Building a Community Together!
Hello to all our wonderful families!
Taking one morning a week to check in with ourselves, reflect, recharge, and recommit to our values is important self-care for adults as well as children so I wanted to take a moment to encourage your family to attend UUI as often as you are able, three Sundays a month, if you can manage it. Here are some reasons why:
Living in Indiana, our children swim in a culture where a good number of their friends and classmates have a church and talk about it. Regularly attending UUI, our children know that they, too, have a church, and they know that their church reflects the values of their families.
Every week, we work to build a cohesive, supportive, nurturing group where your children and youth can be surrounded by friends and teachers who see them for who they are, know their stories and care deeply about them. The goal is to get past awkwardness and pleasantries and really get to know one another. Regular attendance fosters this, especially over a period of years.
When you establish a pattern of going to church more often than not, you are laying a foundation for the day when your child has a question bigger than you feel comfortable answering alone, when your family has a challenge that you need spiritual help meeting, or when a local, national, or world event occurs that shakes all of us, and we need community to help us find peace and understanding.
In short, we want to be your child's community. We want to cheer them when they have accomplishments, and offer compassion when they have disappointments. We want to know their individual experiences of being awake and alive in the world, and we want to share the tools of Unitarian Universalism that can help them to be awake and alive with faith and love and hope. We can only do this if we exchange gifts--you offer your family time, and as a church we give back to one another the gift of community that we create together.
We need your truth and your time to build a church that matters and makes the world a better place, an endeavor that is far, far bigger than any one of us alone.
With Gratitude, Peace and Love,
Susanne
