#228 | Kara Stebbins | Emphasize Freedom of Belief

Submission 228
Kara Stebbins
UU Fellowship of Madison County (Richmond, KY) 3726

What is your suggestion or idea?

“Purposes: foster freedom of belief and support actions of love”

C-2.1. Purposes. The Unitarian Universalist Association will devote its resources to and use its organizational powers for religious, educational, and humanitarian purposes. Its primary purposes are to assist congregations in their vital ministries, to support and train leaders both lay and professional, to foster lifelong faith formation spiritual growth, to heal to understand and work to heal historic injustices, and to advance our Unitarian Universalist values in the world.

The purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association is to actively engage fosters freedom of belief, and supports its members in the transformation of the world through liberating Love. to transform their beliefs into loving actions.

What is the reason for your amendment idea?

It is important to our congregation to emphasize freedom of belief, to reduce religious language, to reduce use of the word “love” (or at least define it more specifically as action, aka “deeds not creeds”), and to reduce the impression that we are an activist organization able to solve all of the world’s problems. We also want to emphasize the need “to understand” before we can hope “to work toward healing.”On a more technical note, in the second sentence we are trying to make the verbs consistent: “to understand and work to heal” seems more like the other verbs “to assist” and “to advance;” and we added “to” to the verb “support,” since all of the other verbs use the “to” form. Finally, we tried to reduce the number of times the word “purpose” is repeated.

Have you discussed this idea with your congregation or other UUs?

Our Fellowship had a democratic approach to the Amendment process. While a straw poll indicated a slim majority would prefer to keep Article II as it is, the other votes indicated we should try to come up with Amendments that could conceivably change some ““no”” votes to ““yes.”” We began writing this Amendment in response to input from the Fellowship during two Sunday Services. We later word-smithed a suggested Amendment with our weekly zoom group. Finally, the full Fellowship had an opportunity to review this written Amendment. No objections were voiced.

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