Follen’s Welcoming Congregation Committee warmly invites you to this season’s soup and film series! The series will begin on Wednesday, February 24th, in the Anne Smith Room. We’ll share soup at 6:30 and the film will start at approximately 7:00, with discussion to follow. February’s film will be Preacher’s Sons, a moving documentary about an extraordinary family.
Follen Church voted to become a Welcoming Congregation in 1997 but the decision to be a Welcoming Congregation is made continually through the everyday decisions we make, the actions we take, and the interactions we have in our congregational life.
The UUA defines a Welcoming Congregation as focusing on inclusion of gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual people, though their workshop curriculum also addresses other kinds of privilege and marginalization. At Follen Church, we embrace both the specific work related to GLBT concerns, as defined by the UUA website (see below), and the broader work of making our congregation a place where everyone feels acknowledged and affirmed. In our community, which includes GBLT people as well as heterosexual allies, we recognize that the work of becoming fully welcoming is ongoing work. It can be finished only when there is no new possibility for learning and enhancing our deep recognition of and support for people who are different from ourselves – in other words, it is a lifelong process.
The Welcoming Congregation Committee at Follen sees its mission not as limited to offering topical programs (like the film series we ran last year) but as integrating its work with the work of all aspects of congregational life. For example, we include information about the Welcoming Congregation in our “New UU” program and we participate in the annual Pride Parade in Boston and other community events, such as the demonstration of support for the Watertown UU Church, which had its rainbow flag burned this past summer.
Questions, ideas, concerns? Would you like to join the committee? Contact co-chairs Maggie Herzig 781-862-4795 or Rachel Hyde 781-643-4354.
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Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those who find it.
