Dear Church, The Pastoral Search Committee, co-chaired by Amber Batson and David Strickland, has been hard at work over the past few weeks. In addition to finalizing UBC’s Leadership Profile, which will go to a church vote on September 22, we are exploring each other’s strengths as team members and...

  Church Family, Perhaps many of us will recognize the reference in the title from Monty Python. “Bring out your dead!” “I’m not dead!” We’ve heard a lot about death, dying, the need to do more and do better lately and I sense a feeling of exhaustion and overwhelm from...

Dear Church: Where do we go from here? Eleven of us gathered last week in the church library to consider that question. We’ll gather again today (Aug. 22) and Aug. 29 from 3:30-4:30 p.m. I hope you’ll come. We began our conversation with a line from the poet T.S. Eliot:...

Happy Pre-Friday, Everyone! This past New Year’s Eve, my closest friends and I had an at-home “spa night” instead of going out and dealing with the masses. It was everything you would imagine a group of millennial, gay men doing: face masks, bath robes, warm eucalyptus towels, a tarot card...

Dear Church: “(I)t doth not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3:2). I heard these words for the first time about 15 years ago while facilitating a discernment process for the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, known today as Bautistas por la Paz. Dwight Lundgren, a board...