Year: 2018 (Page 3 of 10)

Why I Give to Foothills

December 4, 2018 /

by Lindsay Tearman

My church is a second home for me. It is a living, breathing second family that I have picked out for myself. When I made the choice to become a partner, to officially join the church, I was all in. That meant giving support physically, spiritually, and financially as well. And I give recurrent donations with love and hope to support this church. I want to assure that this place that I cherish never has to reduce its reach to our community or be unable to provide care for all who enter.

It can’t happen without me and hundreds of others. Without funding support, Foothills cannot continue to extend to our own community and beyond, to offer sanctuary to those in crisis, to offer a safe place to those in turmoil, to provide assurance of justice and comfort and love to all those that walk in the door every single Sunday. It doesn’t happen without me.

I love that my donation each month goes to partner with a multitude of non-profits all over Northern Colorado. It goes towards making our whole community a better place, a more giving place. I feel like I am personally impacting so many more lives through Foothills than I could ever hope to on my own. The model of generosity shown by Foothills is truly outstanding. We share the plate with a non-profit each month, we host a mobile food bank, we work with Faith Family Hospitality, and so much more. And I am a part of that.

I had never given regularly to a church in my life, until I became a member at Foothills, and I have not looked back since. The more I examined my own habits with money, and looked deeply at my relationship with spending, the freer I felt in giving to something that truly mattered to me.

Here is what I know: I have bought and returned many clothing or household items in my life after having a change of heart about an impulse buy near the register. After pledging for two years with Foothills, I have NEVER once wanted a refund. I have never thought that money could have been better spent. I have never had “buyer’s remorse.” And it is because this is my home and my family that I am taking care of. That feels really good, every single time.

Foothills is growing — we cannot keep up with the needs of the community without having more people join as partners with us. Being a part of this has changed my life and is changing the lives of so many others right here within our walls.

You can’t truly quantify a donation. Its power is limitless, and you may never know the impact that it has. You may not have anything to physically hold in your hands when all is said in done. But know that you’ve helped others who could not always help themselves.

What a beautiful thing.

In Your Words: Wishes for Our Future and Highlights from our Past

December 4, 2018 /

Starting today and over the next eight weeks, we’ll be sharing with you some of the future wishes and past highlights that we saw represented most frequently in the data that was collected in our 22 visioning sessions* with some 350 members, friends, and staff of Foothills.

The entire body of data can be reviewed here.

The Board of Trustees held a retreat before Thanksgiving to sift through this data and discern both guiding values for our congregation and concrete vision statements. We will hold a special board meeting in December to complete the process and will present the final values and vision statements** at our half-yearly congregational update meeting in January.

These values and vision statements will complete the triumvirate of Values, Mission, and Vision that are the cornerstones of the large-congregation, policy-based governance structure that Foothills has been diligently working to transition into for a number of years now.

This new model of governance is designed to allow a large and growing democratic congregation and its governing board to operate in an effective partnership with a strong, permission-giving ministry team to further the mission of the church. In the case of our mission, to help Foothills Unitarian Church unleash courageous love in Northern Colorado and beyond by embracing our diversity, growing our faith, and awakening our spirits to the unfolding meaning of this life.

Here are a few of the highlights and values from this wonderfully successful visioning process that so many of you gave so generously to of your time and energy. We’ll share more in the coming weeks.

Courageous love as we experienced it at Foothills:

  • Being included and supported in the “tangled blessings” grief group, and experiencing the courage to be small.
  • Gather and sisterhood groups: respectful listening, commitment, continuity/familiarity and deepened relationships, shared leadership.
  • Women’s group as a new member: warmth, hugs, welcoming.
  • Renaming moment for the Harris family celebrating their child’s gender transition: willingness to show up, do what you can.

Our wishes for the current and future Foothills congregation:

  • I want everyone to feel the amount of belonging here in this church that I have found.
  • Rediscover create/fun energy in myself and help others who may be marginalized do the same.
  • More connecting to find ways to help/support each other within our church community.

In faith and love,
Sue Sullivan
Board Secretary

*In those sessions, for those who weren’t able to participate, we were asked to share a story of the holy or transcendent in small groups, identify value words that our story embodied, and winnow those value words to a set that our small group could agree were common to all our stories.

Next, we shared a memory of experiencing courageous love in action at Foothills in our small group.

Then we shared our boldest wishes for the future of the congregation, and the small groups created a magazine cover from 10 years in the future of how Foothills was making news and impacting the world.

Habits of Hope

November 28, 2018 /

The month of December and the surrounding holidays promise joy and hope, and yet in these times, hope can be a real challenge.
Between caring for our loved ones, while also trying to take care of ourselves…all the while absorbing losses or disappointments of all sorts, strained relationships, the challenges of work and community…Even when life shifts bring good news, it can still feel overwhelming, like we can’t quite find solid ground.

And then there’s the wider world.

Even those most optimistic among us can feel pretty unsure where we can or should turn to for real guidance and reassurance that everything will be okay in the end, and the idea of being okay again feels really far off, either way. Longer than a lifetime. More than a generation.

Which is a new feeling for many, and certainly a challenge for the optimism of liberal religion.

Which is why we need to re-orient ourselves to new habits of hope.

Because hope is a habit, a muscle, and a choice. But it’s not a given. It requires our practice, our shared learning, our commitment, even, our discipline.

Over the month of December, we’ll be exploring the habits that help us cultivate hope for the long haul.

Habits where grief leads us not towards isolation or fear, but into a reflex of compassion, and care.

Where we don’t wait for a perfect moment to claim joy, but where joy is always now, even in the middle of everything.

And where we remain open to the mystery of all that is being born, and all that remains unseen.

This is the promise of solstice, and of the Christmas story, and of Hanukkah. And it is the story of our Unitarian Universalist faith.
That truth continues to be revealed.

That into this world there will arrive something totally new.

Something unexpected, yet longed for.

Something powerful, connective, and transforming that will arrive right in the middle of the chaos, in the darkness, in the wreck, in the mess, in the imperfection of regular, everyday life.

Even yours.

Gretchen

Share the Plate – October 2018

November 28, 2018 /

By Sue Ferguson and Jane Everham

“Share the Plate” for October raised $3,194.11 for Faith Family Hospitality (FFH), an organization that provides a great service to our community and gives busy Foothills members a way to serve without making a long-term commitment. We have so many new members at Foothills, that it is worth taking time to recount our history with FFH as it approaches its 7th anniversary as a ministry of Foothills Unitarian Church.

During 2011 we became a part of a community-wide effort to address the growing crisis of families experiencing homelessness. Our school district was reporting an alarming number of children whose families didn’t have stable housing and were couch surfing or living in their cars.

Thirty-two faith communities banded together to help. About half the congregations in FFH actually open their buildings and provide a week’s worth of housing to up to four families. The other half serve as support congregations and help out with volunteers and meals as needed. Our partner is Congregation Har Shalom. We were the first partnership to begin hosting families in January of 2012 and have continued to host quarterly each subsequent year.

It’s a process — first we begin to recruit volunteer help using the online app Signup Genius. When the FFH trailer arrives on a Sunday early afternoon, volunteers unload beds and turn the lower level of our RE building into 4 family-friendly guest rooms. Last year Foothills added a much-needed shower facility.

Families arrive between 5 and 6 pm. Volunteers prepare and serve a hot dinner each night and families leave each morning by 7 am after a light breakfast. Most go to jobs and school and they have access to the FFH day center in the Mennonite Church at Matthews and Oak if they need it. They return to Foothills each evening for the whole week.

The following Sunday morning early, volunteers pack up the FFH trailer and the families move onto the next congregation in the annual rotation. Using this system FFH provides food and shelter to four families 365 days of the year. The FFH staff provides case management and helps each family develop and implement a plan that leads to permanent housing. Over 80% of FFH guest families are successful and achieve that goal.

We host again the week of January 20, and will offer an orientation for new volunteers just prior. We have an amazing team of coordinators including Marla Nelson, Danue Laborde, Dannielle North, Julie Pass and Sue Ferguson. Those of us who treasure this work always end up feeling we receive so much more than we give!  Please feel free to chat with us, ask questions and consider joining us next year. sueferguson7@gmail.com

347 Highlights, 570 Wishes, and 197 Values Words Later…

November 26, 2018 /

Were you one of the 350 participants in the 22 visioning sessions that a heroic team of volunteer facilitators led last month, supported by our wonderful staff here at Foothills?

Were you moved and inspired by the time spent thinking about the past and future of this beloved community in the company of long-time and newly-made Foothills friends?

Were you wondering how we were going to turn these many hundreds of value words, stories, and wishes for Foothills’ future into actionable vision statements for the congregation to pursue in the next 5 to 7 years?

We – your Foothills Board of Trustees — were too!

We spent so much time trying to pull together so many sessions that we barely had time to look ahead to the next step in the process. (Our visioning consultant informs us that we exceeded any previous congregation’s participation in both sheer numbers and percentage of congregation taking part, that’s how engaged and enthusiastic Foothills members were in this process!)

We did have faith, however — fueled by many in-person and online meetings with the wise and skillful Laura Park of Unity Consulting — that the process would result in tangible, focused vision statements for the years ahead, visionary dreams that reflect the collective character of this congregation, its long history, and the hopes for its future that so many of you shared with us over the course of these workshops.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, the entire board of Trustees (Ed Beers, Sara Steen, Cheryl Hazlitt, Brendan Mahoney, Glenn Pearson and Sue Sullivan), Rev. Gretchen Haley, Rev. Sean Neil-Barron, and Laura Park spent Friday evening and all of Saturday surrounded by this data — distilling themes and common values and discerning where we saw the congregation wanting to go in the coming years.

The shared values we discerned will serve as touchstones for our board decisions and the policies that we write, and as guides and anchors for all that we do together as a congregation.

The vision statements that we identified will become our promises to each other and the larger community. They are what we will be asking ourselves to do together as a beloved community in the next 5 to 7 years. They represent what we want our ministers to lead, equip, and support us in doing – for us as individuals, for the Foothills community, and for Northern Colorado and beyond.

Because the task was so ambitious and the feedback was so generous from the many participants, we didn’t quite finish the work that weekend before Thanksgiving. There is some wordsmithing left to do, and perhaps some whittling down of a vision statement or two into a more manageable charge to the congregation and its ministers.

As a board we will finish that work up next month, and we’ll present the final values and vision statements to the congregation at our half-year congregational update meeting in late January.

We are deeply grateful that so many of you participated with such presence and enthusiasm. Unitarian Universalist churches are congregationally led – without the input of an engaged congregation, we cannot live into our spiritual ideals of embodying the democratic process and making collective decisions about our congregation’s life.

In faith and love,

Sue Sullivan,
Secretary
Foothills Board of Trustees

 

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