Please plan to attend PCUUC’s Annual Meeting on Sunday, June 10, 2012.  An abbreviated worship service will be held in the Prairie Crossing Charter School gymnasium at 9:00 am and the meeting will immediately follow.  Although I cannot set an end time for the meeting as the meeting’s end point is truly determined by the community, I can say that a reasonable goal for the meeting end time is 11:30 – 11:40.

The Annual Meeting is where the community makes critical decisions that define the direction of PCUUC including (but not limited to):

• Voting to pass a budget for the 2012 – 2013 church year
• Voting on a Board and Nominating Committee Slate for the new church year
• Additional motions on topics that will impact the PCUUC community

On or before May 31, 2012 you will receive an e-mail containing documents for the meeting and I ask that you take a little bit of time to review the documents prior to the meeting.

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me or another Board member with questions or concerns.

Peace and Blessings,

Tonia Becker VerShaw, PCUUC Board President

President@PrairieCircleUUC.org

Board Meeting Agenda — April 26, 2012 – 7:00pm

I.        Opening Reading

II.       Approval of March Board Meeting Minutes

III.      DRE Report

IV.      Minister Report

V.       Treasurer Report

VI.      Nominating Committee Report

VII.     Nominating Committee Member Confirmation

VIII.    2012-2013 Church Year Budget Discussion

IX.      Reaching Out to Missing Pledges

X.       Budget/Pledge Gap Approach

XI.      Stone Soup Fundraiser & Additional Fundraiser Idea

XII.     Board Member Binders for New Board

XIII.    Church Documents/Information Backup Management

XIV.    Laptop for Church Administrator

XV.     New Business

XVI.    Closing Reading

Upon the request of a Prairie Circle member, Rev. Ziegler offers the opportunity for members and friends to get together to share experiences they’ve had and through brainstorming come up with creative and caring responses.

We’ll have this discuss and brainstorming session at Rev. Ziegler’s home on Friday, June 8, beginning at 6:30 p.m. over a potluck dinner.  To participate in this evening gathering a reservation is requested by no later than Wednesday, May 30. If more people reserve than Rev. Ziegler’s home can comfortably accommodate we’ll gather at a Prairie Circle member or friend’s home. 

To make your reservation there will be a sign up at the Visitors’ Welcome table on Sundays, or you may email Rev. Ziegler at revziegler@comcast.net or call her at 847-629-5868.  After Monday, April 30, Rev. Ziegler will inform you where the gathering will take place and discuss your potluck contribution.

On February 12, 2012 we held a Community Forum for two express purposes.  One purpose was to discuss as a community Rev. Jackie Ziegler’s ministry in order that the Board might have input as we approached the vote on whether or not Rev. Ziegler’s contract would be renewed for another year. I hope we communicated the outcome of that vote effectively, but in case we did not – the Board voted unanimously to renew Rev. Jackie’s contract.

The other area of discussion within the Community Forum was an exercise that was designed to stimulate some thought as to what broad visions and purposes for PCUUC might look like.

The attendees of the Community Forum were broken into small groups.  Each group represented the sole founders of a new UU church.  The groups were then asked to discuss and answer the following questions as a group:

• How do you (as church founders) want to feel when you are in the midst of your ideal member?
• What would be the outward manifestation of the faith and beliefs of your ideal members to community at large?  (outside your churches)
• What would be the internal church manifestation of the faith and beliefs of your ideal members?  (Manifestation of faith as members are conducting themselves within the church community)
• How would decisions within your churches be made by your membership and/or your church leadership?

Complete “raw” notes from this exercise can be found by clicking here.

The following are just my interpretations of some of the answers the groups came up with  and undoubtedly you will come to your own conclusions (which I would love to hear…feel free to comment below).

The, what is in my opinion, a great paradox for many UUs and sometimes a source of tension within ourselves as individuals and within our churches is that we want to be both relaxed and inspired/excited. We want to be both challenged and accepted.  We want to connect with kindred spirits and be intrigued and perhaps exposed to new thinking.

Although each member of a UU church has different wants and needs, I think most of us agree that we want a safe place to explore different thoughts and be accepted for who we are as we make our individual journeys…..and of course have some fun along the way.

We know that what might be viewed as contradictions are simply different manifestations of the same energy.

How do we want to “be” within the world-at-large and within our churches?  I was heartened to learn, as I suspected would be the case, that we want to be the same people both within our churches and within the external community.

We are active people who seek to advance various causes and positions.  We are people who strive for integrity and justice – I don’t think this is a big surprise to you.  We do have a desire to be known, which as many of us know evangelism is not an active part of many UU’s faith.  But, we seem to want to share the opportunity of our faith in meaningful, yet not over bearing ways.

Finally, how do we want decisions to be made within our churches?  Well, this is a bit less clear and needs to be an ongoing conversation within PCUUC.  We want both a sense of order, yet we are committed to the democratic process (sometimes a messy process as we know).  One of my conclusions from this discussion is that we want a balance.  It is my guess that the balance will be an ongoing source of discussion, debate and sometimes conflict (I just hope for productive conflict).

We seem to be saying that the Board, Committee heads and other church leaders should handle managerial and administrative issues and large decisions should be made by the entire community.  This distinction seems easy enough, right?  Wrong.  What is a big issue and what is a small issue?  Big and small are certainly relative.  What is a policy and what is a practice/institutional memory?  There just aren’t 100% black and white answers to these questions.

During my term as Board President there have been a couple issues that were in my mind small potatoes and hardly worthy of a larger community discussion.   There has also been an issue or two that were presented to the Board as small insignificant issues, but in my mind were larger decisions that should go before the entire community.

Just goes to show that big/small, policy/routine, significant/minor are matters of perspective.  To effectively navigate occasionally interesting waters we have to be willing to do everything we can to step into other’s shoes.

Sometimes I wish the world was simpler, but it is often just not.  On the other hand, how boring would simple be day after day?  Although sometimes our lives, our faith and our churches get a little complex, one thing I think is clear – we want the freedom to try to figure it out.

Peace and Blessings,

Tonia Becker VerShaw

PCUUC Board President

The presentation will take place in a Prairie Crossing Charter School classroom next to the barn at 10:45. For additional information please contact Mike Honegger, Mike Merritt, Rev. Ziegler, or Julie Palumbo.

Location:   In a Prairie Crossing Charter School classroom next to the Barn; room location will be announced that morning

Faced with the converging crises of energy sufficiency, collapsing environmental systems and a dangerously unstable global economy, we now must make a defining choice between two contrasting models for organizing human affairs — Empire and Earth Community.  Absent an understanding of the history and implications of this choice, we may squander valuable time and resources on efforts to preserve or mend cultural patterns and institutions that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.

To move forward in this critical moment we must, above all, recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth Community with a common destiny.  Now we must, and can, move again to a life-sustaining society in harmony with the earth’s natural abundance.

This offering will feature Dr. David C. Korten’s PowerPoint presentation on this subject given at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 2006, with an update to reflect recent developments in the areas of energy, the environment and the economy.

This presentation will be led by Prairie Circle member John Crowley who has studied these problems and proposed solutions over a long period of time.

Preregistration is requested.  Beginning with the March 11 Sunday service and following services, a registration sheet will be available on the Welcome Table at the Barn.  People can also register through Rev. Ziegler by email at revziegler@comcast.net  or 847-629-5868.

Dear Friends,

I truly believe that the ways in which we spend our time and money are some of the truest reflections of our beliefs.  In other words, if someone were to do an objective analysis of all of our personnel financial transactions, as well as an objective review of how we spend the hours within our days, would our professed beliefs be apparent?

I ask myself this question a lot.  Sometimes I am happy with the results I think such and review would produce, at other times I am simply not.  For instance, I try to buy as much as I can from thrift stores and rummage sales because I believe the amounts of “stuff” manufactured around the world and consumed by Americans is ridiculous.  I try not to add much fuel to the fire of this frenzy, but I will be the first to confess that shiny new things (like a fun Ann Taylor dress, an iPad or new curtains for a bedroom in our house) are temptations I do succumb to more often than I would like to admit.

I strive to spend my time in manners in line with my values – enjoying and strengthening connections with friends, family, PCUUC community members, working hard at my job, taking care of myself, working to further the church, learning new things, trying to make this world just a little bit better, etc.  But, some days I log more hours than I feel comfortable playing silly computer games or watching America’s Next Top Model.

How do you spend your time and money and are these expenditures in line with your professed values and beliefs?  I suggest that now, as we prepare to launch our 2012-2013 church year pledge drive, is a good time to ask yourself these questions.  On Sunday, March 11 we will officially kick off the pledge drive.  Pledge packets will be available at church and the packets that are not distributed at church on March 11 will be mailed.

In the upcoming weeks we will not only be asking ourselves as individuals what we value, but we will be asking these questions as a church community.  There are areas in which we would like to invest including investments to improve the Sunday morning worship experience, investments to strengthen our future church leadership and the possibility of renting a space for our church staff to have an office area and a space in which to hold PCUUC programming like adult education classes.

Your pledge packets will outline some of the options before us and will make apparent the increase in pledge base (which would be substantial) to do the things we would truly love to do.

In addition, we also have the question of our annual fundraiser – the Stone Soup Dinner & Auction.  This event as currently structured requires a great deal of energy from many members of our community.  We have the pragmatic reality of needing to fund our church operations and this church year the profit from the Stone Soup Dinner & Auction was 14% of the income that will fund the church.

On one hand, spending a lot of energy fundraising to fund our church operations may not be the most accurate reflection of our values as a religious community.   I believe it is accurate to say that as a community we spend many more volunteer “man hours” on our fundraiser than we do on PCUUC organized social action/justice efforts. Does this reality accurately reflect our community values?  If we decide that it does not, what do we do about it?  On one hand, we need to expend our community energies in a manner that is in line with our professed values.  On the other hand, we have the pragmatic realities of needing to keep the lights on, pay our staff fairly, rent space for our worship services and programming, etc.

In the upcoming weeks we will need to have some important conversations as a community.  We will need to approach these questions and decisions as mature individuals from both spiritual and pragmatic perspectives and I, for one, am looking forward to these conversations.

In the Spirit,

Tonia Becker VerShaw

PCUUC, Board President

President@PrairieCircleUUC.org

You may use this order form or the order form in your order of service on Sunday, March 25^th and on April 1^st .  Return orders with your payment of $10.00 per plant to Jan Kirch. CHECKOR CASH must accompany this form. Checks should be made payable to PCUUC with “Easter Plant” in the memo area. You may also submit orders in the Easter Basket on the welcome  table by Sunday, April 1^st .  For more information call Jan at
Easter pic847-816-7602 or email at IdeasJan1217@comcast.netor caring@prairiecircleuuc.org .