You may have seen various posts on our MidAmericaUU website, and on the Heartland, Prairie Star and Central Midwest websites on regionalization. Much of that important news has been focused on the impact on governance for our respective three districts. At our most recent MidAmerica staff retreat this last December, we had a shared “aha,” that we should start a series on the “adaptive possibilities” that we can realize together due to regionalization.

Let’s begin with some good news. A few years back Dori Davenport Thexton, Phil Lund, and myself began to have a conversation about how hard it was to sustain the viability of offering Renaissance Modules for our respective three districts. Despite the challenges, we shared, and continue to share, a conviction that offering meaningful and worthwhile continuing education opportunities for religious professionals, and seminarians, who want to learn more about the Philosophy of Religious Education, Teacher Development, Administration of RE programs, and UU Curriculum Planning, Ministry with Youth, Multicultural Religious Education, Worship for All Ages, is something that we want to maintain and sustain.

As I look up and out to our immediate horizon, I begin to imagine what possibilities lie before us in Unitarian Universalist faith formation. Let’s assume that we are mapping out a course together. If we were conducting a MapQuest search, our driving directions would start with the address of where we are today. Our location in the present is that we have a thousand plus congregations who endeavor to provide lifelong religious education, largely in Sunday morning, age graded, classrooms. There are wondrous examples of the successes of many of those Sunday morning experiences….preschoolers engaged in Spirit Play (a Montessori model); children, youth, and adults immersed in workshop studios to experience a central value, such as the “Golden rule,” in drama, poetry, music, etc…., (the Rotation Model). This is important, I am not saying that there aren’t wonderful experiences of Sunday morning religious education taking place, and that should continue taking place, but here is the part when we get back to our driving directions. If our end location is the beloved community we say that we are aiming for, and if our end sight is achieved, in part, by growing our faith and raising lifelong Unitarian Universalists, THEN we must think beyond bricks and mortar experiences.