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Meet the Moment—a shared framework of resources, tools, and processes for Unitarian Universalists to respond to the present moment with faithful, value-driven action—is moving from theory into reality. Piloted by Unitarian Universalist Association staff in 2024 and rolled out to the public at General Assembly 2025, Meet the Moment is being used in congregations to answer challenging questions, adapt to a changing world, and discover opportunities for growth.
UU World spoke with Rev. Rachel Lonberg, Minister of People’s Church of Kalamazoo, Michigan, to learn about her early experiences with Meet the Moment and how the framework can be of use to congregations everywhere. Working with her church board, as well as a local interfaith coalition, Lonberg has turned to Meet the Moment strategies for two activities, narrative strategy and asset mapping, that have helped her community live out their mission.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
- Q: What service work has your church been doing, and how has Meet the Moment become part of it?
People’s Church, which is my congregation, has a very long history of being of service to the whole community. That’s why we changed our name [from First Unitarian] in the 1890s, with the vision of being a church for all people in the community.
Rev. Rachel Lonberg, Minister of People’s Church of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
We’ve been doing a lot of different work, and we’re deeply involved in refugee resettlement. We’ve done fundraising to meet the needs of refugees whose resources were cut off. And we are facilitating a lot of the mutual aid work in our community through what we’ve called the “Resistance & Resilience Fund” that is helping undocumented folks, trans folks, victims of human trafficking, and others who have financial needs.
I got connected with Meet the Moment when I was in Albuquerque [New Mexico] for a UUMA [Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association] conference. And over the last few months we have found it incredibly helpful, especially the framing questions it offers.
With my church’s board, and with an interfaith coalition of about twenty congregations, we have worked on asset mapping and narrative strategy. The asset mapping has resulted in things like helping the Lutherans, whose church is three blocks from the LGBTQ community center in town, learn that the LGBTQ community center needs clothes—and the Lutheran church has a clothes closet.
We’re also using Meet the Moment resources to try and roll out a new narrative for our town, which is that “Americans are good neighbors.”
- Q: How did Meet the Moment become a catalyst for change?
At the training [at the UUMA Institute] that I attended, they gave us this narrative strategy worksheet and taught us how to do it. And I literally made photocopies, and handed it out to twenty religious leaders in our coalition, and said, okay, here we go. Cool. Find and replace the UU language as needed [if you belong to a different religious tradition]. And they did. It’s pretty exciting.
- Q: What is asset mapping? And what is narrative strategy?
Asset mapping is when you think of all of the assets you have, whether physical or human or logistical or relational, and you just start writing them down. So, then you just have this really big list of all the resources you have. We have twenty acres on our church property, we basically have a park in addition to our building. Maybe there will be a moment when that’s needed. And the act of naming what you have, whether that’s a commercial kitchen or a really big ladder or people with certain sets of skills in the congregation, it brings it front of mind. So then when the requests come or the situations arise, you know what’s possible in a different way. It feels like almost a spiritual practice to recognize, okay, things are really hard, but we have something. Maybe the ladder isn’t what we need, but it could be. We know we have it.
When I was taught about narrative strategy, Nicole Pressley [Director of the UUA’s Organizing Strategy Team] taught us that facts and stories are stars, and narrative strategy is the constellation. The facts are what they are, regardless of our perspective, but constellations are rooted in a very specific perspective on the stars and are culturally mediated. And so narrative strategy is being really intentional about how you tell the stories about the facts that exist. It’s creating new constellations on top of the stars that are there.
- Q: What has it been like to bring Meet the Moment resources into an interfaith space?
I have found it helpful because there are so many of us that want to meet the moment but don’t know how. We don’t know how to be strategic. We don’t know how to build, we don’t know which conversations we should even be having with each other.
Our interfaith coalition is all mainline to progressive congregations who share really similar values. And so to have these Meet the Moment tools to help us know what conversations to have, or how to think about things, has been really helpful in channeling the, “We want to do something” into, “Okay, we’re going to try to talk about being good neighbors.”
- Q: In your view, how can Unitarian Universalists meet the moment we’re living in?
I think the task is to hold it all—the outrage and the grief and the joy when we can find it—and find ways to be rooted in love and in our values and move forward as we can. It’s really hard.
I would add that we’re not alone in this, right? We have so many partners in faith who are navigating the same stuff in the same time and holding similar, if not identical, values. We can do this together. And it makes it a lot easier and less scary when you’re in coalition.
To learn more about Meet the Moment, you can explore UU World’s full coverage here.