shifts in leadership that accompany times of transition.
  4. Renewing connections with available resources within and beyond the UUA (and CUC for us).
  5. Enabling the congregation to renew its vision, strengthen its stewardship, prepare for new professional leadership, and engage its future with anticipation and zest.

From the Janus Workbook.  

Right now, the MTT is focussed on making sure UCV’s new organizational design is sustainably implemented. A large part of this undertaking is going over the Terms of Reference for each active committee and team. That may sound like the most boring part of task 3, but it’s actually a wonderful time to reflect on the diversity of passions and projects we have here.

And remember those Rethinking Our Identity workshops from last summer? The information collected is being sifted through by a dedicated team to find the patterns of what’s special about UCV. Are you interested in helping to comb through our members’ stories and memories and find gems? New sets of eyes are always appreciated. Reach out to identityproject@vancouverunitarians.ca if you can help in this work.

Another continuing project is the History Wall. Now on display in its full glory both online at ucv.im/ucvstories and in the Hewett Hall alcove, the wall showcases UCV’s path from 1909 to today. And there’s still a space for your new memories to be added if you have them. 

Last but not least, the Decision Making Task Force shared a Preliminary Recommendations report with the MTT and the board in January and is working diligently to complete their full report, which we will share with the whole congregation.

Do you have any questions? Comments? Enthusiasms? Let me know! Email oliviahmargaret@gmail.com with your thoughts.

January, 2021 – Imagining The Future For UCV

We are travelling the “road ahead”, our ministerial transition. We have made great progress on our first developmental/transition task, “Coming to terms with history”, and we continue to build our history wall. Please visit or revisit UCV Stories to discover our past and to add your own memories and stories.

We begin our second transition task this month – “Discovering a new identity”. The UUA’s Janus Workbook, created to support ministerial transitions, describes this second transition task as “Illuminating the congregation’s unique identity, its strengths, its needs, and its challenges”. Simply put, it is time to imagine the future we want to become, to stretch ourselves, to look into our crystal balls, and to use our imaginations to reshape our reality and transform UCV into the congregation we dream to be. Our imaginations are the magic that will get us there.

Our Soul Matters theme for January is “Imagination”, and Reverend Lara explains in her January 2021 In the Interim that we will explore imagination in various ways during this month. Unleashing our imaginations will help our Vancouver Unitarians world come alive – an exciting step in our “road ahead”!

from Transition Team, Rob Dainow, Chair