Beyond Welcome: Building Communities of Love (Linnea Nelson, ed.) includes 20 short essays about the prospects for building community in Unitarian Universalist congregations. The book needed to become a discussion series for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tallahassee, and so it has. Rev. Holly Brown and Robin Gray have built five sessions for us all to share.

The essays are from Ministers, Directors of Religious Education, and lay leaders across the denomination. Some of the essays engage the reader with questions that Unitarian Universalists have already been asking each other. What does belonging mean? Who can belong to our congregation? How do we engage youth? How do we define family and serve the needs of all families? How can we make our worship more inclusive? As we engage each other in considering those questions, and more, we will develop along the path of becoming an ever more inclusive, multicultural, anti-racist, anti-oppressive congregation. 

Book Orders: Even though the discussions won’t begin until early May, you might want to order your copy of Beyond Welcome: Building Communities of Love now. It is available from the UUA Bookstore in paperback (https://www.uuabookstore.org/Beyond-Welcome-P19172.aspx). You should expect to wait 10 days for it to arrive. It is also available immediately as an ebook from Amazon. Sadly, it is not available as an audio book, but Text to Speech is enabled on the ebook. You should explore your device/app capability for Text to Speech before relying on this option. Be on the lookout for session dates and registration information.