by Karin Reinhold
First of all, thank you all for your trust in me and the newly elected Board members. It is an honor to serve our beautiful community in this capacity and now as president of the Board.
You might have heard me this past month, when I’ve been platform assistant, asking the congregation to join me reciting a new version of the mission statement that the Prosperity Committee had developed. Developing vision, mission and values statements for our church was one of the results of the visioning process we did last year. The idea behind such statements is to reflect, in a concise manner, what we are all about and what we aspire to be. They have become popular across all types of organizations because they are powerful tools that provide the basis and guidance for the work of the organization.
Please see Sam’s House article “Mission, Vision, and Welcome Home…Clarifying Who We Are”, where you can see the proposed vision and mission statements for Unity Church in Albany and the new “Welcome Home!” invitation (which appears in every Sunday Bulletin) that the Prosperity Committee has discerned.
We have not developed the statement of values because we want the congregation to be more involved in their discernment. We intend to do a workshop to discern the adoption of the proposed mission and vision statements as well as discern the statement of values at a later time. In the meantime, we ask that you hold the proposed vision and mission statements in your heart, to feel them and see if they are statements we would jointly like to adopt for our church.
I feel the need to add that we continue to be a Christ based church, we continue to be the same Unity Church “teaching the effective daily application of the principles of Truth taught and exemplified by Jesus Christ”, we continue to be guided by Unity’s Five Principles of Truths. We simply feel that replacing the word “the Christ” with “the Divine” in the mission statement that is read every Sunday, makes it easier for newcomers, and is easier to embrace by persons that come to Unity from other faiths.
The essence of the message is the same. We will continue to invite the expansion of understanding of what the Christ consciousness is and what it means to recognize the Christ in others, through the teachings in Sunday services and the classes we offer. At the same time, we are also expanding the mission to be more inclusive, no longer human centric, now recognizing the Divine in everything, human, animal, plant and inanimate.
I hope you like the proposed changes. Whether you do or you don’t, we truly welcome your feedback on how they resonate within you. Please let us know what you think.
In Service, Love & Light,
Karin Reinhold