A recap of the February 2015 Board of Trustees meeting offered by Marjorie Herman, Member At Large

At the opening of our weekend together in Houston, the UUMN Board realized that we are a Board in transition, with several members being new this year, and two preparing to leave in a few months. This was Deb Weiner’s first face-to-face meeting since taking over as Moderator, and to get all of us on the same page, she directed us in developing an organizational time-line to concretize the history of the UUMN, and identify the organization’s major themes which might help us plot its future focus. The time-line extended from 1980 to the present, and included major events in the organization’s history, and trends in congregational music, in the life of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and in world events. It was a truly meaningful exercise for those who were new to the Board, and also served as a contextual reminder for those who have already served.Work with LREDA and UUMA

On Saturday morning, Beth Norton and Keith Arnold joined us for a Zoom video conference to report on the interaction between implementation efforts for the Excellence in Shared Ministry Report and the work of the Good Officers. They reported that progress, albeit slow, is being made in aligning the intersections of these two groups as they connect with the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) and the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA).

The UUMN discussion list has been a vital part of our network for many years. Our new online system offers us the opportunity to host those discussions on our own site. This means we are now able to:

• let members choose which Forums are of interest to them.
• include formatting and attachments with our messages.
• see the photos and profiles of those involved in the discussions.
• make some of the discussions open to the public.

We know that change is hard and that the transition to using new Forums will be daunting to some of our members. So our current e-list will stay active for the next year as we start utilizing our new system and figuring out all of its quirks. We also have a team of members who will be archiving the past discussions so that we can make them available as searchable documents on our new site.

Remember those break-out sessions at the conference where members with similar interests and needs meet to ask questions and solicit advice? Our new website offers us the potential to do that same thing year-round. Using the “Circles” feature on our site, members can create and/or join various affinity groups and communicate about specific issues. 

So how does a member know whether to create a Circle or to instead post a question to the general UUMN discussion group? The answer lies in how broad the question is.

Dana Decker, UUMN Trustee at Large 

Dana Decker, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, began his professional career as an electric and acoustic bassist. In 2006 Dana began to focus on composition, specifically writing worship music for liberal faiths, and this writing eventually led to the release of Dana’s first worship album in 2008 entitled When We Sing. In September of 2008 Dana was hired as the first ever Contemporary Worship Associate at First UU Church of San Diego. In 2012 Dana became the Associate Director of Music at First Church and he has been using this experience to build a “model” for contemporary worship within the UU movement.

Every winter, our Board of Trustees gathers for a face-to-face meeting. This year, eight of our members (pictured at right) braved some fairly inhospitable weather inCharlotte, NC in order to vision about the future of our organization. So what were they discussing this year? Along with reviewing reports from our wonderful program directors, the Board considered exciting new opportunities for collaboration with our colleagues at the UUA, as well as discussing UUMN’s presence at the upcoming General Assembly in Providence. Collaboration with our fellow religious leaders in LREDA and UUMA also figured in the agenda for the meetings as we take the first steps in implementing the recommendations set forth in the report shared last year from the Task Force for Excellence in Shared Ministry (www.uumn.org/educate/task-force-for-excellence-in-shared-ministry)

Vincent Silliman's work in the middle half of the 20th Century helped shape the hymnody of Unitarian Universalism. UUMN members are invited continue his musical mission by submitting compositions to the 2014 Vincent Silliman Hymn Competition. The deadline is March 1, 2014 and details about the competition can be found here.

Director of Publications, Scott Roewe, recently spoke with the Reverend Dr. Richard Speck, one of the judges for the 2014 Vincent Silliman Hymn Competition. Reverend Speck recently finished writing a book about the competition's namesake.