Dear ones,

I am coming to you this one last time from the shores of Lake Superior. This is, like the best of partings: bittersweet.

First, the sweet. Without exception, I have felt received and appreciated during every encounter of this nearly-two year interim journey with you. I have been gratified by your willingness to engage in the process of diving deep and surfacing with renewed tools and vision of what is possible when you leverage your gifts in the service of a mission that works for everybody. I reminded you. You did the work. I can only hope it was as good for you as it was for me.

And then the leaving. This is the long good-bye, for sure. My physical absence since March of 2020 created a kind of false absence masked by the miracle of Zoom. Now I am leaving with out having returned. The many messages of appreciation that I have received by e-mail, by text, by USPS and video and in the lovely book of UCE photos from my time with you, have been received as treasures, all. This has been a time of great mutual blessing. I will miss my weekly contacts with many of you – the staff, the Board, the many groups and individuals who showed up with your questions and comments and willingness to dig into the work of the Interim.

It is my hope for you that all of your ministries, past, present and future, be viewed through the lens of mutual blessing. This is the essence of truly shared ministry: to know yourselves as receivers and givers, holders and those being held, a people who serve and are served by your shared mission.

A final report of the Interim will be posted on the UCE Website later this summer. May it serve as a reminder of the best of UCE and of the possibilities for an even more promising future.

I have been asked what, for me, is next. I will not, in the foreseeable future, be doing more interim work. I will be enjoying the summer, doing a little preaching around and being a wife and a friend and a mom and a grandma and a homeowner with all that entails.

I look forward to being with you when you formally install Rev. Eileen as your Senior Minister. In the meantime, be well and be good to one another.

In love and gratitude.

Karen

Dear Ones, 

My ministry at UCE is nearing its end. Rumor has it that there will be some kind of farewell after the service on June 6. This will be my last appearance at a Sunday morning service. I will, however, be around dropping last words here and there, meeting with the Board and staff, tying up some loose ends before I formally sign off on June 30. On June 19 from 9:30 – until noon I will be hosting a formal Interim Review in which I will be revisiting the five Interim Tasks in light of the work we have done together and offer my summary reflection on the state of UCE. (Details to follow) 

Right now, I want to briefly address a piece of UCE culture that I believe is crucial for a true claiming of a healthier future, particularly in regard to the role and relationship to your Senior Minister.  

My earliest conversations with many of you (in the fall of 2019) reflected some considerable disappointment in UCE’s professional ministry. It was my perception then that most of these disappointments were the result of three things: 

1. Inadequately communicated and managed expectations of the roles and boundaries of congregation, staff and ministers. 
2. Unclear channels of feedback and opportunities for clarification of said expectations 
3. A willingness to tolerate toxic behavior on the part of both ministers and congregants in order to avoid conflict. 

Over the past several months there have been multiple efforts to address these issues. The framework of Shared Ministry was introduced early in 2020 by me and Rev Eileen in her role of Acting Senior Minister. This is a way of making clear that effective ministry of the congregation is not about a set of discrete functions delivered by a single trained person and a paid staff and a small group of plucky volunteers. Instead it is the enterprise of recognizing the richness of EVERYONE’S capacity to create what we have come to call “the beloved community” whose mission is “to nurture the human spirit for a world made whole”. 

AND, it also is an enterprise that NEEDS everyone to communicate and manage expectations, to use newly established channels of feedback to clarify and to address conflict with patience and love. 

This is a culture change. 

Here is how it works.  

When feeling discontent or dissatisfied or disappointed: 

1. Please think through your question or concern. Make notes or, better yet, write it out. When you are ready to talk about the concern or question ask yourself: 

“In my considered interactions around the important issues facing UCE: 

•  Am I inviting integrity and partnership? 
•  Am I authentically open to alternatives? 
• Am I approaching this with curiosity or judgement? 
• Are my responses constricting/limiting or narrowing the conversation or opening space for more light, more insight?   
• Am I ready to engage the UCE Covenant of Engagement in my expression of this issue/question/concern? 
• How do I see myself as part of the solution? 

 2. Choose carefully who you talk to.

• What do I want out of this conversation? (Clarity or more information? Collusion? Change? Support fo a foregone conclusion?) Is this person/group in a position to partner with me to address the issue or concern I am raising?  
• If you are uncertain about who to talk to, please contact a minister or other staff person or a member of the Committee on Shared Ministry or the Congregational Relations Team. These groups are all gearing up to hear your concerns as well as your joy and gladness. 

3. Take time to reflect on what is right about the UCE community, what is working, how things are evolving toward greater wholeness and frame your concerns in terms of how to leverage strengths for the greater good.

4. Be informed. Read the newsletter; check out the website; attend worship and events; be involved. Make sure you understand what is currently in the works about your concern.

5. Remember what you are trying to do together.

My work with UCE over the past two years has been to support opening up lines of communication; to encourage transparent negotiation to clarify the role of the Minister and the responsibility of the congregation. I am leaving you with some new structures, some new possibilities and a settled Senior Minister who has been around here long enough to learn from the experience of some of your previous ministers. She has a head start. Let her use it. 

This is incomplete work. It is HARD work. I have witnessed many of you in good faith feeling your way into a healthier way of engaging, using the new structures to help clarify your expectations and provide timely and constructive feedback. You all need to trust in the good intentions, good faith and basic competence of each other. EVERYONE WILL MAKE MISTAKES! Embedded in this time of great change MUST be the commitment to “forgive yourselves and one another and begin again” (and again and again) “in love”. 

In love and gratitude, 

Karen Gustafson
Interim Minister

Dear ones, 

There is a large window in our upstairs bathroom that looks out into a patch of woods. Northern Minnesota is fully a month behind Central Illinois relative to the arrival of spring, and so, on this rather dreary day the view outside is all shades of brown and gray – except for the intrepid moss that grows on the north, south, east and west sides of the trees. Whereas I love the dazzling green of spring in your neck of the woods, I oddly treasure this fallow time of year when change comes more slowly and moves me to think about the nature of all things. This year especially as I move out of Covid and toward the end of my interim time with UCE, I am aware of the hidden changes that emerge out of winter. 

Clearly there is deadfall, brought down by heavy snow or angry lake winds. But in the absence of leaves, it is impossible for me to tell which of the standing trees will bloom and which will, this summer, begin their  journey back to earth. At ground level there are tiny sprouts making their way toward the light. Only a skilled botanist would be able to tell one from another and even they can’t predict which ones will survive to reveal their true identities. Late frost, hungry deer, stampeding squirrels all waiting to lay claim. 

And in the end, spring will prevail. What is lost will most likely be forgotten as the living puts on its most extravagant show.  

For me, the essence of Earth Day is to reclaim this poignant reality as it mirrors the nature of human systems. There is at once so much beauty and so much loss. Beauty and good fortune can be so seductive that the embedded presence of loss can be ignored.

At best what is lost becomes the stuff of regeneration in the form of lessons learned, mistakes corrected and wisdom claimed. At worst what is lost is human potential and the capacity for compassion and the will to work for change. 

We are all emerging from many winters – the season itself can be harsh and especially so with the additions of Covid and growing urgency to address systemic racism and white supremacy in all forms.

At UCE there is much emerging beauty: the calling of Eileen Wiviott as your Senior Minister; the formation of the Anti-Oppression Task Force; a successful canvass; the structural review of many aspects of congregational life including Life Span Religious Education; wonderful virtual All Music Sunday and so much more.  

Let us not in the presence of all of this splendor, forget the losses: those who have been left behind due to lack of access to technology; those who have not been able to engage because of illness; those who have drifted away because they have not felt welcomed or invited into connection. These tender shoots need our attention even in our grateful celebration of spring. 

As you slowly re-emerge from this time of pandemic, please think of those with whom you have been long disconnected. Today would be a good day for reaching out with a phone call or an e-mail or a personal note. Let the power of those small gestures nourish the ground of your beloved community. 

In love and gratitude, 

Karen Gustafson 

Interim Minister 

Dear ones,  

The snow is nearly gone from my part of northern Minnesota. Last night there was a little dusting from Mother Nature who remains decisively in charge of this nameless season between winter and spring. It seems likely that I will end my tenure as your Interim Minister without appearing again in person, but I am honored to think that my name will appear, for better, for worse, among the array of colleagues who have helped to shape the unfolding story of UCE. In my remaining newsletter offerings, I intend to reflect a bit on what I humbly hope might be a legacy. 

This time, I am thinking about the challenging balance between the personal particular and the mission of the many. 

My observation early in my time with UCE is that this was a congregation founded and sustained by kind, caring, competent, generous individuals, many of whom had formed solid and meaningful interpersonal connections. The motivation to participate had grown for many over decades as friendships, working on common projects that sprang up through the need to raise money, to support emerging social causes, to support members in times of crisis. And to supporting professional ministry- for better, for worse. 

All of that is important beyond measure. And with all great pools of assets come liabilities. Untended, liabilities threaten assets. Some of the liabilities  faced by UCE have resulted in lay leader burn-out, a perception among folks new to the congregation that getting involved is more complicated than it looks, unmanaged personal expectations that lead to disappointment and conflict. All of this is deeply human and certainly not confined to UCE. 

There is a lot of good news here. Over the past 18 months, through good times and hard times, many of you have been willing to engage in conversations and meetings and Sunday services where these issues have been aired and considered. What has emerged is the beginning of a shared understanding that beyond the particular relationships and tasks and even the particular minister, you all are serving a common mission, “To nurture the human spirit for a world made whole.” 

 This is answer to the larger “Why?” in the question, “Why do I hang in when things get hard?” “Why does this conflict need to be resolved instead of being swept under the carpet?” “Why do I need to raise my pledge?” Why do I need to stay on a committee with people who bug me?””Why do I need to provide loving feedback to the minister or the staff when I am concerned about the direction that something is headed”. 

It’s because, in addition to having friends and personal fulfillment, each of you is part of something that has a life of its own that is shaped by all of its parts.  

I am confident that this unnamed season between winter and spring will resolve itself as the cycles that nature ordains. I am also confident that the  you at UCE will sustain your growing momentum to the Shared Ministry that will make your shared Mission live in the world through many more seasons. 

Blessings, all! 

Karen 

Congratulations, UCE! Being with you, even from my perch in the Minnesota north woods, as you voted in large numbers and with great enthusiasm to call Rev Eileen to be you Settled Minister, was truly a magic moment. On February I was moved to tears by your images on my screen as you lighted your covenant candles and symbolically added them to the common flame of your shared ministry.  

And, look. I am still here. This is because the work of the Interim has never been about calling a new minister. It has always been about you, the UCE congregation, you as the keepers of your own religious journeys, you as the makers and livers of your shared Mission. The work of the Interim has always been to strengthen the container that holds these journeys and this Mission, regardless of the particular minister you would, and now have invited into covenant of service and love. 

The invitation has been offered and received and there is some strengthening that is still underway. 

The current project is shoring up the pathways to membership engagement. Here are some of the questions you might consider:  How might the existing structures, the committees and councils and groups and task forces and working groups and covenant groups become more inviting and accessible? How might new members feel more welcomed and longer term members feel freer to move in and out of leadership in a timely manner? How might new groups form and be allowed to end? How might all of the ways to be involved and engaged at UCE be a reflection of your lived Mission and Covenant?  

Your own investment in the answers to these questions may be driven by how you understand your relationship to UCE. In the next few weeks, I will be offering some opportunities for you to share your thoughts and stories about membership engagement at UCE. Stay tuned!  

In the meantime, you are always welcome to contact me by e-mail at kgustafson@ucevanston.org. 

In love and gratitude, 

Karen

Dear ones, 

The Fifth Unitarian Universalist Principle is our covenant to affirm and promote “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large”. 

This principle is utmost in our minds and hearts as the integrity of the time honored system for choosing our nation’s leader is being challenged and tested.   

By contrast, you, the members of UCE, have been engaged in an example of what democracy looks like.  Like the process for choosing a US President, the process for calling a settled minister is imperfect. But when engaged with integrity and good faith, both have the potential for selecting  leaders who will join fully in a shared effort to serve the greater good.  

By all standards, the UCE Ministerial Search has been a process engaged with that kind of integrity and good faith. Your Search Committee was chosen by congregational nomination and vote and represented a diverse cross section of the congregation. Together they spent hundreds of hours laying a strong foundation for gathering your input through survey and focus groups and cottage meetings. These results, your input, were to become the basis for the congregational record to be reviewed by prospective candidates.  

In parallel with this process, you were invited into the work of the Interim. This was to be the work of looking deeply into the habits and systems, the hurts and healings of UCE’s past, of finding the strengths and addressing challenges that would serve as the foundation for moving boldly into the promise of “nurturing the human spirit for a world made whole”. In the fall of 2019 it became clear that this foundational work had not been adequately addressed. The Search Committee committed to an additional year for that to happen because they wanted time for you to claim and offer a fuller story to the next settled minister. 

So here you are. The surveys have been tallied. The hours of recorded conversation and feedback and cottage meetings have been sifted and winnowed. The Congregational Profile has been created and made available for review. The search Committee has with all due diligence reviewed the qualifications and interviewed the Candidate and with the utmost integrity has recommended the call.  

Two steps remain. In the coming week you will have many opportunities to engage one more time, screen to screen, to ask unanswered questions and address lingering concerns.  

The final step in this process is your vote. 

In the democratic process at its best, the vote is the capstone of a process which has invited the full participation of informed voters in the expression of their will made with the full intention to support the outcome. 

This is the privilege and the promise of our faith. 

My personal thanks to the UCE Ministerial Search Committee for their intrepid and unfailing integrity. This is what democracy looks like. 

In unfailing gratitude, 

Karen 

PS – Be assured that the work of the Interim will continue until the end of June when I will take my leave and you will be a congregation with no unfinished business… 

Dear ones,

Next week we will find new ways to join in Thanksgiving. We may also find new reasons to be grateful.

While accounts of this time in history are emerging with threads from many voices, I have found myself curiously wordless as I search for my own voice in this unfolding story. In my place of privilege where I am sheltered and well fed in a place of beauty and peace, from which I can view the real events in the real world on a screen with an off-switch, I can tell myself that I am doing my part by not putting a strain on medical resources and risking pain and grief for my loved ones by avoiding un-due exposure to the Corona Virus.

And so the place I begin to look for an on ramp into the flow of this story is an examination of the assumptions embedded in the language I choose and language I passively accept from others.

I have used the phrase “challenging and uncertain times” to point to the dis-ease that I and others are experiencing in the face of the virus, the racial crisis and the seeming dissolution of democracy as I have known it.

What is occurring to me is that the idea of certainty itself is an illusion that is an artifact of white privileged culture.

Furthermore, I wonder if even the concept of “challenging times” is a reaction to the violation of the conditioned expectation of control through accumulated resources.

The loss of certainty implies to me that certainty is a thing that can be had and therefore can be lost. A lack of certainty and the presence of challenge is a constant in many, many lives. Uncertainty, it would seem, is the steady state of people of all races and colors and creeds who lack accumulated resources denied them by white supremacy.

COVID 19 with its insidious death threat and the increased attention by white people elicited by the murder of George Floyd has not created for these humans a state of uncertainty. It has only increased its magnitude as it adds to the accumulated uncertainty of how to meet the needs of basic survival and human dignity.

It has, in fact, not created the uncertainty that we white people of privilege are experiencing either. Maybe what we are experiencing is unwelcome exposure to all of our denied vulnerability to inevitable uncertainty.

Even in the best of times under the best of circumstances – even those times and circumstances that have been sustained by privilege for decades, there is the specter of unchosen change – death of loved one, sudden explained or unexplainable illness, economic miscalculation, natural disaster, random violence, and even the consequences of unguarded passion and risk that lurk at the edges of our awareness.

It occurs to me that I and other people of privilege are ensconced in an economic system that is based on the production and accumulation of more. This is fueled by the cultural myth that if we have more than we need we can use what we have to protect us from uncertainty. What we label as greed might well be at its base a kind of holding on, a protection against the real and inevitable uncertainty that is part of the human condition. I wonder if generations of this holding on have produced a class of folks who, in spite of our best efforts to manage our earnings and possessions responsibly, have failed to accumulate the kinds of resources that have sustained the disenfranchised for centuries.

Resources like:

• The will to fight for justice – every day.
• The capacity to make do with meager means.
• The capacity to endure unpleasantness while hoping for something bet-ter.
• A clear and present relationship with good enough.
• The kind of risks that happen when there is nothing to lose.

From the safety and protection of this sheltered place, this place of so-cial distance, can we find the words for a different story, one that is not defined by its uncertainty, one that creates space for untapped re-sources.

May this time of solemn gratitude include a a time of deep reflection on the limits of our unearned privilege.

Blessings, all. Stay well. The world needs us.

In love and gratitude,

Karen

For as long as I can remember, I have had a curiosity about the complexity of things. Not just exotic things like works of art or airplanes or chocolate eclair and bone china, but ordinary, everyday things like screws and pencils and traffic signs. When my children were just into their double digit ages, we used to play a game in the car on road trips. We would pick something, like the knobs on the car radio (this was in the days of knobs – look it up) and we would try to name everything that went into the creation and production of that particular object. It started with a perceived need. Cars need radios. There needs to be a way to turn them on, etc. Then we might turn to that particular knob and all of the processes and decisions, designers and workers and decision makers that went into making it and getting it into our particular car. A designer, a design; decisions about color and size and materials and how it fit into the dashboard design. Someone designed and made a machine that would produce that very knob and install it in a factory where workers were employed etc., etc., etc.

I think about that game whenever I hear someone say something akin to, “I HATE the radio knobs on my car dash…” Where, I wonder, did the piece of the process that made that knob become the source of someone’s dissatisfaction? How is it that the outcome of a process so complex and in some way so miraculous become the object of judgment and critical reaction? What complex process has led any of us to the impression that our judgments and our dissatisfaction should somehow become the rallying point for how something is understood?

My interest in such things extends into how I understand my ministry at UCE. For the past year, I have been engaged in looking at the complex and often miraculous processes by which the staff, the elected leadership, the lay leadership and all of the other kinds of stake holders at UCE engage in the process of “making church”. Unlike the production of a radio knob, there is no concrete and single outcome. The moving parts are not, in fact, made of metal and plastic but of hopes and dreams and mission and hundreds and hundreds of human connections and isolated and shared decisions. My job has been to look with you at the ways you organize those parts to fill the needs for which they were intended; to hold up a mirror and to provide and encourage constructive feedback that might make the systems more accessible and inviting and the perceived outcomes more understandable.

In a few weeks, I will be meeting with the Ministerial Search Committee to share my observations. By next week, there will be an updated interim report available on the UCE website detailing the “progress” we have made together in addressing some of the observed challenges and the Interim Tasks and what we will be inviting you to do in the coming months.

In the meantime, I would invite you into the “car game” as you consider your dissatisfactions and judgments as well as your joys and appreciations of anything you perceive as an outcome at UCE…the time of the service, the color of the new tile in the foyer or the choice of hymns or the budget or the process for selection of your next settled minister. If you have not been a designer or a machinist or a line worker in these decisions, try to follow the process back and engage in some real curiosity about the complexity and the miracle of this dynamic and life giving entity that is UCE. Consider the hours and hours of meetings and research and the daily choices, large and small. Miracle, indeed.

I would love to hear from you!

In love and gratitude,

Karen

Dear ones,

As your interim minister I take seriously my charge to help you to identify your strengths and your challenges in ways that will help you to thrive during this time of preparation for your next covenant of settled ministry. I also support the Ministerial Search Committee in presenting a clear and honest profile of the congregation to prospective candidates.

In the weeks since my last message in which I summarized the interim work going forward, I have been invited in a variety of ways into a new urgency of consciousness about white supremacy culture and systemic racism. At the UUA General Assembly the UCE delegates were present at the unveiling of the Report of the UUA Commission on Institutional Change entitled Widening the Circle of Concern. This document is an in depth report on the state of our association of congregations and our Unitarian Universalist faith regarding our understanding of racial justice and systems of oppression. It is a call to self examination and a call to meaningful action.

Clearly this awareness has been underway at UCE as reflected in the leadership of the REAL Team, the participation of a number of members of UCE in Beloved Conversations and classes on racism and the initiative that put the Black Lives Matter sign on the lawn. Now you are being encouraged by your General Assembly delegates and others to go deeper and wider in the cause of dismantling oppression in the many places that it is hard wired into a system that is built on white cultural values.

You will need to be prepared to be in conversation about all of this with anyone interested in assuming the position of Senior Minister at UCE. Among the many efforts to “widen the circle of concern” at UCE, I will be engaging you over the next year in conversations that will help you look at where systemic racism and white supremacy culture has become embedded at UCE. What then might it look like to make more real and visible a fuller embrace of Unitarian Universalist values and principles?

These conversations are beginning in August with elected and lay leaders and staff. They will be suspended in September and October to allow for a full focus on the Congregational Survey and the Cottage Meetings conducted by the Ministerial Search Committee. No doubt these issues will come up in these places as well. In November we will open the conversations again and hope to involve everyone in one way or another.

We will continue to work on other areas of UCE governance and structure as identified in the Interim Report. If you have questions or concerns about any of this, please feel free to contact me by e-mail at kgustafson@ucevanston.org.

In love and gratitude,

Karen