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We are a community that invites you to awaken to love.
Beloveds,
We gather, once again, at the edge of something new.
Summer’s looseness is giving way to rhythm, and rhythm is calling us home. Whatever weariness you carry through these doors, whatever wonder, whatever waiting — you are welcome here. You are seen here. You are needed here. And so, together, let us begin.
A Different Shape for This Year
This year, my own rhythm for work and life is changing shape. I want you to understand it, and to know why.
My schedule at church will be three weeks on, and one week off. This isn’t reducing my presence — it’s only reshaping it. Those three weeks “on” are being woven, as much as possible, around our committee meetings and church functions, so that when I’m with you, I’m fully with you — in the rooms where we plan, where we wrestle with ideas, and where we dream together about what this congregation is becoming. I hope this schedule makes the best use of my three-quarter time as your minister.
Classes and Taizé — A New Wednesday Rhythm
Beginning this month, Wednesday evenings will include two different kinds of gatherings, and I invite you to find your way to both.
On the first and third Wednesday evenings, I’ll be offering classes that invite us deeper into our own theology, our own becoming, our own questions. Come curious. Come with your doubts. There is room here for all of it. Please register so that I can be sure to have enough materials each night.
On the second Wednesday, we’ll gather at 7 pm for Taizé Vespers — a contemplative, candlelighting service built around simple, repeated song, readings, and long stretches of shared silence. Taizé worship comes from an ecumenical monastic community in France, and it asks very little of us except our presence: no performance, no polish, just breath and chant and quiet, held together. If you are tired, if the weight of the world is bearing down on you, if you’re hungry for a community healing space that doesn’t ask you to think so much as simply be, this is for you. I hope you will join me.
All Ages Faith Formation
Children and Youth: Our children’s education program is beginning again this year, too — with new curriculum, new energy, and a renewed commitment to the values we say we hold.
Every classroom will need a volunteer alongside our teachers. This isn’t simply about extra hands — it’s about living out our safety policy, and it’s about our covenant with the youngest among us: that they will never be alone, that they will always be held by more than one caring adult, that this community takes seriously what it means to keep them safe and to help them flourish. If you have ever wondered how to show up for the next generation of this congregation, this is your invitation. Contact Margaret HERE (mailto:dfe@uusmc.org) to explore what might be possible.
Adult Chalice Circles: Now is the time to sign up for our Chalice Circles — small groups that gather each month to sit with a shared theme, explore it through readings, questions, and honest conversation, and walk alongside each other through a full church year. If you’re still discerning whether a circle is right for you, I want to make that easier. This month’s theme is Beginnings, and I’m including the first month’s small group readings HERE (https://www.uusmc.org/wp-content/uploads/Beginnings-Sept-sm-group-002.pdf) — so you can look them over before committing. Come sit with the questions. See if they shimmer for you.
Each month, I’ll also share a music channel here in this letter — a small musical companion to the monthly theme, something you can listen to on your own time as one more way of sitting with the questions these circles ask us to hold. Click HERE (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3OVmO8ZACfyuaqZfFvSAcr?si=75da11a8917b49c4&nd=1&dlsi=e6a7fee3791a4830) for the Spotify playlist; click HERE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35tLy-AtQm8&list=PLN5796wOcC1c) for the YouTube playlist.
Community Matters
A Widening Welcome
Our welcome is widening in a new way this year, too. Classroom 4 is reserved 24/7, exclusively, for the Islamic Center of Greater Hockessin, a Muslim Community, who are making it their masjid — literally, “place of prostration” — where they will gather for prayer five times a day, as their faith calls them to. Their community is growing, which is why they came to rent space, and we are so grateful to be a partner in their growth.
To be clear, Room 4 is their space now, and we ask that none of us enter unless invited in. But as good partners do, we’re learning the customs of this space together — chief among them, removing shoes before entering, as is customary in Muslim prayer. So if you find yourself invited in, or need to go in for some reason, please remove your shoes as is custom, and treat the masjid as the sacred space it now is. May this shared space be one more sign that our doors, and our hearts, open wider than we ever imagined.
Bringing the Community In, and Being Sent Out
So you can begin making room in your hearts and calendars, I want to bring your attention to some bigger events we have planned for this church year.
Some of these will be moments where we throw open our doors and invite the wider community in — to see who we are, to taste our welcome, to feel for themselves what this beloved community holds. Some events call us out — into the wider world, as partners, as neighbors, as people willing to show up where we’re needed, not just where we’re comfortable.
We are being asked, this year, to practice both — the opening and the offering, the gathering and the going. Both directions matter. A congregation that only welcomes in without going out grows insular. A congregation that only goes out without welcoming in loses its center.
GATHERING IN
Sept 13th – Ingathering Service
Oct 24th – Arts and Crafts Faire
Dec 9th – Blue Christmas Taizé
Dec 24th – Christmas Eve Candlelight Service
GOING OUT
Sept 20th – Newark Community Days
Nov 24th – Interfaith Thanksgiving Service
More details on each of these moments are coming soon. For now, hold the shape of it: this will be a year of doors opening both ways.
Wear Your Welcome
This year, we’re creating new congregational t-shirts — a small, wearable way to carry this community with you wherever you go. Hats and canvas bags may be joining them soon, too. Wear your pride in this community out into the world: to the grocery store, to Community Days, to wherever you find yourself. Let people see, before you say a word, that you belong to something good.
Let Us Begin
New beginnings rarely arrive all at once. They gather slowly, like light before sunrise.
So go into this season trusting the next step more than the whole path, the small stirring more than certainty. Trust in the newness, and bring your curious hearts along with you.
And may we always remember: life is always becoming, and we — together — can always begin again.
In faith,
Rev. Christe
my pronouns are they/them and this is why they matter (https://pronouns.org/what-and-why)
To schedule an appointment click here (https://calendar.app.google/8kMRsw3EwQgZVqYQ8)
I serve Mill Creek at ¾ time, and I look forward to the time we share in ministry together.
UUSMC Website (https://www.uusmc.org/)
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