Dear First Parishers,
Welcome, welcome to a new church year! While I have enjoyed the slower pace of summer, I have missed you all and look forward to catching up with everyone. I would like to thank our awesome summer services team of worship leaders, worship coordinators, and tech wizards. We had good attendance, both in the chapel and online.
We will begin our new church year in the sanctuary on September 10 at 10 am, with our traditional intergenerational ingathering and water communion. Bring a little water to pour into our common bowl. It can be from or symbolic of a place you have visited or from your home. And we will have water up front to use as well. As our September Soul Matters theme is “The Gift of Welcome,” I invite you to share a sentence about what gift of welcome you are giving or receiving as you pour the water in the bowl for our ingathering communion.
Last year at this time, we were in the midst of big changes, above and beyond COVID. We had just welcomed Erica Clifford and Jeff Ellis as our new office assistant and bookkeeper/business manager respectively. We were still in search of a new music director until we hired Dr. Christopher Grills in late September. This fall, we enter with the staff team fully in place for our second year together. We just held a staff retreat with clergy and congregational consultant Rev. Larry Peers (who you may remember led a couple of congregational retreats with us around our covenant). This gave us an opportunity to reflect on our first year together as a staff team and to prepare for the coming year. We are excited to be working together in service to this congregation we love.
For many, COVID feels to have receded into the background, but it is still with us. Neil Harmon, the Standing Committee Chair, and I are keeping an eye on the CDC’s community risk level for our county, which thankfully remains low. While masks are not required during worship in the sanctuary at this time, we are keeping the “Mask Required” seating in the back for those who need to be cautious for the sake of their health or those they love. Please be supportive of masking by not questioning or challenging a person’s decision to wear one. And note that if the community risk level does rise to “high” in Middlesex County, we will require masks in the sanctuary again. Hopefully, each year it will get a little easier to ride out the surges and ebbs of this virus.
The big event on the horizon is my sabbatical which will start February 5 2024, and run through the end of May. I have a wonderful sabbatical team in place: Cindy Gist, Bonnie Rankin, Liz Peterson, Gail Burati, Ruth Whalen Crockett and Joan Coyne. We will meet next week to start putting the pieces in place for coverage while I am away. This will be the third time we have gone through a sabbatical together so for those of you who have never experienced this before, please know that this congregation knows very well how function while I am gone. In fact, that is one of the purposes of the sabbatical: to remind all of us that the ministry of the congregation ultimately belongs to the congregation through our covenant. While I am called to serve as the minister and provide professional spiritual and congregational leadership, all of us are called to walk together in the ministry and ministries of our congregational life. Especially as we continue to return from COVID, the sabbatical will offer a time to reflect and reengage with our covenant and our commitments to one another, to First Parish and to our Unitarian Universalist faith.
In faith,
Rev. Ellen
