UU Fellowship of Manhattan, Kansas

May 2018

Rev Jonalu Johnstone

We have committed to another three years of ministry together.  I appreciate the confidence the congregation has shown in my leadership.  We have made significant changes in how we approach Sunday morning services and how we relate to the community.  We have explored options about our building and location.  We are reorganizing how we systematize our tasks.  We have made real progress.

However, we are not showing the growth that we need to sustain full-time ministry.  In fact, our membership numbers are flat, and our attendance numbers are declining.  Some of this is the context we are in.  Our culture places declining emphasis on religious community.  Churches, in general, including even UU’s, struggle with this, even though the “nones” seem to be perfect perspective UU’s.  The challenge is to figure out what changes need to happen in our UU congregations to reach and embrace these prospects.  At the same time, the Manhattan area is experiencing a pinch with declining enrollments at KSU creating anxiety and uncertainty for many of our members and friends.  So, the context is challenging.  If we are going to achieve substantial growth, we will need to take some new tack, whether that be relocation, adding a location in town, concerted publicity work, or some other major effort.  Part of our challenge is that going on as we have is comfortable; however, it is not ultimately sustainable.

Growth, of course, is never for the sake of growth alone. We want to grow in order to increase the reach of Unitarian Universalist values and principles in our community and beyond.

Once more, I assess what I have seen over the last year, based on our established developmental ministry 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, including:
   1. The Riley County Law Board meeting where John Exdell and the Coalition for Equal Justice presented their findings about racial discrepancies in marijuana arrest rates. The Law Board appointed an Ad Hoc Committee to look into it, on which I currently serve.
   2. Kansas People’s Agenda State of the State, pressing the state legislature toward a more progressive agenda.
   3. Rallies in response to white nationalist propaganda on campus, in response to the racism at Charlottesville, and in response to gun violence in schools.
   4. Confronting our representatives, particularly Jerry Moran, on specific national issues
   5. Community Housing Forum that is forming study groups to make policy recommendations to our City Council for safe and affordable housing in Manhattan.
   6. Poor People’s Campaign – at the October kick-off, and currently several of us are participating in the 40 Days of Action, changing the political conversation of our nation through statewide actions across the country.
2. Specific congregation-wide efforts. The efforts noted above were by individuals, though the fellowship enabled that involvement through publicity and encouragement. As a congregation, we also raised money for Black Lives UU at a special service (the Promise and Practice of our Faith), supported Beloved Conversations training for anti-racism through our budget, and collected money each month for various organizations through Helping Hands. As part of our outreach efforts, we tabled this year at Purple Power Play and Juneteenth. We also have expanded our volunteer support of Happy Kitchen, feeding breakfasts at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Fridays. It’s worth mentioning here that our OWL program this year included about half its participants from outside the congregation, children and youth from our community and partner congregations; this is a kind of outreach that reflects our values that we rarely think of as outreach, but is vitally important to our community.
3. Inside our congregation. Six of us participated in Beloved Conversations, committing a weekend and several subsequent sessions to learning more about race and racism and looking at how our congregation is doing.
4. Ministerial involvement. Because this is one of our priority goals for developmental ministry, I spend significant energy in the area of social action, including:
   1. Serving on the MAPJ (Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice) Board
   2. Speaking at public events, including the response to the white nationalist propaganda and the second student walk-out in response to the Parkland shootings.
   3. Facilitation of small groups at the Race Reconciliation event and the Community Housing Forum.
   4. Being part of the local organizing team for Poor People’s Campaign.
   5. Participating in local action groups, including Common Table, Safe and Affordable Housing Action, Everybody Counts, the Martin Luther King Committee.
   6. Building interfaith community, working particularly with Susanne Glymour of the Manhattan Nonviolence Initiative and Christian Watkins of the Ecumenical Campus Ministry.
   7. Responding via letter to the editor to events, notably the beginning of prayer at County Commission meetings.

Full-time Ministerial Leadership Model

1. Sunday Services. The Sunday Services Committee began studying multi-sensory worship to enhance our theme-based ministry model. With the committee’s support, ably led by Katie Kingery-Page, I maintained a more regular one Sunday a month out of the pulpit. At the same time, we worked to ensure a consistent quality in all our services. We added a visual focus each month to accent our themes, along with monthly meetings with the conveners to explore the theme and begin planning. UUFM honored Michael Oldfather’s retirement as Music Director and hired Renea Reasoner Brown to begin June 1 as our first paid Music Director. With declining participation, we ended our afternoon meditation circle.
2. Participation in leadership. The minister meets regularly with Board leadership to plan our Board agendas and coordinate our efforts in various areas, including the vision-based reorganization of volunteers, the efforts at Strategic Planning, the exploration of moving to two services, stewardship, and more. We have a solid collaborative relationship. It has been a great joy to work this year with Chair Courtney Albin.
3. Communications. Outreach and inreach are shared between staff and volunteers. Communications remain a major aspect of our administrator’s job. Carolyn Kelly has been creating beautiful bulletin boards in the building. As minister, I do a fair amount with our social media presence, though that effort is shared with lay volunteers. We experimented for the first time with Facebook promotions for the concert Jim Scott performed.
4. Staff supervision and support. Our small staff continues to show dedication and creativity in meeting the needs of the congregation. We are pleased to be adding Renea Brown as Music Director.
5. Pastoral Care. As relationships have deepened, I am called on more often for pastoral care, formally and informally. Since our Caring Committee chair moved, we need to regroup around how to be sure to keep one another well cared for.
6. Rites of Passage.
   1. We commemorated deaths this year of Don Davis and Sam Lacy.
   2. I conducted weddings for William Mitchell and Ashley Fulps and Renea Reasoner and Jeff Brown.

Grow in Ways to Support Our Goals

1. Flattening growth. Membership remains stable while attendance has fallen. DRE Sandy Nelson’s analysis of patterns of attendance of our children last fall was helpful in understanding. She found that our most regular attending children came a couple times a month, while many more attended less than that. It seems safe to say that adult attendance patterns are similar, except for our elder members who are the most likely to attend regularly each week. This is not a judgment, but an observation. While irregular attendance fits the lifestyles of busy families and individuals, it creates a challenge in determining how people are connected with the congregation. Providing other opportunities for connection – Chalice Circles, Beer and Theology, Meadowlark program – is one way to make sure people feel connected. We also need to make sure we’re making full use of social media and explore what possibilities exist to nurture both our inreach and our outreach, keeping members connected while reaching out to new people. Mark Clarke continues to chair a task force looking at the question of whether and how we might institute another service to support that effort.
2. Path to Membership. Classes following the Sunday service were offered twice during the year. A mix of newcomers and long-termers attended.
3. Membership, as noted above, has not grown in the past twelve months, because we lose as many members as we gain. Shirley Hobrock continues to track newcomers, invite them to social events, and help them into membership. We currently have 117 members, one more than we had at the annual meeting. New members this year were: Les Loschky & Miki Loschky, Jayci Hamm & Laura Roberson, Goutham Reddy, Amber Kozak, Kay Ediger & Colleen Riley, Patti Johnson & George Johnson, Emily Trube, Sabra Tieperman, Kim Ewing, and Lily Colburn.

Look Forward to

1. We plan to hold a Worship Workshop August 4 in Topeka, a joint effort with the Topeka congregation, to develop our skills and understanding of multi-sensory worship. All who participate in any way in worship are encouraged to be part of this.
2. I hope to adapt feedback circles, which we have been using to evaluate our Sunday morning services, to look at other areas of congregational life, especially our Social Justice efforts and outreach and communications.
3. I look forward to seeing how our reorganization of volunteer life plays out.
4. I am working with Christian Watkins at ECM to offer a workshop to some of the KSU students, sorting through their own individual religious heritages.

I am glad to be with you, and deeply grateful to all the people I work with here, our staff, Executive Board, Chalice Circle facilitators, religious education teachers, and all our great volunteers.

Jonalu Johnstone, Developmental Minister