August 29. 2025

Something For the Moment 

Integrating Your Sabbatical: Join us on Wed., September 3 at  6:30-8pm ET / 5:30-7pm CT / 4:30-6pm MT / 3:30-5pm PT. After a sabbatical, it’s easy to get swept back up in the work of ministry, and our sabbatical experiences can seem like a distant memory. Whether you are coming to the end of a sabbatical, or returned from your sabbatical months ago, you are invited to take a brief time out to remember and integrate the fruits, challenges and unanswered questions from your sabbatical. 
 

Support Groups for Immigrant Ministers Beginning in September: In recent months, we have received a number of requests for support from members of the UUMA whose citizenship status reflects their history of immigration. We are pleased to announce that we will be experimenting with offering facilitated support groups for immigrant members of the UUMA beginning in September with UUMA member Rev. Blanca Rodriguez. More information and link to indicate your availability can be found here. 
 

Opportunities in Good Offices: Are you interested in opportunities for supporting our community of collegial care? We are looking for experienced ministers who would like to become trained as Good Offices people. In particular, we are currently seeking to expand our Good Offices Contract/Call Negotiation Support Team, our Good Offices Right Relationship Team and our roster of Dedicated Good Offices People. Please click on the links to learn more and/or complete the application. Please reach out to Melissa Carvill Ziemer with any questions or if you’d like a discernment conversation about becoming a Good Offices person.

Something for the Journey

Rev. Dr. Robin Tanner, President UUMA Board of Trustees 

Dear Colleagues,

I write these words just after boarding a train for Washington D.C. to join our colleague and UUMA Treasurer, Rev. Carol Thomas Cissel, to host our Washington D.C., Maryland, and northern Virginia colleagues during the ongoing occupation by the National Guard. We are in a rapidly shifting and frightening time in our country’s history. While it is true that this moment is not entirely unique, it is also true that most of us have not experienced fascism in the United States. 

This past summer I traveled quite a bit to conferences and to be with faith leaders in local struggles for freedom, including in Oak Flat, Arizona where the Apache Stronghold are defending their sacred land from a copper mining company. Again and again, I heard our colleagues across ministries and faiths naming a yearning for a new way to move together at this moment – a longing for spiritual grounding, connectedness, and vision. Since experiencing the San Carlos Apache coming of age ceremony for young women, the sunrise ceremony, I am wondering about how our faith might drink more deeply from the older wells. Knowing we must both be strategic and agile, that we must inhabit generational, pluralistic, and emerging wisdom, your UUMA Board is establishing a strategic planning partners group. I am reminded of the phrase from the National Union of the Homeless, “you only get what you are organized to take.”  Of course, organizing doesn’t guarantee transformation, but it is a start. Read about this groups charge below.

This process will be both forward thinking, iterative, and include immediate advocacy. We are committed to partnering with you and other key stakeholders to ensure a sustainable and liberating ministry. We do so in the context of our covenant and in recognition that across institutions we share values that can help us companion one another from here to a more grounded, freer, and sustainable future.

As the fall emerges with so much uncertainty and the usual pace of our ministries, please know that you are not alone, nor forgotten. Across our ministries, we are finding each other, and together, I do believe we can embody our values and longing for a new, yet old way.

With you on that journey,
Robin

Charge to the Strategic Partners Working Group

To the end of addressing the challenges in ministry today, we have charged a new Strategic Partners Working Group to collaborate with the UUMA Board on four goals:

• Work to ensure UU ministry is physically, emotionally, spiritually, and financially sustainable for more UUMA members especially those who have disabilities, are BIPOC, are LGBTQ+, are experiencing financial hardship, and/or a combination of these identities.

• Advocate for UUMA members, particularly in congregational settings, to increase trust in and fair treatment by UUA Congregational Life Staff, UUA Ministries and Faith Development Department Staff (including Transitions Staff), the MFC and its Review Team, and congregations. 

• With integrity to the ministry and grounded in our commitment to accountability, partner with the UUA, the MFC, and other religious professional organizations to widen the path to ministry.

• Develop Board policies, practices, and processes that increase our collegial care and strengthen our abilities to engage in trauma-informed ministries with one another, with Exec/Staff, with UUMA members, and with responses to harm and efforts toward repair.

Something Extra

• Saplings – Trans Youth (13–18 or in high school)
• Sycamores – Trans Adults (18+)
• Sequoias – Adult caregivers/parents of trans youth (attending without children)
• Sequoias Jr. – Adult caregivers/parents attending with trans children