Thematic Ministry 2024-2025
Each monthly theme plays a part in the development of a well-grounded religious and spiritual life. These topics are selected so that, cumulatively, month after month, year after year, spiritual understanding matures and develops, lending greater meaning and depth to all aspects of our congregational life (and, indeed, our lives apart from our congregation).
The themes provide us with a set of common stories and ideas that become elements of our ongoing community conversation. Be warned: Seriously engaging these themes significantly risks transforming your life!
PURPOSE
To engage and empower First Unitarian Church of Des Moines and its members to think theologically and live our ministry and calling at home and in the wider world — thereby also strengthening the Unitarian Universalist network of congregations so engaged and empowered.
THE BASICS
The monthly theme is the focus of church life and programming across the lifespan.
Each theme offers language, symbols and metaphors on the theme. The congregation is offered multiple ways to engage the themes through worship, classes, small groups, newsletter articles, spiritual homework, and at-home family practices.
IMPORTANCE
- Religious Competence. Explorations of the monthly themes helps UUs develop a common language of faith, competency in the liberal theology, and liberal religious resources for dealing with tough times loss, betrayal, addiction, evil, tragedies and personal crises. We will all face such times, and it’s better to develop the coping resources before we are in the midst of them.
- Integrating Worship, RE, and Small Groups. Coordination between the Sunday school programming for children and what is being discussed by the adults in worship and small groups enhances community building and intergenerational religious learning.
HOW TO TAKE PART
- Attend the service on the first Sunday of each month. Of course, we encourage attendance at every service, but on the first Sunday of the month (and sometimes on subsequent Sundays) the minister’s sermon will explore the theme, and the story for all ages that day will introduce the theme for our children and youth.
- Take up a journaling practice. (If you don’t already have a journaling practice, to get started try an internet search for “how to journal.”) Your journal allows you to reflect in various ways – for instance, we recommend beginning each daily entry with gratitudes: listing three unique things that happened in the previous 24 hours for which you are grateful. Then, on some days each month, reflect on the monthly theme.
- Read the issue of Connecting, our in-house monthly journal. Connecting explores ideas related to the theme. Each issue includes: prompts for your daily journaling, particularly a list of quotations on the theme to consider as part of a daily journaling or meditation practice; a book list of suggested further reading, including suggested children’s books for parents to share and discuss with children.
- Sign up for and attend your monthly Connection Circle. These small groups afford the opportunity to explore through sharing and discussion with others what the theme means – and what it might come to mean – in your life.
- Other church programming, such as our affinity groups or theological-identity groups, may also choose to orient their meetings to touch upon aspects of the monthly theme from their diverse perspectives.
CONNECTION CIRCLES
Our small groups afford a chance to develop and deepen connections with others while developing your understanding of the month’s topic.
Click HERE to view the connection circle packets and sign up for a group.
OUR THEMES FOR 2024-2025
September: Radical Hospitality
How to be welcoming to all aspects of ourselves and to others.
October: Fear
We all have the voice of fear. How do we welcome its wisdom without letting it carry us away?
November: Reason
We so often imagine that “reason” means “thinking like me.” How do we recognize our own irrationality – while also appreciating the rich emotions which may sometimes drive it?
December: Awe & Wonder
Exploring deep joys that are beyond reason.
January: Vow
Discerning what direction to commit your life (whether or not you ever get very far in that direction).
February: Borders & Boundaries
It’s important to have good personal boundaries, and to be self-defined. It’s also important to find ways across the borders that may separate us.
March: Dignity
If our dignity is inherent in all of us (as our first principles says), we can never lose it. So what does it mean to live with more dignity? With more awareness of others’ dignity?
April: Caring
What and who do we care about? What and who are calling us to care about them more or better? What could we care about less?
May: Beauty
How does awareness of beauty (in nature, in art, in animal, including human, form and movement) matter? What is the spiritual function of a capacity to perceive beauty?
June: Community
How can strengthening community connection facilitate spiritual growth? How can spiritual growth facilitate stronger community connection?
