Matthew’s Memo June 6, 2023
 
You will find in today’s Kairos a link to the annual report and meeting agenda for the annual meeting, coming up this Sunday after worship.  I wanted to take my column space to share with you my goals for the coming church year.  The common thread that unites these goals is that I need your help.  I cannot accomplish any of these alone.  Think about how you can participate and please do.  With that, my goals for 23-24 are:
 

1. Heartfelt, engaging worship.  I want to continue our movement toward worship that engages the whole person, celebrates our diversity, and changes lives.  Working with Rev. Joyce, Tim, Lindsay, our worship associates, and our guest preachers and musicians, we will push ourselves to bring more heart-centered and body-inclusive elements to worship. 
2. Faith in Action.  We will go deeper with our issue/action teams, leverage our power and connections to do more organizing, collaborate more with key partners including the LIAM Foundation, Sustain Rockford, Eliminate Racism 815, and Rockford Urban Ministries, offer more opportunities for service and connection, support mutual aid, grow cultural humility and anti-racism skills, and empower and support our leaders in this area.  This includes working with our UUANI Congregational Catalyst (Allyson Rosemore) and with RUM to do a strong listening campaign and focus on engagement.
3. Lay Leadership Development. I will lead the Harvest the Power leadership program, and The Shared Pulpit, a worship leadership program, to train and support more leaders.  We’ll do more to encourage, train, and connect leaders and to help teams and committees actualize and be accountable to our goals around belonging, inclusion, and anti-oppression. 
4. Outreach, Evangelism, and Growth.  People are hungry for liberal and liberating spiritual community.  We need to reach them, connect them, and engage them.  I will work with our staff and volunteers to do more outreach to potential visitors, to grow our capacity to make invitations, authentically welcome people, and turn visitors into engaged and active members whose lives are better for being part of the church.

 
I look forward to partnering with you on this work.
 
In faith,
Matthew

Who Makes a Difference in Our Community?

The Social Justice Team is seeking nominees for the Connolly Community Service Awards for 2023. A bit of history of the awards and the nomination procedures follow. If you know someone – or a group of people — you think should receive one of these awards, please turn in nominations to the church office.

History: In 1993 the church initiated a community service award to recognize a member of the congregation for significant contributions to the community. The award was named for Dr. Charles Parker Connolly, minister of our congregation from 1913 to 1942, and a recognized community leader.

To date the award has been presented to the following individuals: Walt Lewis, Mary Caskey, Martha Logemann, Pat Tollefsrud, Sandra Locke, David Weissbard, Lynn Liston, Pat Lewis, Jon McGinty, JoAnn Shaheen, Leigh Lakey, Roger Oehlke, Lola Gustafson, Allen Penticoff, Colleen McDonald, Jackie Dehler, Bob Arevalo, Dave Black, Myrna Lake, Dave Lantz, Barb Giolitto, Duane Wilke, Ellyn Ahmer, Dale Dunnigan, Nikki Ticknor, Bob Babcock, & Shiraz Tata, & Allyson Rosemore.

More recently an award was established to recognize a young person, 8th grade through high school, for service to the church and community. Recipients to date are Emma Stocker, Katie Whitworth, Sandra Hill, Jackie Whitworth, Emily Pfleiderer, Max Freund, and Ari Almonaci.

The Social Justice Council has decided to have a “group” award.  This award will be for a group of people, formally or informally organized, who have done the work of justice in our community. Two years ago the award went to the Cornucopia Group.

The awards are presented at the annual meeting of the congregation.

The nominations should include:

 A detailed description of volunteer and/or professional involvement and accomplishments, tasks, performed and issues addressed impact on others, and other relevant information.

 A signed statement that the nominee is willing to be nominated.

A nomination should include the name of the nominator and is due in the office (Send to Autumn uurockford@gmail.com) by June 6th. The nominations will be reviewed and a selection made by the Social Justice Team before the annual meeting.

Library Committee
The Library team is pleased to announce the addition of “Lon Time Coming” by Michael Eric Dyson to our collection. We would like to thank Jim Callahan for his donation of several brand-new Al-Anon books. Look for them in our new Addiction Recovery section devoted to Social Justice: We are Calling it “Social Justice”.

WCCC will be hosting two pro-choice political leaders on June 13th at 6:30pm at the Unitarian Church.  Sen. Steve Stadelman will discuss the main issues of the recent session in Springfield including S.B. 1909 which is the new law that deals with the “Crisis Pregnancy centers” which deceive women seeking abortions. There are over 1,000 in our state, one is just around the corner from our new clinic. We will also be happy to welcome City Council Member Karen Hoffman, who will discuss current laws on the local level of interest to us.
Don’t miss this very interesting meeting! 

Barb Giolitto, WCCC President

The Unitarian Universalist Church, Rockford, IL  |   4848 Turner St., Rockford, IL 61107   |   815-398-6322    |   uurockford.org  |