By Tom Stites
Second of two articles
UU churches that have seen significant growth in recent years tend to have experimented with and changed their approaches to Sunday worship. This trend became clear through conversations with ministers of similar-sized UU churches in our region that members of the FRS Transition Team visited during the last church year.
Further research, led by team member Forrest Speck, showed that this trend was true of UU congregations nationally – and that the familiar business principle of “change or die” also applies to churches.
“The field visits were wonderful,” said Jane Tuohy, chair of the eight-member Transition Team. “We’d done a lot of research and on the visits we saw what we’d researched being lived out.” The churches visited – in Portsmouth, N.H., and Bedford, Needham and North Andover, Mass. – were selected because, like FRS, they are historic congregations, and they have grappled with challenges similar to those FRS is facing. Most important, the team’s report said, these congregations have been growing despite the challenges.
FRS visitors to the other churches – members of the Transition Team as well as John Mercer, chair of the Search Committee that will select a candidate to be our new settled minister a year from now – heard about experiments in creating ways to make services more interactive and in diversifying the music offered during worship.
