On Saturday, January 10, about 14 people of the UU Church of Cortland gathered at the Interfaith Center on campus to ponder the vision, mission, values, and raison d’etre (reason for being) of our church organization. Julie Ganson was our fearless leader. The Board President,  at least 3 other Board members, and our Minister were among those gathered. As was I, the church webmaster, and the following are my opinions and observations, not any kind of official message!

We considered the strengths of the UU Church of Cortland, which include our people, our building, our history, and our values. We considered our challenges, including our building and our need for people – including paid staff – and therefore our need for money! Then we tried to create a vision of what we want for our church. Now, if you know anything about this whole “visioning/mission/goals thing”, you know that it is easy to slip into a buzzword bingo mindset, and come out with, for example, a mission statement that sounds nice but doesn’t do anyone much good over time. Julie Ganson was great at pushing us to make this method produce valuable, concrete results. Part of how she did that was by NOT insisting that we follow a time-limited process, but by letting us work through our thoughts and differences even though that takes time. As a result, we – the folks who were there – have a good sense of our strengths and weaknesses, and what is important to members and friends of the congregation, even though we did not come out of this one-day retreat with tidy statements of our “vision, mission, and goals”. Instead, we have many thoughts captured on large sheets of paper, and a determination to use those thoughts to:

• Help the Pledge Committee share elements of our vision with those who will be asked to support the church financially.
• Help the Board understand the needs and wants of our members and friends.
• Provide a base on which the congregation can build through future retreats, forums, or meetings, in order to crystallize our vision and mission, after which the Board will create specific goals to accomplish, with specific plans and timelines.

Our job as Board, members, and friends will be to ensure that this process is followed through, so that we can become the busy, active, safe, and well-known community within our region that we want to be, without stressing, pressuring, or burning out the people we have.

Let it be!

—Julia Schult