Dear Members and Friends,

As a Fellowship, we continue to be very busy, not only with our usual heavy schedule of activities and our interim work, but tomorrow we start our Pledge Festival Weekend! We hope everyone can come by the Fellowship and participate and enjoy two days of Creating Community Together while making our pledges of financial support to QUUF for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. Saturday will feature a grand breakfast in Fellowship Hall followed by activities in all parts of QUUF through the rest of the day until 9pm. Sunday’s activities will start after the second service at 1pm and continue to 5pm. Nonetheless, it seems both appropriate and necessary to take the time to talk about where we are as a congregation, the work we are doing, and to address certain persistent issues and perceptions in the congregation.

Right Relations

Conflict in any group is almost inevitable, even in a UU Fellowship where we covenant “to love, to share, to serve” and “to use compassion, curiosity, reverence and respect while seeking our truths”. We all care deeply about our community and the success of this Fellowship, which sometimes leads to disagreement and conflict when we don’t all agree on a decision or a direction to go. This is especially true in a time of change. There is no doubt in our minds that all of us – minister, staff, board, members and friends – have only the best interests of the Fellowship at heart. So even if we disagree at times, that is no reason for us to be uncivil or unkind to each other.

This is why we are very grateful to Helen Kolff and Kathy Stevenson for taking on the task of creating a Fellowship-wide Covenant of Right Relations, a set of agreements on how we promise to BE together. With a covenant of right relations, we affirm our intentions, knowing that if we fall short, we have a path to repair our relationships. At our meeting on Wednesday evening, March 20, Helen and Kathy heard from the Board about what we believe should be included in such a covenant, and this work will continue Congregation-wide on April 7.

Acting Lead Minister Kate Lore

When Rev. Helen Carroll left us last fall, we named Rev. Kate Lore as “Acting Lead Minister”. Kate was thus put in the position of taking care of the regular and ordinary duties of a minister in our Fellowship. This includes responsibility for Sunday Services, pastoral care, managing the staff, etc. Kate has taken on this role with great spirit and positive energy, unfortunately also leading to Kate work many more hours than she should.

However, Kate is not our Interim Minister; she did not replace Helen Carroll as the one responsible for managing the interim work we need to do in preparation for calling our next settled minister. This responsibility fell, essentially, on the shoulders of the Board of Trustees, which work we have taken up as best we can with the help of Consultant Ministers referred to us by the UUA. Questions about this work, our various workshops, our visiting Consultant Ministers, should go to the Board or the Transition Team, and not Kate.

Unfortunately, Kate has been taking heat from some members that ordinarily would be the very heat that an Interim Minister would expect. While interim ministers are trained to deal with these types of situations, and while interim ministers see these types of reactions from members as predictable and part of what an interim minister is trained to deal with, Kate is not our interim minister. Legitimate concerns about Fellowship business that falls within the scope of Kate’s duties may of course be taken to Kate. But Kate is not responsible for Helen Carroll’s departure, is not in charge of our interim work and is not responsible for decisions made by us, the Board.

Music Director Position

Some members have raised questions regarding the process around the decision to budget for and hire a music director. The rationale behind this position has been thoroughly explored by Rev. Kate Lore in her blog and in open meetings with the Fellowship, so won’t be repeated here. What we would like to discuss is how we as a board see the process leading to the decision that we made.

Although Kate, our acting lead minister, did initiate the process with the Music Program Committee, the need had been recognized as well by Rev. Helen Carroll last year as a staff deficiency for a Fellowship of our size. From the Music Program Committee, the request was reviewed and discussed by the Personnel Committee and the Finance Committee prior to being brought to the Board, per the Operations Manual and the Bylaws.

The need for an assistant minister has not been diminished. However, the upcoming retirement and departure of our choir director Marj Iuro, as well as budget deadlines, led to an accelerated consideration of the need for music leadership. At the same time, it was felt that to bring on a second assistant minister during the interim period would add complexity and should rightfully involve the Fellowship’s new senior minister; that is, as we do not have a settled senior minister at this time, we saw it as inadvisable to hire an assistant minister, because the new senior minister would want to have a say in who their assistant would be.

We also recognize that Kate is working too many hours. Indeed, very soon after Rev. Helen Carroll’s departure, we asked Kate how we could help her in her job, since she was, in effect, taking on the work of two ministers. Kate’s response was eventually to ask for the Music Director position instead of an assistant minister at this time, partly for the reasons noted above.

The Music Director position came to the Board along with the staffing plan for next year. The staffing plan was developed by Kate working with the Personnel Committee. An influence on the thinking of at least some of us on the board has also been our consideration of a move toward a policy governance structure. This model of governance and how we implement it, however, is still an open question and one to be carefully considered as we move forward through our interim work.

The Board also recognizes that the budget presented to the congregation at the annual meeting in June is subject to changes based on the success of the pledge drive. And the formal contract hiring of a music director is also subject to the final budget approval of the members at the annual meeting.

Interim Work

On April 2, Rev. Eric Posa will return to begin working with us on clarifying our mission as a Fellowship. Please come to a special Assembly in Fellowship Hall on Tuesday, April 2 from 5-7:30pm. Rev. Posa, of our Interim Team, will work with us around Mission and help us develop a process to review and revise as needed. This is our chance to be involved in “doing the work” and we want to make sure all who want to provide input can do so. Please RSVP your reservation to Colleen Johnson. The Board will also be considering the formation of a Mission task force to follow up on the work that we begin on April 2.