Last year, I commented early in my report, “What a difference a year makes!” This year, I say it in a whole new way.

We started the year with threats of serious flooding, exacerbated no doubt by climate change. Meanwhile, the national political climate feels poisonous. Then, coronavirus and its side-effects have multiplied the challenges for everything, including religious communities. It’s impossible to project the many repercussions that will come as we make our way into a different world.

In short order, we have moved from in-person to virtual services, through astounding work from a team including our audio-visual whiz Doug Walter, Sunday Services Committee Co-chairs Rob Morrison and Katie Kingery-Page, Music Director Renea Brown, tech guru Jeff Brown, Board Past Chair Jessica Sievers, and an assortment of flexible conveners ready to learn new things. We’ve seen a slight uptick in attendance with the move to virtual services. Because of live-streaming, we have had so many different people join us – friends and family from around the country, members sequestered at Meadowlark Hills, and others who have difficult joining us physically, who find virtual connection meaningful. So, whatever else happens, we have to continue live-streaming services.

With the struggle involved with getting children and teens to check into virtual RE, DRE Sandy Nelson reminds me that in these times, family ministry and perhaps, all ministry, requires a more seven-day-a-week approach, than a focus on Sundays. Sandy is sending out activities to support family ministry in the home. Meanwhile, adults are gathering regularly on Zoom in Chalice Circles, Men’s Lunch, a weekly evening gathering hosted by Elke Lorenz, as well as assorted meetings. And participants in the Caring Team and others have called and offered support to members.

We’ve gone from a year where we showed encouraging growth to a year where we have stabilized, even declined a bit, and then been assaulted by the virus and its economic fall-out. The Board has taken courageous leadership in recognizing and naming where we are, struggling with the issues, and moving forward. With help from consultant Barry Finkelstein, we have developed new mission and vision statements, to be approved at the Annual Meeting this week. We have figured ways to move into the future in a more sustainable way, in part through reducing to ¾ time ministry. And we have gotten real about our financial situation.

In the coming year, the nation, this city, and this congregation will be adjusting. Many variables remain up in the air at this time. Will students return to K-State in the fall? With the inevitable economic decline locally, will we struggle further with membership and finances? How will the election – locally and nationally – affect us as a congregation? These big questions may push us towards creative solutions. We’ll figure out together what less than full time ministry looks like in this time and place. We need to particularly think about how cooperation with other congregations may help us accomplish our goals in a time of scarcity. Consider these suggestions from David Miller and Tera Little: http://growinguu.blogs.uua.org/organizational-maturity/clusters-doing-church-in-the-21st-century/

There is a lot to learn.

Let me report on our activities together during the past year, organizing them around our developmental goals:

Strategic Action to Create Strong, Visible, and Socially Active Presence

1. Congregational Participation in Social Justice work. UUFM members and friends have shown up for a number of significant events and causes, including:
   1. Wear Orange event against gun violence.
   2. Lights for Liberty, expressing concern over the treatment of immigrants.
   3. Kansas Interfaith Action dinner and events.
   4. Study circles of Community Solutions to Affordable Housing. Solutions recommended were mandatory rental inspections, a housing trust and community revitalization.
   5. Medicaid expansion rallies, including through Kansas People’s Agenda.
   6. Conversation on Race and Reconciliation.
   7. After strong representation at last year’s Little Apple Pride Parade and Festival, we also had representation at the celebration of Stonewall in June. I will be representing us on the virtual Pride celebration on Facebook.
   8. As has been true in the past, several of the Board members of Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice (MAPJ) are members of the fellowship. A number of other members also participated in MAPJ huddles, actions, Living Wage, Coalition for Equal Justice, the County Commission campaign for transparency and against racism, People’s Forum City Commission Forum, and other activities.
2. Specific congregation-wide efforts.
   1. We sponsored the OWL Training of Trainers in June. Sandy Nelson, particularly deserves credit for this. It is a reflection of our values to be sure that people of all ages receive quality, accurate sex education.
   2. We decided to continue to give away the offering every month through Helping Hands. Finance reports give more information about that.
   3. After our increased involvement with Happy Kitchen every week, we have discontinued involvement with the closure of the kitchen at St. Paul’s due to the pandemic. Rob Delong has been involved with helping Common Table to systematize collection of numbers. Many thanks to Rob, and to Tom Phillips, and all those who volunteer regularly.
3. Inside our congregation.
   12. Our Racial Justice Task Force continued to meet nearly every month. Judy Nickelson led a multi-part book discussion of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, culminating in a discussion that included community representatives talking about various aspects of race in the justice system. Then, a good-sized group attended the movie. Several members also attended the showing of the retrospective on Brown v. Board of Ed at the MAC. There has been talk of helping to support a refugee, which got sidelined with the pandemic. And, they presented a Sunday service on January 12. We’ve also reviewed and tried to keep up with what’s going on in the UUA with the Commission on Institutional Change (Commission on Institutional Change)
   13. Judy Nickelson is serving as chair of Social Justice, helping to coordinate our in-kind collections for the community and other activities.
4. Ministerial involvement. Because this is one of our priority goals for developmental ministry, I spend significant energy in the area of social action. Besides involvement in many of the efforts listed above, I
   1. Served as chair for Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice (MAPJ), helping make a move towards more coordinated community organizing efforts in several campaigns and getting our message clearer to both members and the community. I’ve also been active with the Coalition for Equal Justice, which is moving toward working with the Riley County Police Department on a Fair and Impartial Policing group.
   2. Served as Vice Chair and Parade Coordinator for Little Apple Pride
   3. Offered training to Crisis Center volunteers on Religion and Domestic Violence twice a year
   4. Attended on-line meetings of the Clergy group of Kansas Interfaith Action.
   5. Worked with ACLU on Smart Justice advocacy.
   6. Co-moderated the People’s Issues Forum for the City Commission candidates.
   7. Served on the planning committee for Conversations on Race and Reconciliation: Listening to Local Voices.
   8. Participated in a panel on Religion and Sexuality for a K-State class.
   9. Led singing and prayer at events associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., Day
   10. In the wake of the pandemic, participated in increased meetings of the Manhattan Ministerial Association, going from monthly to weekly, in order to stay abreast of community needs and how the religious community can be supportive

Full-time Ministerial Leadership Model

1. Sunday Services.
   1. I’ve already described above the major move to on-line services that took place during March. This was extraordinary work, greatly aided by the preparation we had made (unwittingly) by adding more visual elements to the service through projection, including projecting hymn lyrics, and doing a couple of Facebook Live services due to weather.
   2. After evaluating it, we let go of monthly Services for All Ages, including only a few this year.
   3. With attendance once more falling, we abandoned movement on two services. At this time, that remains moot. Perhaps the best option, once we return to live services will be adding the live-stream, and perhaps even live-streaming to the Alsop Room.
   4. I kept training and supporting conveners, including revisions to the Convener’s Manual.
   5. We continued pulpit exchanges with other local ministers, including Rev. Oscar Sinclair from Lincoln, NE, and Rev. Sarah Oglesby-Dunegan from Topeka.
2. Participation in leadership.Our organization has made its way to a blend of organic and structure. Currently we have the following official committees operating:
   1. Finance Committee (chair — Michael Oldfather) — meets regularly
   2. Sunday Services Committee (co-chairs Katie Kingery-Page and Rob Morrison) — meets irregularly; under this would come Conveners who have trainings and monthly meetings of whoever is convening the following month
   3. Facilities Committee (chair — Dan Swenson) — meets irregularly; subgroups include Grounds (Sylvia Beeman)
   4. Membership Committee (chair — Shirley Hobrock) — doesn’t meet as a committee, Shirley calls on who she needs for what she needs
   5. Communications Committee (chair — Marisa Larsen) — doesn’t meet as a committee
   6. Social Action Committee (chair — Judy Nickelson) — meeting irregularly
      1. Racial Justice Team – sub-group of Social Action; contact Jonalu
   7. Aesthetics – Rob Morrison — doesn’t really meet as a committee, but does organize the art shows in the narthex.
   8. Caring Team – meets occasionally; individual assignments; contact Jonalu
   9. Chalice Circle Facilitators – meets occasionally
   10. Strategic Planning group – led by Les Losche
   11. A lot of individual volunteer jobs from HR to recycling to purchasing supplies to A/V

1. 1. I participated in Next Steps weekend and the work on mission and vision, though I limited my leadership to process concerns. As a Developmental Minister who will only be with you for a short time longer, I didn’t want to exert too much influence. In that spirit, I intend to remain engaged with the development of a Strategic Plan.
   2. I attended more Finance Committee meetings this year, as we worked to get a better grasp of financial planning.
   3. I led monthly Adult Religious Education classes focused on various themes in UU historic social justice. Attendance was highly variable, and not as strong as last year.
   4. Participation with lay leadership in a series of webinars from the UUA helped us think about how small church works well.

3. Staff supervision and support.
   1. Reviewed revised personnel standards from UUA. We still need to improve our policies based on that review.
   2. Key staff meet once monthly for communication, coordination, and support.
   3. Custodian Troy Fisher is completing a deep clean of the building while we are away from it.
   4. I conduct an annual review of staff, and all are performing satisfactorily. We reviewed and updated job descriptions.
4. Pastoral Care.
   1. UUFM takes care of its people well. I make occasional hospital visits when called in, and often meet with people for pastoral care at Radina’s hours, or in a scheduled meeting. One of the hardest things about the stay at home order has been being unable to have casual, impromptu interactions.
   2. Our Caring Team feels well-established. Though we meet only once a year, we have reached out to the congregation members during the pandemic and provided support in multiple ways.
   3. I had a regular monthly presence at Meadowlark Hills, until it was closed off for the pandemic.
5. Rites of Passage.
   1. I conducted two weddings of members this year:
      1. Mark Moser and Terri Franz
      2. Linus Anton and Alex Dau, who took the last name of Urbanek.
   2. We held a memorial service for Chris Banner. Though no longer a member, his connection with the congregation and his family’s (especially Betty) made it a congregational celebration of life.
   3. I also conducted memorial services for Doris Mangelsdorf (Jessica Siever’s grandmother) and Cecilia Evans Clement (Lorn Clement’s mother).
6. Other
   1. I was featured in the Manhattan Mercury “Our Neighbors” feature in the summer.
   2. My book Scripture Unbound was published by Skinner House Press. The congregation hosted a lovely reading and reception, and I have donated some of the proceeds from book sales to the congregation.

Grow in Ways to Support Our Goals

1. Membership growth.
   1. We added the following members this year: Jennifer Thomsen, Ed Olsen, and John Reese.
   2. We expect to lose a number of members through the summer, and have already lost some through moves, so our membership has declined and will do so a bit more.
   3. We did not see our usual influx of visitors in the fall, and numbers continued to be down throughout the year. Similarly, attendance was down, though we have observed slightly increased attendance with virtual services.
   4. We held only a couple of Path to Membership classes this year, because of the decline in prospective members.
2. Social Media, Outreach, Communications:
   1. Facebook remains our primary outreach and inreach social media tool, inreach being through our UUFM Coffee and Conversation group and outreach through Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Manhattan page. We have 402 likes on our Facebook page and 131 members of UUFM Coffee and conversation. We also have 210 Instagram followers, almost double what we had last year. So, we have more members of the Facebook group than we do of the congregation itself, substantially more followers on Instagram than we have members, and more than 3 times as many people following us on Facebook as we have members. We continue to use Soul Matters media packets to supplement our local efforts (on both Facebook and Instagram), posting 10-12 times a week, generally. Sarah Desmet has joined Taryn Cipra, Katie Kingery-Page, Jessica Sievers, and Marisa Larsen on our social media posting team
   2. Thanks to Marisa Larsen and Mark Clarke, we updated our website, moving to the WordPress theme developed by the UUA. It looks good!
   3. We participated this year in Juneteenth.
3. Path to Membership. We held only a couple of classes this year.

 Look Forward to

This year will be a year of experimentation, as we continue to learn how to adapt to the pandemic. It’s impossible to predict when we will be together again in large groups, certainly no earlier than fall, and quite likely well after that. Even once we are able to have large group gatherings, we may need to be prepared at any time to move back to virtual only services.

 Instead, our focus will need to be on small groups, the lifeblood of the congregation, where people gather and know one another and feel known and recognized for themselves. Also, on-line experiences, social media and developing relationships remain key.

We will likely also experiment with less than full-time ministry, finding new ways of sharing leadership between clergy and lay people. At the same time, searching for a new minister will require energy, primarily from the Search Committee, but from others as well. Search should help the congregation better understand itself and its connections with the larger UUA.

 We’re also going to have to adapt to changing needs in our community and world. How do we help support the larger community in making a place for everyone? We’ll undoubtedly learn new ways in the coming year.  Our goal is to make the world a better place for all to live in, a more welcoming and nurturing place for all people, those like us and those different from us. UUFM is making a difference in our community and in the lives of the people touched by UUFM. In the words of our draft mission statement: “We are dedicated to challenging ourselves and society into wholeness.” Our work towards social justice and inclusion will help us fulfill the vision we have summarized: “A vibrant, inclusive congregation, UUFM is widely known as a safe haven and a force for social justice”

 So may it be.

Jonalu Johnstone

Developmental Minister