Sunny Notes: 01.21.26 - Creating a Beloved Community
It was a busy long weekend around BUF, between the Congregational Start-Up Workshop, the Stewardship Envisioning Session, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service on Sunday and event on Monday.
From the Start-Up Workshop and Envisioning Session, we surfaced hopes and goals on everything from supporting our growing number of youth and families, to creating a robust staffing plan to support BUF's work, to strengthening connections with our UU sibling congregations and greater Association, to making our congregation more radically welcoming, to exploring the history and creation of our Mission. BTW: If you have information on when and how BUF's current Mission came to be, please do reach out to me, as I'm on a bit of an anthropological quest—you can find our Mission at buf.org.
I've also included here a photo of me with our Board President, Lin Skavdahl, our recorder extraordinaire for the Envisioning Session, who selected a highchair as our chalice table to represent new life and BUF's future. The BUF History Wall has now become an Envisioning Wall (thank you, Kathryn Allen and Sky Hedman, for so lovingly keeping and storing all that was on the History Wall!). And if you weren’t able to come to Sunday’s Envisioning Session, we are planning to hold two additional Envisioning Sessions on Wednesday, January 28 after Community Night Dinner, and Sunday, February 1 before the Sunday service—stay tuned for additional details.
From our Sunday service, I used as my jumping-off point a quote from the last speech MLK, Jr. gave before he was assassinated. In this speech, King said, “I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” During my sermon, I explored how we, as folks who value justice and equity, can become stars, points of light, when times are dark, as well as how we can cultivate our own inner light.
BUF offers many opportunities for cultivating our inner light, from our Chalice Circles, to our Adult Religious Education offerings, to our Choir, to our services (on Sundays, at Taizé, and more). I also want to highlight the incredible work of our Social & Environmental Justice Committee (SEJC), made up of a variety of dedicated individuals and action teams that are bringing so much light to our community and our world.
If you are feeling called to get more involved and help those most in need in this current moment in our history, I encourage you to attend SEJC's Winter Meeting on Sunday, January 25 at noon in the BUF Library to learn more. Whether you are interested in justice and support for immigrants, refugees, BIPOC folks, LGBTQIA+ folks, those under-resourced in our Bellingham community, or the environment, there are so many ways to jump in and lend a hand.
Through the work of SEJC and the larger BUF community, may we continue bringing MLK, Jr.'s vision of Beloved Community to life while bringing more light to this current darkness.
— Sunny, minister