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We have so much to be excited about this month, with a full week to get to know Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair, and then coming together for a congregational meeting to vote on calling him as our senior minister. Everyone is encouraged to attend the events during candidating week, April 14-21, and to share stories about your life at Unity Church, hear stories about Rev. Oscar’s ministry and envision us building our congregation’s future together.
For many months, the board has been thinking deeply about how to best structure the meeting and prepare us for the vote. Louise Livesay-Al, Chair of Unity’s Board of Trustees, spent some time talking with another Unitarian Universalist congregational president who recently supported a congregational call for their minister. Louise found some aspects of that meeting worth sharing as we prepare for our vote. In leading up to the meeting on April 21, the board and the Executive Team have been thinking about how to set up the meeting differently so that the feel of the meeting is more in line with our proposed congregational covenant and supports us with the charge to the congregation developed for the search. That is what we want to talk about in this Board Walk and Talk.
To help our meeting align with our charge and proposed covenant, we want to share a few highlights:
- Practice the proposed congregational covenant and see how it works, before voting on its possible adoption at a future meeting.
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Take time at the beginning of the meeting to ground ourselves in a powerful guiding question and share in small groups: What is the story about Unity Church that most needs telling today, and has the power to call us into our future?
- Take up a motion to limit the discussion portion of the meeting to 30 minutes, with the option of extending it an additional 30 minutes by majority vote, for a maximum of one hour of discussion time on the motion to call the candidate. This is to help us manage our meeting time, to be considerate of people’s time constraints, and to prioritize what most needs to be expressed within the two minutes allotted each speaker.
- And as we learned from Rev. Terasa Cooley’s workshop on conflict in early February, we will breathe and sing together to help us manage our anxieties and emotions and help us continue to feel connected, despite our possible differences of opinion.
Between now and the congregational meeting, you will be listening, learning and pondering about how you will vote. What we have learned since our last congregational vote to call a minister is that the question before us is not a matter of whether this person is going to meet each of our individual needs. Rather, the question before us is whether we believe that we as a congregation, in partnership with this candidate, can move closer to Unity’s Ends and make progress towards the Beloved Community we seek to make real. As voting members, we have an obligation to actively participate in candidating week so that we can confidently answer this question and vote to call Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair as our senior minister.
Even though we will be casting a ballot of “yes” or “no,” it may be helpful to consider our vote along a continuum. The congregation president with whom Louise spoke shared how they used a “gradients of agreement” scale to provide members with another tool in thinking about the vote: “It enables members of a group to express their support for the proposal in degrees, along a continuum” so people don’t feel trapped in a binary yes/no decision. This graphic is taken from the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making, by Sam Kaner.
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