Welcome to Stone Soup. This is a plan to address needs identified by the Long Range Planning Task Force and generally revitalize Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston over the next few years, and to get us onto a path of growth and sustainability.

I've tried to come up with a short summary but this effort has to start with a frank admission: Emerson is not the church I joined 10 years ago. If I were in the same situation today, I'd join a different UU church. Our worship is mediocre, we spend very little on it, we have almost nothing in terms of programs, and we spend the lion's share of our time and energy either raising money or on non-mission activity. If we were a non-profit, I wouldn't donate to us. Our overhead is too high and our deliverables are meh.

I'm not saying this to tear us down; I'm saying if we need growth, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit.

I think the fundamental issue that we need to fix is simple to understand: we don't have a strong culture of service. Actually, I think we don't know the first thing about service.

The first thing about service is: It's what needs to be done, not what you want to do.

One place where we got this wrong was in the orchestra. The whole reason I joined Emerson instead of First Church in 2015 was because Emerson had an orchestra. But our minds weren't on service; we wanted to play Schubert and Dvorak and all these really difficult, ambitious pieces, and we did. But what was needed was frequent accompaniment of church services. We should have been able to cover any time our keyboard artist had to be out but we never reached that point. We weren't trying to reach that point. We were focused on doing what we wanted, rather than what was needed. We were not serving the mission of the church.

(We're also too focused on money. But that's another topic.)

Every church has two missions–the same two missions for every church: worship and service.

As a church of mostly secular people, we don't have the same built-in drive for praise and worship that believers have. If there's no higher being whose will to seek, what do we worship?

When I gave my sermon on homelessness, I said our core ministries were being neglected. That was March 23rd. It had not yet occurred to me that the seasons had changed and that we, as a church, did not mark it. I asked about it later, and found out the services marking the seasons have been organized by just one person for some time, and they don't have bandwidth for it anymore.

So my first proposal is not a policy or initiative, but two definitions that would help keep us from neglecting the worship part of our mission:

• Spirituality is the experience of being connected to something larger than yourself. That larger thing can be completely imaginary. It's the experience of being connected to it that matters.
• Worship means creating those spiritual experiences for the people who attend our services. Sharing that experience is why we come.

I believe these spiritual experiences are an essential part of the human experience, whether you're a believer or not. Much of Stone Soup is about elevating the quality and experience of our praise and worship. Powerful spiritual experiences in memorable worship services turn visitors into members.

The other thing that will make people want to join our church is having good programs. The church I attended in Utah isn't even theologically compatible with me but I went anyway because what they're doing is actually saving lives and actually getting people off the street.

(If I can figure out the words, I'd like to briefly explain the theory of the plan here.)

This introduction needs to establish:

• Stone Soup grows the church
• The pathways and mechanisms for growth are clear
• The way to get there is to shape Emerson into an engine for expressing our values in the world
• The evangelism effort needs to be the right kind of scary

These are the three legs of the stool. Evangelism is three things:

1. Be a church people want to join
2. Be connected enough with the community that people find their way in by diffusion
3. Invite people who are likely to accept and join