I'm at home watching Henry at the moment. Okay, I'm not actually watching him--he's taking a nap. But this does give me a little time to write a quick post about something that I've had on my mind every since the Prairie Star District's Executive Committee meeting a week or so ago. We spent a good portion of that meeting making plans for our August retreat with the PSD Program Council at Shalom Hill Farms, and it looks like one of the big topics is going to be moving beyond our Vision 2010 and begin thinking about what the future of Unitarian Universalism in Prairie Star might look like.
 
At one point, we started to speculate on we how might arrive at some goals for 2015, etc., and that's when I was reminded of something I had heard a month earlier, at the Convocation for students graduating from United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minnesota. I made a mental note when I heard this from David Schoen, one of the guys responsible for the "God is Still Speaking" campaign of the United Church of Christ (his exact title is Congregational Vitality Initiative Coordinator). He mentioned how once, when he was looking into Jewish commentaries about the scene in the Torah where God replies to Moses' question about who God is by saying "I AM" (or "I am what I am, I am what I have been, I am what I will be"), he found one of the commentaries that had this great interpretation of what God's name really means: “I will be what the future demands.”
 
And that got me thinking about goals for the future in Prairie Star. You see, the Vision 2010 has lots of great ideas in it, lots of hopes and dreams. And a considerable number of them have actually been achieved. However, there's been an incredible number other good things that have happened since that vision was cast in 2000, things that we couldn't even imagine then: new congregations starting on their own, added staff, advances in technology. While the vision may have helped us somewhat to get were we are today, I think it was really something else, something akin to interpretation of God's answer to Moses.
 
So rather than coming up with a list (long or short) of things we'd like to see by 2015 (or 2020 or whenever), I'd like to see us come up with a vision that we can make happen right now instead of having to wait 10 or 20 years. And it goes something like this: I envision a Unitarian Universalist faith for Prairie Star that helps us all to become what the future demands. I don't know what kind of congregations we'll need to serve people in 2020 or even 2015. And I don't know what kind of district structure we'll need to help those congregations, either. But I do know that we'll need to have people who are prepared for what the future demands, and I think we need to start being those people today. I've got a feeling that this is where the future of faith development is.Comments