In addition to specific workshops, CB / Justice and Peace Consulting provides consulting, group development, and specific program development services.
You want:
- To grow and develop your congregation to better meet the needs of the community around you.
- To be responsive to changing demographics, cultural landscape, and socio-political times.
- To balance tradition and innovation as you move forward.
- To respond to loss and grief (of person, idea, or failing democracy,) and move with strength into the next decade and beyond.
- To invest in human infrastructure that will shore up the foundation of your community as you build more and more levels of service to the larger community.
- To practice patterns of communication that move toward inclusion, health, and justice.
- To develop lithe, responsive ways of decision-making that will support experimentation within the framework of your mission.
- To welcome newcomers and have them feel meaningfully welcome, to integrate them into the life of the congregation, and conversely,
to create space for newcomers to impact and change the congregation. - To learn about generational and cultural differences and grow the flexibility and wings necessary to adapt your programs and activities to meet new needs as they arise, and learn enough to begin to preemptively be ready to be responsive
- To do justice and seek peace, and understand that the first precedes the second as we live more fully into the Beloved Community*
I offer solutions to these desires and challenges by helping with
Group development — I have had years of experience working with all sorts of organizations and the groups and committees that make them up. Middle and high school youth groups and their adult leaders, committees that are stuck or stagnant or struggling with growth challenges, congregations in conflict or dealing with harmful behavior, congregations trying to meet the needs of groups and generations that are more a mystery to them than they expected, and congregations living with loss. I am available for intervention, development or both.
Program development — Whether it is your Religious Education/Faith Formation program, your Welcoming/Newcomer Team, or a Board trying to quickly shift priorities in a time of crisis, I can come in and help you quickly assess the challenges, attend to covenants and relationship, get to work of serving our faith and our communties in the best way possible.
Interim change management — All of the above endeavors are more challenging during an interim time (a time that is between the way it was before and whatever will come next.) It might involve loss or change of ministerial or program leadership, a loss or change in the physical building, membership, or in the larger culture.
If your congregational program or committee is looking for someone with an understanding of congregational polity and ministerial authority and board responsibility, alongside the ability to see the interplay of programs and committees with the history and experience of leaders, reach out to me.
If your UU congregation is undergoing significant or protracted conflict, or conflict related to recent misconduct by leadership, I recommend you reach out toyour regional staff and Hope for Us.
*There are many ways to talk about the Beloved Community. Here are two quotes that demonstrate how I use it.
“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” bell hooks.
…the opportunity, not the necessity, mark my word, but the opportunity, for growth in relatedness, for primary face-to-face discovery of the secret of life far removed from one’s own background and culture…It was as if the Creator of existence wanted to discover whether or not a certain ideal could be realized in time and space.” Howard Thurman