Naptastic

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.

(okay, that's a good first draft. Now tie it together better.)

Emerson is not the church I joined 10 years ago. I were choosing a UU church today under the same circumstances, I'd choose a different one. 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 this to point at an opportunity we have to change ourselves from a church people visit to a church people join.

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 don't think it's going too far to say, we don't know the first thing about service.

Also, we're too focused on money. But that's another topic.

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

For example, one place where we got this wrong was 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 do Schubert and Dvorak and all these really 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.

Every church has two missions–the same two missions: worship and service. Praising our God, and making the world a better place. A church that's better at those things is a better church, full stop.

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? The piano?

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 for us to use (finish this sentence)

• 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. I assert that one of our weaknesses as a church is that our worship is not a reliable source of spiritual experiences. (write this again like you're not wearing a bowtie)

Much of Stone Soup is about elevating the quality and experience of our praise and worship and it's all later. I want to lead with the programs people have been asking about and for the most: the activism.

“What do we do now?” “What can I do to help?” I'm about to answer that question.

(Next section: activism. This is where we introduce the housing first program. Which segues into the Social Action Council stuff. Which segues back into the worship stuff. Which segues into the musical collaborations. Okay, this is making sense.)