Important Message from The Board of Trustees

Dear UCE Members and Friends:

By now you will have seen Rev. Greg Stewart’s announcement about his resignation. I am writing to let you know that the Board is very grateful for all of Greg’s work for our community. Greg is a good listener and he has provided us with many insights about our congregation’s strengths and weaknesses. He has met with us and helped us reflect on ourselves–through exercises like the Scrapbook and the Decades service. We wish Greg the very best as he and Stillman move on to their next step. We will celebrate his many gifts to us at the service on June 9th-which will be his last at UCE.

The board is happy to announce that we have a plan for the next church year. Rev. Eileen Wiviott will serve as our Acting Senior Minister for the 2019-2020 year. We are so thankful that she has agreed to serve us in this capacity.

We are also hiring a new, part-time interim minister. Her name is Rev. Karen Gustafson and some of you met her at the No Agenda meeting in April. We will let you know more about this whole plan very soon, but for now, here are the high points: Rev. Gustafson will join us for a retreat in August and then officially be here 11 days per month from September through May. We believe she is an excellent choice to lead us through the interim work that our congregation needs to accomplish. She also will preach two sermons per month during the nine months she is with us.

Greg shared his news with us on late Wednesday last week.

That gave us only 3 days to prepare news of it for the Annual Meeting. We, as a Board, decided that since we had the makings of a plan-we would rather work intensively on that plan and have it complete before we presented it to you. We are sorry that the timing worked out this way—but we have done our best. We needed to put in significant time making phone calls and attending Zoom meetings in order to present a complete plan to you today. We hope you understand the complexity of this situation and why we felt we had to share it now, instead of at the Annual Meeting.

For detail about the financial aspects of this plan, please

click here. We will hold two Q&A sessions about Greg’s leaving and the new plan. Please come to one of these to learn more:

Sunday, May 26th- immediately after the 10:00 am service (meet in the Sanctuary)

Wednesday, May 29th – 7:30pm

We are genuinely excited about this new team of ministers who will help us navigate the year ahead-we can do amazing things together.

Sincerely,

Jeanne Kerl

President, Board of Trustees