Fifty Years!

Fifty years ago, in 1964, Universalists from the First Universalist Church in Portland left behind their big beautiful building at Congress Square to form a new UU community with their colleagues from the Messiah/All Souls Universalist Church on Stevens Avenue. It was a difficult decision, eventually made because the huge old building became unsustainable for a shrinking congregation. Most families had moved away from the downtown area. Attendance was down. Money was hard to come by. The consolidation was not without struggle as two church communities tried to form one new identity. They were re-inventing themselves.  As a part of the agreement, they promised to jointly build a new church building in the North Deering area.

Fifty years offers a lot of perspective. They didn't know 50 years ago what would emerge in the unfolding years. They only knew that what they had wasn't working. The consolidated church, then called the Universalist Society of Portland, built our current A2U2 building, with a smaller, multipurpose room for a sanctuary. I think that has had profound symbolic and practical significance for this community. Unknowingly, our predecessors laid a groundwork that positions us to be more flexible and adaptable, more focused on people than on structures, more focused on the future than on the past.

We are now in another time of change for religious institutions. Church attendance in the United States has been going down across most denominations. More people don't identify with any faith tradition at all. Some experts wonder if there will be any such thing as churches or ministers fifty years into the future. And of course, many of us ponder what changes the world will experience because of global warming and other ecological changes that humans are creating. Many churches are stuck in the model of the big old sanctuary, and the Sunday morning service.

But here we are, with a multipurpose building, beautiful land and a thriving community. And we are asking questions about how we can be sustainable for the next 50 years. We are exploring changes to our building and land that might help us in that dream. It is a challenging process because our visions often outpace what is possible with current technology and current economies. But why not dream and let ourselves experiment with a church that can keep on thriving.

On November 9^th, after each service, I encourage you to participate in an all-congregation feedback session with members of our Environmental Steering Committee. They will be presenting some of the ideas that have emerged, and the research they have done about things like energy efficiency, lowering our carbon footprint, and generating our own solar energy, along with possibilities for improving the parking lot, the bathrooms, and the foyer, and creating more beauty and usability of our land. I am so appreciative of all the work they have done to research the options! It is not so easy as we might think, and they have spent many hours on this. But they really need your feedback now, because nothing will happen without the congregation's financial and logistical and enthusiastic support—and there are decisions to make about how to proceed next.

If you can't come to one of the Sunday sessions, you can also participate in a feedback session during the Program Council meeting on Monday the 10^th at 6:30, or in a meeting on Thursday the 13^th at 7 p.m.

I look forward to seeing you there. May we have insight and wisdom to bring our church into the next 50 years!

Rev. Myke