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Adult Religious Education Discovering
Your True Spiritual Path Free
Online Course American
Religious Identification Survey 2008 UUFM Library
Children's Religious Education The UUFM is dedicated to providing quality children's religious education as a stepping stone to becoming a thoughtful, empowered, and balanced person. Sunday: 10:30
- Noon Children will learn to feel at home in the classroom and in our UU community. They will explore how they are changing and growing and helping each other create a safe space for all. Their time together will be full of celebrations. Whether it is Halloween, Chalice Sunday or saying grace for snack time, each day is full of sharing a special time together. Children gain an understanding of the ways in which we worship together by attending the first fifteen minutes of services in the Fellowship Hall. Seated with their families or in their reserved section, they join with people of all ages singing hymns, listening to a story and joining their voices with those of the larger congregation.
Wonderful
Welcome How do we welcome? We welcome by sharing intangible gifts, those positive qualities which we all have inside us such as kindness, love, invitation, covenant and empathy. In this program, children learn to articulate and express a variety of intangible gifts, empowering them to share these gifts with others. The intangible gifts explored in Wonderful Welcome are all components of welcoming itself, a core Unitarian Universalist value. This program helps children understand and practice other values central to Unitarian Universalism such as friendship, hospitality, and fairness. It offers children safe, positive and intentional ways to relate to one another, the people in their families, and the world around them as they investigate how they use gifts they can't see or touch to welcome others into their lives. Children will think about the intangible gifts they bring into the world, and the intangible gifts they receive. When and how do they get love from others? When and how do they show empathy? Who has given them the gift of friendship? How do they show that they want to be someone's friend? What does "helping" look like? Each
session begins with a Wonder Box that contains a symbol of the session's
theme. The Wonder Box engages the children's curiosity and encourages a
spirit of inquiry and reflection. In the first session, the box is empty
to introduce the concept of " intangible." Faithful Journeys Because ours is a creedless faith, defining what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist can be challenging. Our adults and youth often welcome such a challenge — indeed, a questioning spirit is part of our faith. Yet, our children need to learn who Unitarian Universalists are, what we believe, and how we live in faith. Faithful Journeys equips them with language and experiences to answer these questions and help them develop a strong Unitarian Universalist identity. Participants embark on a pilgrimage of faith, exploring how Unitarian Universalism translates into life choices and everyday actions. In each session, they hear historic or contemporary examples of Unitarian Universalist faith in action. Stories about real people model how participants can activate their own personal agency — their capacity to act faithfully as Unitarian Universalists — in their own lives, and children have regular opportunities to share and affirm their own stories of faithful action. Through sessions structured around the Unitarian Universalist Principles, Faithful Journeys demonstrates that our Principles are not a dogma, but a credo that individuals can affirm with many kinds of action. Over the course of the program, children discover a unity of faith in the many different ways Unitarian Universalists, including themselves, can act on our beliefs. All sessions include hands-on activities as well as guided discussion, reflection, and self-expression to engage participants with various learning styles. Each session is crafted to appeal to children in our Faithful Journeys group. Each session of this program includes rituals: sharing opening words, a chalice-lighting, centering in silence before hearing a story, and singing. Most children love ritual, and these spiritual activities form an important element of the program.
Windows and Mirrors Unitarian Universalism views our members' multiple perspectives as a blessing. In spirit, we embrace the contribution of diversity to our collective ability to pursue truth, fairness, justice and love. In practice, however, we often fail to embrace all the experiences and viewpoints in our communities as respectfully or as wholly as we might. Sometimes, we fail to even see differences among us. We seem most prone to gloss over differences when to acknowledge them requires acute self-examination and may lead to pain, shame, discomfort or guilt. Windows and Mirrors nurtures youth's ability to identify their own experiences and perspectives and to seek out, care about and respect those of others. The sessions unpack topics that lend themselves to diverse experiences and perspectives—for example, faith heritage, public service, anti-racism and prayer. The program teaches that there are always multiple viewpoints and everyone's viewpoint matters. The metaphor of windows and mirrors represents the dynamic relationship among our awareness of self, our perceptions of others, and others' perceptions of us. Beginning in Session 2, an ongoing art activity gives youth a way to respond to the metaphor creatively and concretely. Participants do guided work on individual Window/Mirror Panels in each session to explore looking inward and looking outward in terms of the session's topic. As a mirror, the panel reflects the individual person. As a window, it represents their view and connections beyond themselves to the congregation, other communities to which they belong and the world. Unitarian Universalism is a faith we live in community, acknowledging and acting on our responsibility toward one another. We encourage one another's search for truth and meaning. We affirm the interdependent web of which we are all a part. In Windows and Mirrors, youth will learn that when we come together as Unitarian Universalists, we nurture our individual spirits and work to help heal the world; the two are inextricable.
CRE
Kids Flying the Peace Dove
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This site was last updated 07/21/09
