Year: 2021 (Page 15 of 23)

Invitation to Flower Communion

May 19, 2021 /

Mother’s Day always signals to me the likely final burst of big spring snow in Fort Collins, and so also signals a green light for planting! It’s always a risk, of course, the snow is sneaky that way (and it’s not like we wouldn’t be grateful for the moisture!). 

But then again, planting is a risk, period. You never know exactly how something will turn out – if it will flourish or whither. Even with our best efforts, there’s a lot about gardening that is out of our control. And yet we take the risk and make the investment because when the flowers bloom or the tomatoes arrive, or the perennial comes back year after year, we remember life’s resilience, and the way simple beauty can be healing and redeeming, despite everything. And we remember the lessons of loving with an open hand, a leaning in that is also always a letting go. 

This is the practice we felt drawn to for our Flower Communion this year. Rather than a simple exchange of cut flowers as is more traditional, we want to invite us to a shared practice of planting. 

Next Thursday and Friday, you are invited to come to the church to participate in a plant exchange. Bring a cutting from your garden, pick up a gem from the nursery, or bring the small shoots you’ve been growing from seed. Or, bring seeds ready for planting! It can be flowers or vegetables, or ground cover, or…whatever you are inspired to bring. In turn, receive someone else’s plant, cutting, or seeds. (Don’t worry if you can’t get your hands on a plant. We’ll have some extras.) 

You can either take home the plant you receive and plant it somewhere you can see it, or you plant it on the church grounds. We’ll have a map of places for you to plant and some tools (or feel free to bring your own). We imagine this as a wonderful way to begin to “reclaim” our church grounds, as well as a reminder of the way life persists, changes, and invites us to keep planting with a spirit of playfulness, leaning in, and letting go.

Join us at the church during any of the following times for Flower Communion:

Flower Communion Dates & Times (at the church):
Thursday, May 20th: 4:30-6:30 pm
Friday, May 21st: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm & 4:30 – 6:30 pm

The Next Three Weeks at Foothills

May 7, 2021 /

How are you doing? If you’re feeling pretty stressed – but also mixed with bursts of joy and happiness – you’re not alone! The month of May is notorious for being a surprisingly stressful month in congregational life.  
 
After all, in May, parents, teachers, and students are all feeling the stress of the last few weeks of school and potential life transitions – graduations of all sorts – kindergarten, high school, college….Many of us are often attending recitals or assemblies, or actual graduations. 
 
We are getting ready for summer – the joy and stress of vacations and a different sort of time. We’re already beginning to anticipate the changes of fall. 
 
And all of this in church life is set against preparations for our annual congregational meeting, and marking the seasonal transition with our annual flower communion. There is a sense of happy anticipation, and also anxiety, and a strange pressure to get it all figured out before the end of the month! 

It’s one of the reasons we chose Play as our theme this month. We knew it would be a much-needed antidote to this time!

Join us this Sunday as we explore Playing “Dress-Up!” We invite you to come to the service “dressed up” – whatever that means for you! It could be fancy clothes, face paint, mom jeans, animal print footie pajamas, or anything else that feels right to you! 

Join us this Sunday at 9:00 am using Zoom – link here. 
Or watch a rebroadcast of the service at 11:00 am on Facebook or our website.

While a lot about this second pandemic May is different, in some ways, this year is just the same but more. Because we are still in all of these transitions – we will celebrate our graduating seniors on May 16th, and the congregational meeting will be on May 23rd at 10:15 am. This meeting will mark our transition in board leadership, and we will update everyone on our building process. We will also vote on our 8th Principle, and are likely to vote on publicly supporting universal health care. These are “usual” transitions but still transitions. 
 
And on top of these usual things, we are also in the transitional time of the pandemic. We are marking the end of 18 months of pandemic schooling, which has been stressful in so many ways. Every day, more grandparents are reuniting with grandchildren, or parents with young adult children, or friends finally hugging after so many months of screen-only contact. Vaccinations are offering us a vision of a life returning in full. (Visit building process to learn about our plans for post-pandemic church.)
 
And also, we don’t yet know what this “returning” will mean – how we have changed as a community, as individuals – how we have grown.  
 
So much is – like the blossoming trees on every street – bursting and in bloom. And this fullness of transitions can surprise us with its stress and our struggle because it’s good. There’s so much to celebrate, and also, it is and has been for a long time, a lot. 
 
And so, alongside the good, we can honor the journey it’s taken to get here. The grief and the work along the way. The isolation we’ve survived. The effort it’s taken to adapt. The patience and the pain. And most of all, we can honor and acknowledge with awe and gratitude how much beauty we’ve found and created – surprising beauty, persistent beauty, saving beauty – all along the way. 
 
That’s what we’ll be celebrating and acknowledging this year in our Flower Communion. We imagine a week of adaptive celebrations of surprising beauty. Flower Communion will start May 17th, with our shared celebration on Sunday the 23rd before our congregational meeting. Look for more information early next week for how this May we can pause in wonder at this great transition we are all in and give thanks as we live into what’s next.
 
In this time of transition and a lot-ness, please reach out if you need any support or a listening ear. We are all cheering for you. 
 
In partnership,
 
Rev. Gretchen 

Spring Photo Collage

May 6, 2021 /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Thank you to everyone who submitted a photo![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_gallery interval=”3″ images=”42778″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Letter from Rev. Gretchen regarding School Resource Officers

April 30, 2021 /

Dear Foothills Community and beyond, 

As some of you may be aware, the Community Advisory Committee tasked with evaluating safety in Poudre School District, and specifically, the presence of the Student Resource Officers (SROs) provided their final report a few days ago. As some of you may also be aware, Rev. Sean has served as a part of this Committee, and so we have been able to have a close-up awareness of its work.  

After a thorough process, the CAC was not able to reach a full consensus, although a majority came to believe that it was ultimately harmful to keep SROs in schools. They provide many recommendations beyond this point. I’d encourage you to read their entire report, especially since there are currently broad mischaracterizations and misunderstandings circulating regarding the CAC’s work. You can find their full report here.  

These mischaracterizations and misunderstandings have been especially lodged at members of the Committee, especially the people of color serving on the CAC.  They have been targeted online and in their comments to the School Board alleging that the process is fraudulent, and attacking their character and legitimacy.  There is also a campaign directed towards the School Board via letters and online comments to ensure that the status quo is maintained and the CAC’s report disregarded based on a survey sent to PSD parents. 

As a person of faith and a religious leader, I believe it is imperative that we create structures and communities that listen and respond not to the loudest voices, or even the majority of voices, but most closely to the voices and experiences of the most vulnerable among us. As Christian scripture would say, the “least of these.”  

Especially in our schools, we need to listen to the voices of immigrants and people of color, and to those who know first-hand the trauma of living in a world where their very existence has been targeted by those in power for generations.  

I start here because the voices of those pointing to the results of surveys where a large majority support the continued presence of SROs are extremely loud, and could be superficially quite persuasive. But we can’t let these loud voices claiming the imperative of majority rules be confused with a moral imperative.  Now is the time to claim a path of moral courage.  

When the data clearly show the impact of SRO’s presence on students of color in our schools, and when the history of policing is objectively tied to racism and white supremacy, and today is a key component in the school-to-prison pipeline, the moral and ethical path is clear. We need to remove SROs from our schools and instead focus our funding priorities on counselors and other trauma-informed supports for mental health for our children. While there are undeniably many instances of positive experiences with SROs, and we all believe in ensuring our children are as safe as possible, this is not enough to justify their continued presence every day in our schools. 

The data on SROs’ capacity to respond to emergencies is mixed, and there are other ways to ensure we have the efficiency and effectiveness of response originally intended in establishing SROs in the first place. The report from the CAC provides ample examples of the needs and opportunities to better serve our students, and our District needs to pursue and prioritize these recommendations. If you agree, I hope you will join me in lending your voice in support by writing to the School Board and/or posting your support online or in a letter to the Coloradoan.  

Especially after this year, when so many of us have experienced firsthand how near trauma may be for any of us, and how stressed our children and school communities may be. We need to respond with resources that heal and transform this trauma rather than magnify it or simply pass it on to another generation.  

It will not be easy to resist the loud voices pointing to the surveyed “yes column” of the majority. It will also not be easy to disregard some of our personal experiences with SROs that we like and have found valuable. But this is not ultimately what matters most. But now is the time to hold steady, and trust in a deeper value and a deeper truth that listens to and protects the marginalized and creates a system that puts the needs of the most vulnerable first. Many of us have participated in calls for racial justice over this last year, and have called for urgent reform. Removing SROs from our schools is one way to show that when we hold up signs saying Black Lives Matter, we actually mean it.  

In partnership,

Rev. Gretchen Haley
Senior Minister 
Foothills Unitarian Church

Update on Post-Pandemic Church Plans (April 2021)

April 29, 2021 /

I’m just a few days from my second vaccine’s “full effect” date, and I can’t wait. I already have in-person get-togethers set for most of the following few days, not to mention a haircut. 

I know not everyone is as eager as I am to launch back into non-Zoom life, but in the last few weeks, things have started to shift significantly for a lot of us. Vaccines have become widely available for anyone over the age of 16, and we have a hunch that the Foothills community has a very high percentage of us already or almost fully vaccinated.  

Will you help us confirm (or refute) our hunch by filling out this totally anonymous survey about your vaccine status? It will help us better plan and understand how our plans will be received in the coming weeks and months.

So much has shifted recently, and also, a lot hasn’t. Specifically, the infection rates haven’t changed much. We’re holding steady in our County at rates just about where we were around Halloween. This means we’re nowhere near the extreme highs of December and January, but we’re also very far away from the lower numbers we saw a year ago in May 2020.  

The combination of high infection rates with high vaccine availability creates a public health conundrum, especially for places like churches that serve the general public or multi-generational communities given those under age 16 aren’t yet eligible for a vaccine.  

We don’t really know what this will mean, but we do know that getting more people vaccinated is imperative for all of us to return to a sense of normalcy. If you know anyone who is not vaccinated, please make sure they sign up with the County for a fast vaccine appointment here.  

With all that said, we have been moving forward with our plans for in-person gatherings. To start, I’m happy to offer these updated Guidelines for Gatherings – geared especially to all of you who lead groups, circles, or teams and who are consider getting together in the next few months – but also to give you all a sense of how we as staff are thinking about get-togethers. Please review and let me know your questions! 

In the last few days, we’ve begun the process of returning to and opening back up our campus, a process that will culminate in full reopening by September.  

To start, in the last week, volunteers helped us to paint and clean the building and playground. On May 22nd and 23rd, families will move out of Foothills and into Christ United Methodist, launching Faith Family Hospitality (the program through which we house families experiencing homelessness) back into their normal rotation across churches.  

This move-out will give us 2 weeks before our first big event back on the campus – Day Camp! (An all outdoor event this year.) 

During these weeks, Family Housing Network has arranged for professional deep cleaning (including carpets), along with a few other investments in the look and feel of our campus.  

On June 5th, we will host a “work day” at the church to finalize any clean-up and to plant flowers around the campus. This will be open to anyone, so look out for the sign-up coming soon! 
 
Throughout the summer, our building will remain mostly closed since we won’t yet have the systems/staff ready to operate in the way we did pre-pandemic. We will have occasional outdoor events, however, including a second Day Camp later in the summer. Given the high infection rates, waiting a few more months before being indoors together seems like due diligence after everything we’ve gone through. Besides, if you remember the temperature of our building in the summer, you’ll also remember that returning to indoor activities in the fall is just fine 🙂 

Speaking of the fall, a few key decisions are starting to shape up for our return to in-person worship. First, we are aiming for our first in-person worship on September 19th, assuming infection rates continue to fall. 

Currently, we are planning on maintaining our 9 am online service, providing a 10:15 in-person service that requires reservations (due to our limited seating), and a rebroadcast of the 9 am service at 11. Because of our space limitations, we’re thinking about a rotation of different groups on different Sundays to ensure you can come in person at least twice a month if you want to.  

We are also tentatively planning on an all-church in-person REUNION Sunday, October 17th at a rented location TBD. This all-church Sunday gathering would then repeat every third Sunday through January. Somewhere in there, the choir will sing, and we’ll have coffee! Don’t forget that somewhere in October-ish we’ll also be breaking ground on our new construction! (Learn more about the building expansion here.)

We’re trying to balance a lot of things in this plan, including:

  • the limitations of our current sanctuary size
  • the potential inclination of people to want to stay online – while also recognizing the needs of those for whom online church doesn’t work (especially parents with younger kids at home)
  • the gifts we’ve discovered in the online format
  • the reality that we can’t do everything (unless we hire double our staff!)
  • the fact that in a year, we’ll have a whole new sanctuary so anything we do now is automatically temporary! …. and, as I said in the last update, there’s a lot we won’t know until we start trying it. 

Even what I’ve outlined here remains only loosely determined, with a lot still to be worked out. So take this in and then let me know your questions and reactions. We will learn our way to the next right thing, together. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to seeing you all online, or outdoors at a gathering sometime soon! 

With love, and in partnership,

Gretchen  

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