August Message from Tyler - Annual Gathering
You may have noticed the announced schedule for this year’s Annual Gathering looks a little different. I’m super excited about what the planning team is putting together, but I also know the schedule has caused some confusion.
Our hope is that everyone will participate in both the onsite weekend at the Wild Horse, as well as in the online meeting on October 5th. All our time during Annual Gathering -- both the time onsite and the time online -- will be spent doing the business of the conference, it’s just that some of the business will happen the following weekend on Zoom.
In year’s past, one of the complaints we’ve heard is that Annual Gathering didn’t have enough time to really get to know one another. Sometimes deliberations seemed to be cut short because of time, and often deeper conversations didn’t happen at all because we didn’t have the space in the schedule. We wondered if there was a way to expand the length of Annual Gathering to allow for more-expansive conversations.
During the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about Zoom and the possibilities that technology provides, which led to the suggestion that we might add some Zoom meetings to the Annual Gathering schedule. We did that this year. However, we’ve also learned that there are some conversations that go better when you’re breathing the same air, and some conversations that work well in a large-Zoom format, so the planning team asked Moderator Lea Mathieu to work with them to make sure the business that needs to happen onsite happens onsite and the business that works well on Zoom can happen on Zoom. Finally, we’re hoping that by scheduling the online portion of the meeting after an onsite meeting, we’ll feel closer to one another in the Zoom room having broken bread together in the conference room.
This is an experiment, so there will be hiccups. One I’ve already heard about -- if your delegates can’t attend both the online and onsite meetings, because they didn’t know about the expanded schedule until too late, that’s okay. Please ask them to attend what they can. Your church can also designate an alternate lay delegate to attend the meeting on behalf of a lay delegate who can’t attend the onsite or online session. Clergy, as always, please attend as much of the Annual Gathering as you can.
I also wanted to say a word about workshops. Due to the schedule requirements of this year’s Annual Gathering, the planning team asked that workshops happen on Zoom. The delightful surprise is that this has already expanded our thinking about what workshops could look like.
The Immigrant Welcoming Churches were hoping to have a workshop at Annual Gathering about our trip to Brownsville. Instead, we’ve decided to hold a Zoom meeting with the Border Delegation while they are at the border, on the evening of Sunday, September 15th. That then allowed us to loop in our National UCC Staff, who will be able to join over Zoom.
The Committee on Ministry wanted to have a workshop on the new Compensation Guidelines and on creative compensation ideas for small and rural churches. This has led to them planning two Zoom meetings, hopefully in October. It’s also meant that the Creative Compensations workshop will be joined by the National UCC Staff tasked with supporting small and rural churches, because they’ll Zoom in from Cleveland!
Finally, Margaret Marcuson, who we were hoping would lead our Boundary Training for clergy a third time, said she couldn’t be at our onsite meeting, so we decided to offer Boundary Training in an online format this year. That will happen October 29th, and will hopefully make Boundary Training more accessible for clergy who have struggled to get to onsite trainings.
Look for more details on all of these exciting opportunities soon, and please put a placeholder on your calendars now.
We live in interesting times. Things are changing quickly, and sometimes schedules come together later than we want. Thank you for your flexibility as we try meet the needs of a changing world. And, as always, thank you for being the church for this time and this place.
Blessings,
Tyler
