Hello again everyone!
Here is our weekly update on how our Welcoming Congregation workshop went last Friday evening.
Welcome to our new attendees! We had a couple new faces this week as we talked about “The Radical Right”. This was likely the most work-intensive workshop in the series, as we had a lot of material to cover.
First, we contemplated the differences between “rigid thinking” and “clear thinking” - we split up into pairs and shared our own experiences with people who were rigid thinkers, and others who were clear thinkers.
Be brainstormed as a group, and came up with quite a list of evils that exist in our world today; then we split up into small groups and did our best to define “evil” - let me tell you, it wasn’t easy! We all struggled to come to a clear definition of what evil actually is - rather than just give examples.
After a short break (where we enjoyed a smorgasbord of treats!), our final exercise for the evening was in small groups again, where each group took on one tactic employed by “The Radical Right” to confuse the issues (and the public), to promote fear, and to advance their fundamentalist agenda. Each group then presented what they learned to all.
LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR NEXT WORKSHOP:
This coming Friday, Feb, 26th will be our fifth workshop, and we will be hosting Pastor Buddy from the First Presbyterian Church of East Aurora! He will be giving an abbreviated version of the Bible-Study he recently finished at his church about “The Bible and Homosexuality”.
We hope you’ll join us!
Mark
Hello, New York Unitarian Universalist congregations! There is an exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunity coming up that we wouldn’t want your members to miss. To celebrate the bicentennial of Margaret Fuller’s birth, there is an upcoming toured trip through Italy, where your members can follow the same path that she did almost two centuries ago.
All of the necessary information is in the attached document. If you would please distribute this information to your members, whether by newsletter, flyers, e-mail, or any means of your choosing, it would be much appreciated. Thank you very much, and we hope to see you in Italy!
The following link is to a flyer with more information:
Hi all,
Our third Welcoming Congregation workshop last Friday focused on Oppression.
First, we described all the different forms of oppression we could think of, and learned some terminology about a few forms we hadn’t heard of! Then we split up into groups, and each group focused on one form of oppression. When we all came back together, each group then explained to everyone else there what they learned, and some even acted it out!
Then we split up into new groups, each group went to a chart on the wall with a different area of life - work, education, family, media, etc - and we noted the similarities and differences between Homophobia and Racism. Then we all reviewed these together.
LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR NEXT WORKSHOP:
This coming Friday, Feb, 19th will be our fourth workshop, and it will focus on the “Radical Right”. We will discuss the differences between Rigid Thinking and Clear Thinking. We will spend some time defining how we see evil in the world, and then we will examine a few case studies.
This week we will also be handing out some material for people to prepare for the Feb. 26th workshop when Pastor Buddy from First Presbyterian will be our guest speaker! He will be giving an abbreviated version of the Bible-Study he has been doing at his church for the past 6 weeks about “The Bible and Homosexuality”.
We hope you’ll join us!
Mark, Donata & Patricia
The second of the series of Welcoming Congregation Workshops was held last Friday evening, focusing on gender issues & how we learned to be a boy or a girl. 13 people participated, including the facilitators; Donata, Patricia and Mark.
Here’s a re-cap for the benefit of those who weren’t able to make it:
- We all got up & went around the room to the various stations where stick-figure representations were of 5 different categories of people - Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Heterosexual - and we all wrote down all the stereotypes and misconceptions that came to mind. Then we discussed all the things that were brought up.
- Then we sat down & did a drawing exercise where we drew or described what our impressions were of: a good girl, a good boy, a bad girl & a bad boy - and we discussed how we thought we came to believe these things and who taught them to us.
- Then we split up into same-gender pairs, and talked one-on-one about what the rules were as we were growing up - pertaining to how we were expected to be - either as a boy or a girl.
- We came back to the main group and shared what we had talked about in our one-on-one time.
LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR NEXT WORKSHOP:
This coming Friday, February 12th, we will be talking about the various forms of oppression that have been used against GLBT people, and we’ll make some comparisons to other civil rights movements throughout the years. We’ll spend some time defining a few of these forms of oppression, and then we’ll split up into groups to learn a few of these in more depth.
We hope you’ll join us!
- The Welcoming Congregation Workshop Series is an introspective and interactive educational journey into the issues surrounding the lives of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and/or transgender people. The purpose is not to blame ourselves for our feelings but rather to help us understand how we learned our reactions to BGLT people and how we can replace old attitudes with new ones.
- Anyone is welcome to come to any of the upcoming workshops. Just send an e-mail to the church address – UUEastAurora@gmail.com - and we can send you copies of materials to read over and catch up on what we’ve already covered.
- We understand that most everyone will end up having to miss one, or a few of the workshops. Don’t worry about it, we’ll do our best to keep you informed of what you missed.
UNIVERSALIST CONVOCATION 2010
May 14-16, 2010
First Universalist Society of Rochester, NY
Keynote: The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, “Dragged Kicking and Screaming to Heaven”
For more information please go to nmuc.org/Convo
Here’s the February 2010 Newsletter!
The first of the series of Welcoming Congregation Workshops was held Friday evening, January 29th. What a great workshop we had! 13 people participated, including the facilitators; Donata, Patricia and Mark.
Here’s a re-cap for the benefit of those who weren’t able to make it:
- The Welcoming Congregation Workshop Series is an introspective and interactive educational journey into the issues surrounding the lives of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and/or transgender people. The purpose is not to blame ourselves for our feelings but rather to help us understand how we learned our reactions to BGLT people and how we can replace old attitudes with new ones.
- Anyone is welcome to come to any of the upcoming workshops. Just e-mail the church address and we can send you copies of materials to read over and catch up on what we’ve already covered.
- We understand that most everyone will end up having to miss one, or a few of the workshops. Don’t worry about it, we’ll do our best to keep you informed of what you missed.
- We did some introductory stuff:
- going over what the goals of this workshop series are;
- the schedule, and a brief description of the upcoming workshops,
- what our assumptions are coming into this;
- the guidelines we expect to follow,
- we defined a few of the terms we will be using, and
- handed out a list of 20 questions to be reviewed during the coming week.
- We split up into pairs, and spent some quality one-on-one time sharing experiences, we discussed what our fears about participation in this workshop series are - and what we hope to gain from it.
- Then we ended by everyone writing anonymously on a card, a question about something they hoped to learn from this series.
LOOKING FORWARD TO NEXT WEEK:
This coming Friday, February 5th, will focus on Gender issues.
We’ll talk about:
- stereotypes,
- how we learned to be a girl or boy,
- what the rules were for each gender,
- how these things changed as we grew up.
So, now that we’ve covered all the introductory stuff in Workshop 1, and built a safe group atmosphere for sharing, we can start to be more focused, and really dig into one issue at a time, and figure out how these have affected us.
We’re really looking forward to this, and we hope you’ll consider joining us!
Major Earthquake Devastates Haiti; UUSC and UUA Launch Joint Relief Fund
January 13, 2010
Port Au Prince the capital of Haiti, was devastated by a major
earthquake around 5 p.m. Eastern Time on January 12. UUSC and the
Unitarian Universalist Association have launched a joint earthquake
relief fund to help the survivors.
What UUSC will do
UUSC’s disaster response in Haiti will focus on those survivors less
likely to have access to aid, such as child domestic workers
(restaviks), women-headed households that work in the informal sector,
and people living with HIV/AIDS. Haiti has a vibrant grassroots
movement with a vision of empowering people. UUSC will work closely
with partners in this grassroots movement to reach those survivors at
greatest risk of being overlooked. As of this afternoon, we’ve already
connected with three organizations and will be reaching out to others
over the next 24 hours in order to shape our response.
We will be updating our website regularly as our plans develop.
We are deeply saddened at the calamity that has devastated the lives
of people in Haiti — please support our efforts to help them.
Please go to our website: www.uusc.org and donate online.
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
689 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139-3302
p 617-868-6600 | f 617-868-7102
The Unitarian Universalist Church of East Aurora is offering the “Welcoming Congregation” series of workshops. You may visit our webpage with more information by clicking the - A “Welcoming Congregation” page on your screen, to the right. You may also download the tri-fold flyer and print it by right-clicking on the following link and selecting “Save Target As…” save the file to your computer, then print it.
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