Adult Faith Formation

​What is the path to spiritual growth and development? Is it possible to find a way to develop a more loving and effective life? How does antiracist and multicultural work fit into that journey? While in our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, it’s impossible to offer one straight path that can work for everyone, we can offer a landscape to explore, hopefully calibrating your compass to navigate between the offerings, spiraling back when needed to deepen into your next steps. This page will help you explore the landscape of the spiritual life within, among, and beyond, and find the next opportunity for where you are in that landscape. 

WITHIN

Develop a personal spiritual practice that helps you find and keep your balance.

This is the foundational work of the religious and spiritual life. Through this work within, you develop a grounded, centered presence that will support and sustain you in even the most difficult life circumstances and move your life toward more love and justice.
 
Regular, ideally daily, spiritual practice helps you:

• Know the experience of the holy.
• Lament, confess, and develop humility.
• Respond creatively to life’s circumstances.
• Remain with discomfort, particularly in our anti-racism work for equity and inclusion.
• See beauty all around you.

 
We hope you enter into any of our congregational activities with the intention to find spiritual practice, and we would particularly recommend the following opportunities:

• Worship. As our primary spiritual experience together, regular attendance at worship helps you:
  • Develop a communal spiritual practice.
  • Hear from a variety of voices about the gifts and challenges of the spiritual life.
  • Explore a variety of ways to receive those gifts and rise to those challenges.
• Wellspring, a year-long program of spiritual deepening that meets twice a month, helps you:
  • Try out a number of practices with the support of and accountability to a community of fellow seekers.
  • Ground spiritual practice in the theology and wisdom offered from the six sources of our Unitarian Universalist living tradition.
• Chalice Circles, a year-long program to deepen your connection to the monthly worship themes, helps you:
  • Deepen your spiritual repertoire
  • Expand your set of spiritual resources
• One-on-ones with the ministers can help you:
  • Work through knotty spiritual issues.
  • Find appropriate spiritual practice.
  • Find or reframe your spiritual intentions.
• Spiritual direction. Spiritual companionship from someone highly trained in listening to what’s moving in your life can help you find focus and direction for your spiritual growth.
• Teaching children’s Religious Education (RE) can help you:
  • Simplify the gifts of spiritual practice and growth as you communicate them to children.
  • Solidify your own understanding of those gifts.

• Spiritual development classes (including Working Toward Prayer, Death and Dying, End-of-Life Conversations, and Thresholds). Targeting a particular aspect of spiritual growth and development, these classes help you spend focused time developing practice to meet particular needs.

AMONG

Develop the skills of small group intimacy that let you go deep quickly with strangers.

This is the foundational work to build religious and spiritual community. Through this work among, you bring your spiritually grounded presence to your interactions with others, learning how to create right relationship across all lines of difference.
 
Regular attention to the quality of relationships among asks you to:

• Be vulnerable with others, listening well and being honest with them about your own life.
• Be present to others without fixing, saving, advising, or setting each other straight.
• Adjust your interactions with people who have identities different than your own to make enriching multicultural connection possible.

 
Again, we encourage people to approach all their church activities with the intention to build these skills, and the following opportunities are particularly designed to help you with that work:

• Wellspring (the year-long class) and Chalice Circles. The facilitated interactions in these classes hold space for the skills of small group intimacy to grow.
• Fellowship Groups. Participants in our Fellowship Groups have made commitments to each other that help build these skills as participants connect.
• Intercultural Developmental Inventory (IDI) and Intercultural Development Plan (IDP). This inventory and the development you do through the related plan will help you:
  • Adjust your interactions with people who hold different identities from you so that deeper, multicultural connection is possible.
  • Know yourself and your culture and how it impacts your interactions with people who hold different identities from you.
  • Right-size the presence of white dominant culture characteristics (Tema Okun)
• Anti-Racism Literacy Partners creates groups of people who explore educational anti-racism resources together. Participation helps you understand multicultural perspectives on the antiracist challenges and opportunities present today.
• Pilgrimage. Traveling with others to sites of Unitarian heritage and tradition (Boston, Transylvania) or to the places our partner organizations do their work (Mano a Mano in Bolivia, Jim Bear Jacobs in Minneapolis) develops your ability to see with fresh eyes what the practice of our faith could look like.  

BEYOND

Let the compassion that rises from doing your work within and among lead you to bless the world.

Compassion can’t help but rise from building a personal spiritual practice and going deep quickly with strangers. At Unity Church, we want to create ways for that compassion to act in the world. Where are our values most needed? How can we, as individuals and as a church community, best bless the world?
 
Although you can, of course, bless the world without working through Unity Church, we offer several opportunities to bring your values to bear in the world as well:

• Community Outreach Ministry Teams
  • Find the intersections with individuals and organizations that magnify your personal efforts and make them more fruitful.
  • Engage in volunteering as prophetic ministry.
  • Apply what you’ve learned about engaging across difference to create mutual relationships of trust and accountability in the work to heal our world, particularly racial healing.
• Welcome Teams
  • Shape the practical, relational, and symbolic forms of welcome in Unity’s culture to provide the welcome each current and potential congregant needs to receive.
• Worship Associates
  • Help craft the worship experience and share your own spiritual journey as an invitation to others to deepen their own.
• Teaching Associates, Chalice Circle Facilitators, Wellspring Class Facilitators
  • Use what you’ve learned about your Unitarian Universalist faith identity, within, among, and beyond, to help others shape their own.
• Pastoral Care Associates
  • Bring your grounded presence to others in need of spiritual companionship in challenging times.
• Board of Trustees
  • Engage in faithful leadership of the church institution into the future that calls to it.
  • Cultivate relationships of accountability with the greater community to better understand the difference the church is meant to make in people’s lives.