A Message from the UUA – Widening the Pathway to Ministry
A Message from the UUAWidening the Pathway to Ministry
June 12, 2025
Something For the Moment
Ministry Days is just around the corner! We are thrilled to be joined in Baltimore and virtually by almost 600 of you. It isn’t too late to register if you are still planning on joining us.The worship and learning that Ministry Days will offer is finely tuned to our needs as religious leaders in these incredibly trying times. Please join us for learning and growing and inspiration to strengthen your ministries.At Ministry Days we will have time with UUA President Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt and the Executive Officers of the UUA. Please take a moment a submit a question by emailing Janette Lallier.
A Note from UUA President Sofía Betancourt
Beloveds,
From May 20-22, 2025, the UUA convened a Widening the Pathway Stakeholders Meeting at UUA headquarters in Boston. We met to initiate a renewed, long-term effort toward removing barriers and increasing equity in UU ministerial formation and credentialing. We brought together a wide range of stakeholders including UUA leaders, seminary presidents and professors, religious professionals, lay leaders, and current seminarians and ministers. The gathering served as a foundational moment to reflect, assess, and begin to chart a course for institutional transformation.
Please note this was a preliminary meeting to ensure that the work of Widening the Pathway begins in grounded relationships with a wide range of stakeholders, including a wide range of religious professionals who are impacted by the ministerial formation process and the credentialing systems of the UUA. The notes attached to this message are a summary of some of what was raised in the meeting, not a list of decisions nor a strategic approach for the work. Those decisions will require greater engagement, continued connection, and invitation into the process, and significantly more time.
Once again, we are just starting this work, and it will take some time. I am writing in the spirit of transparency to share information and to make some preliminary value commitments for the work going forward. We will not make significant changes to the credentialing process people are already in without multiple options and ample advance notice. We commit to making spaces for honest feedback without retribution. We will continue to offer updates along the way.
Beloveds, this is work called for by our Commission on Institutional Change and requested by many UU leaders over the years. This report is not confidential, and we would ask for participants who were in this initial meeting to share it
with their networks as appropriate.
Faithfully,
Sofia Betancourt
President, Unitarian Universalist Association
A Note from UUA Ministerial Credentialing Director, Darrick Jackson
Widening the Pathway Gathering Reflection
I entered the Widening the Pathway to Ministry Gathering with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I was excited that we were finally having this conversation on a broader scale. Rarely, if ever, have I been in a space where stakeholders have been invited at the beginning of a conversation, rather than at the end to ratify what has already been decided. There was no expected outcome going in. This was truly a time for sharing, dreaming, and leaning into possibility. It was also a time of naming the difficulties, struggles, and points of inaccessibility in our process. As well as our assumptions, expectations, and non-negotiables around ministry and religious professional leadership.
My trepidation was that a bunch of ideas would be dropped in my lap with an unreasonable timetable to figure out how to implement them. That happens often in our UU spaces. I am glad that this was a different type of convening, which held both the realities and the dreaming. What I found in this space were partners in the work of transformation.
All 40 of us in the room were committed to creating a system that is more equitable, accessible, and grounded in integrity. It was a joy to be in that space.
We didn’t come to any decisions at this meeting. We did a lot of dreaming and laid the foundation for future work. We have identified several actions that we can take in the near future to address concerns within the system. Next is to build the scaffolding to sustain the process and develop the framework for something new. I look forward to how we build upon this gathering over the next few years and transform our credentialing process.
Blessings,
Darrick Jackson
Ministerial Credentialing Director
