Hello Fellow UUs,

The UU Collective Universal Connections workshop offerings start this weekend (pick Saturdays or Sundays in September).

I hope your congregation can join us!

Given the potential volume of congregations involved in the UU collective workshop offering, we are able to provide the workshop at a deeply discounted price––only $500 per congregation.

Here is some clarification regarding registration:

If you click the links below (or in the body of the forwarded email), you will reach a payment page to complete the registration for your congregation – only one registration is necessary per congregation – upon payment, enter the email address of the congregation’s primary contact for the workshop and then I will reach out to them to get email addresses of the congregation’s participants (4-8 participants per congregation) to send them the zoom info. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Saturdays in September (7-28) 3-5pm CT

Sundays in September (8-29) 3-5pm CT

I hope to workshop with you this weekend,

Jennifer Jennings

Here is the clarion call we’ve been sending you:

Are we UUs what the world is calling for? – The Rev. Dr. Thandeka believes so and she wants to help us prepare with a UU Collective workshop.

Here is her message to us along with more details about the workshop offerings:

Dear UU Congregations,

I believe you can be the cutting edge of a new spiritual era in America.

Why?

There is a call for a Spiritual Revolution now underway in America because the current religions feel obsolete.

In the Surgeon General’s May 2023 advisory report on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, Vivek Murthy calls for Americans to “build a movement to mend the social fabric of our nation” and he concludes that our nation “will continue to splinter and divide” if America fails to address its social disconnections.

Unitarian Universalism is uniquely positioned to answer these calls with its openness; respect for democracy; its affirmation of the interdependent web of life of which we are a part; and James Luther Adams’ five smooth stones of religious liberalism affirming revelation as continuous, mutual, social, reforming and hopeful. This evolution is essential because the spiritual revolution requires something that Emerson famously called for in his 1838 Divinity School Address at Harvard–-emotions.

People are lonely, concerned for the world and feel powerless. Meanwhile our divides continue to expand, our kids’ anxiety is increasing and people are searching for a new spiritual home to support their personal spiritual-but-not-religious journeys.

I believe they are looking for Unitarian Universalism. They are looking for you—but they don’t know it—yet.

Let’s help them find you.

Here’s how.

Based on my research, small groups provide the emotional care and support needed to address loneliness and they are the best way to grow congregations and build movements.

My life as a UU minister and theologian has culminated in small group work that bridges social disconnections by finding and attending to lost emotions and reaffirming our interconnectedness through personal experience. My team and I call it Universal Connections.

Create Universal Connections small groups in your congregations and the word will spread….

Here’s an introduction to Universal Connections:

WHY UNIVERSAL CONNECTIONS SMALL GROUPS?

Universal Connections starts with a workshop that creates a safe space for people to listen and share deeply. Participants find and affirm their innermost feelings of connections to themselves, to others and to the interdependent web of life through a spiritual practice of Pausing, Discerning, Reflecting (PDR) and Sharing of PDR experiences in a safe, small group.

As they share their PDR experiences, they are heard into speech.  As they listen to others’ PDR experiences, their humanity expands. Emotions are transformed by compassionate understanding.

The compassionate understanding turns the group into a supportive community where participants continue to meet to explore and express their PDR experiences––gaining ever more courage and confidence in their whole selves and deepening their consciousness of interconnection.

This interconnection-consciousness is the energy needed for the next evolution of our movement. This consciousness binds Universal Connections small groups together into a network empowered by an inspired humanity moving us and our nation ever forward.

This is why we are writing to all of you collectively.

We would like to lead your congregations through the workshop series––together.

THE LOGISTICS

UU Collective Workshop Offering for Lay-led Congregations

The Universal Connections workshop series is conducted online meeting once a week, for 2 hours, for 4 consecutive weeks.

Each congregation would select four to eight members to participate in the workshop as a group. During the workshop, breakout room exercises would be undertaken with their own respective congregation’s participants.

As a result, each group would become its community’s first UC small group.

Periodically, we will hold Universal-Connections-wide online meetings. We will draw on films, materials and special guests to help the small groups advance their understanding of their individual and collective power to heal and transform themselves and the world.

At these UC-wide meetings, connections among the congregations will be made in breakout rooms consisting of participants from different congregations.

The fee for this workshop series is $500 per congregation.

Sign up for one of these options:

Saturdays in September (7-28) 3-5pm CT

Sundays in September (8-29) 3-5pm CT

Options for Growing Universal Connections

Following the UU Collective Workshop Offering, if your congregation would like to continue growing Universal Connections small groups, we will provide a UC small group workshop sign up service. The service would entail a recorded sermon/homily by me and time for testimonials from your community’s first UC small group. Facilitation options for this next round of workshops would be:

Option 1 – Congregational Workshop Facilitators

Two or more members from your congregation’s first UC group would be selected by their UC group or congregation to be trained as UC workshop facilitators.

The fee for this training would be comparable to the initial workshop fee, but the trained facilitators could create more UC groups within their community until everyone who wanted to be in a group was in one.

Option 2 – UC Workshop facilitated by Thandeka

The fee for this workshop would be volume dependent. For instance, given the potential volume of congregations involved in the UU collective workshop offering, we are able to provide the workshop at a deeply discounted price per congregation.

Using either of these options, after each workshop, in continuous fashion, inspired participants could make a presentation during a Sunday service and invite people to sign up for the next round.

As the number of UC groups continued to grow, congregants could invite persons who were not members to visit a Sunday service and then meet afterwards to learn about UC groups. Those visitors who wanted to join a workshop series could do so and thus the congregations would have a new way of growing their communities via UC small groups.

WHO ARE WE?

Thandeka is a black American woman, Unitarian Universalist ordained minister and theologian and former Emmy award-winning television producer. Thandeka founded Contemporary Affect Theology, which investigates the links between religion and emotions using insights from the brain science of emotions: Affective Neuroscience.  Jaak Panksepp, the founder of affective neuroscience commends Thandeka’s work as “decisive historical-philosophical analysis” that can provide “a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experience” (The Archaeology of Mind, 391).

Thandeka has taught Contemporary Affect Theology at The Czech Unitarian Academy in Prague, Williams College, Harvard Divinity School and has been a Fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center, a visiting scholar at Union Theological School and The Center for Process Studies and led a tutorial at Brandeis.  Her books and essays helped secure her place as a “major figure in American liberal theology,” as Gary Dorrien notes in The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2005 (John Knox Press, 2006).

Jennifer Jennings is a white American Unitarian Universalist laywoman, co-director of Universal Connections, and a CPA with 25 years of financial accounting experience who left her long-time position as Director of Financial Reporting at a steel and wire company to work full time on launching Universal Connections and a related project called Untrolling America.

THE CALL

We believe Unitarian Universalism is uniquely positioned to be the platform for the spiritual revolution needed to “build a movement to mend the social fabric of our nation” and “address our social disconnections.”  And we believe Universal Connections is the UU-based small group curricula for this work.

Together, we have the collective power to heal and transform ourselves, our communities and our nation.

This is our clarion call. Will you answer it?

 Faithfully,

Thandeka
Co-Director
Universal Connections

Jennifer Jennings
Co-Director
Universal Connections