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Editor’s note: As Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt approaches the midpoint of her six-year presidency this June, she has shared this message to UUs about our faith and what it means to hold the heart of Unitarian Universalism. She reflects on the changes and crises that have led us to this current moment, celebrates innovation while acknowledging challenges, and calls for a continued collaborative investment in our faith that will carry us into the future.
On March 30, the UUA will premiere a video presentation of this message during a special online event hosted by UUA Executive Vice President Carey McDonald and UUA Vice President of Communications and Development Nancy McDonald Ladd. You can join this event live, which begins at 3 p.m. EDT/2 p.m. CDT/12 p.m. PDT, on the UUA’s Facebook or YouTube channels.
Wonderful and weary Beloveds,
There are not words enough to express how grateful I am that we are all in shared ministry together. These are days when community is our rallying point, and our connections to one another are both our protection and our strength.
From the beginning of my conversation with you and with our living tradition about what it might mean for me to serve as president of your UUA, I named a commitment to shared leadership and community care. During the campaign in 2023, we spoke together in a number of focus groups about what it might mean to face an unknown future together. In those conversations, we often landed on our love of this faith, and our investment in all that it might bring to this torn yet beautiful world. In that spirit we began this collaboration, and in that spirit we continue.
At the UU Minister’s Association Institute for Learning and Ministry this winter, some of our beloveds had the opportunity to engage Anne Snyder’s writing on “The Institutions of Tomorrow,” where she carefully and kindly tells us not only that institutions of all types are experiencing attacks from the outside that leave them on the defensive, shielding themselves against narratives condemning their missions and their worth, but that trust in institutions has been eroding for decades. Yet we are a people who inherit the wisdom of James Luther Adams when he reminds us of our responsibility to “participate in the associations that define and re-define the actual situation, in the associations that give utterance and body to prophetic protest, and to social change or to social stability …—in short, [to participate] in the associations that contribute to the shaping of history.”
Adams argued that our voluntary associations, the freely chosen institutions we support in our lifetimes, allow us to fully live into our shared values. They are the instrument by which we align ourselves with the greater meaning of our lives. Anne Snyder’s writing in Comment Magazine insists: “An institution, rightly understood, is a living tradition—a patterned form of human relationship that binds freedom to purpose, memory to responsibility. To think institutionally is to remember that we inherit before we innovate, that we hold something in trust.” This is the kind of wisdom I am referring to when I prioritize the knowledge that we hold the heart of this faith together. Our Unitarian Universalist Association, freely chosen, invites us relationally into a mission where together we equip congregations for health and vitality, support and train lay and professional leaders, and advance Unitarian Universalist values in the world.
Even in the presence of so much pain and profound transition at all levels of our institutions, we are in a time where many of our congregations are experiencing vitality in new and exciting ways, where our communities are emerging to meet the profound shared yearning of our times. Ours is a mission of shared leadership, prophetic justice, and communal care driven by love of neighbor itself. We are a people who show up; warriors for love and justice in the world, and we do not back down. Not in the face of rising tyranny, nor in the suggestion that individualism is somehow enough and we could do better without the covenant that has long held us together in common cause. So how might we think institutionally together? How will we, in the words of Anne Snyder, become “builders, skeptics, and seekers alike who are learning to see institutions not as idols to defend or abandon, but as altars to be reformed until they can bear the weight of grace more fully, more completely”?
Within the wide range of our inherited theological tradition, we are a people whose great strength lies in our ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is often understood as the study of the structures of religious traditions, how our institutions organize themselves, and how we choose to do our work together. In our nondoctrinal covenantal context, I am struck by our understanding of the power and responsibility of religious community, and how that call to mission in both our congregations and aligned institutions, as well as the UUA itself, centers us in our core values and our sense of responsibility to one another in our everyday, faithful living. I think it also offers us a unifying strength. Together, we are a manifestation of the covenant of our living tradition, born of the interconnection between and among us all. That interconnection holds us through time and space, and much becomes possible through how we hold UUism in common cause.
As one final point of context, it is important to note that our Association has faced waves of crisis for the better part of a decade—from internal crisis in 2017 to the pandemic in 2020, and the crashing forces of Trump II in 2025 and beyond. For almost ten years, we have been rallying to adapt not only to our own changing realities, but to the changing realities of the world around us. In that larger context, it stands to reason that so many things are in flux. We have many systems that have been re-examined in that time, and many more that still need re-examination. Some of the ways the UUA functions are in need of full re-imagination, even the long work of taking apart and putting back together systems we have known before. I know that such times of re-examination and reconstruction are challenging for all of us served by and in service to these very same systems. You will hear more specifics on those systems currently being re-imagined or improved further on.
I want to thank so many leaders, both religious professionals and dedicated lay leaders who for ten years have held us in the midst of these crises, for their faithfulness and their courage. Ten years of struggle required much of them. Let us meet their depth of commitment with our own as we continue to meet the needs of this moment together. Let us draw on our powerful call to community itself as we continue forward.
Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Executive Director Lena Gardner hugs Rabbi Barat Ellman from New York, who answered the call to come to Minneapolis, during a community event at a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Amidst the complexity, there is good news about the state of our Association, including renewed work in coalition with other religious institutions as we reclaim our place in the public religious landscape. There can be no question that there is a struggle in this nation over the values by which we make difficult choices and conduct ourselves as a people. We experienced a softening of religious coalition during the early quarantine years of COVID. Many religious movements and denominations turned their attention within to care for their own members. Reconnecting with religious leaders and working in relationship with other religious traditions in these times of upheaval creates effective opportunities to bear witness to our own moral position as a faith in the public square.
Meaningful examples include our 2025 celebration of OWL’s 25th anniversary, offering two and a half decades of groundbreaking, developmentally appropriate, lifespan sexuality education done in partnership with the United Church of Christ. We are not only celebrating this anniversary, we signed a renewed memorandum of understanding that invests in the content and resources of the program, and commits us to collaborative ongoing development of OWL and training for OWL leaders and trainers into the future.
It has been a year since the UUA signed onto a multifaith lawsuit challenging ICE’s “sensitive locations” policy, joining almost thirty multifaith partners in making a First Amendment argument to restore protections for churches, schools, hospitals, and more from ICE activities. We have seen the horrific impact of ICE incursions on these spaces as our neighbors keep their children home and avoid needed health and faith support in fear of violence and deportation. That lawsuit remains in process, impactful primarily because we chose not to go it alone, but in coalition with faith partners across the country.
This past November, we were proud to take the lead on a letter signed by twelve heads of major American religious traditions in calling for the love, support, and protection of our transgender, intersex, and nonbinary kin in response to targeted attacks by the current administration. The connections made through that organizing have remained strong as we build on the powerful work your UUA’s Organizing Strategy Team is doing in interfaith circles to train leaders, build resources, and resist the immoral and unconstitutional actions of ICE. Our profound thanks and prayers for safety and justice continue for all of our colleagues serving in states targeted by ICE, with gratitude for the partnership and organizing in coalition for the safety of all. Moving forward toward the 2026 election season and beyond, we also celebrate the profound commitment to ignite solidarity and reimagine democracy taking shape from UU the Vote. We are in a new place right now. It is no longer adequate for UU the Vote to function primarily as voter education and mobilization. Instead, we have embraced a fundamental re-organizing of our efforts for the protection and reimagination of democracy itself. It will indeed take all of us, within, among, and beyond the bounds of Unitarian Universalism itself.
Our congregations and affiliated communities are also showing up in multifaith coalitions in powerful ways. I am thinking of our beloveds with the Texas UU Justice Ministry who joined together with faith leaders from all over the state in prayerful solidarity with children and parents protesting from within the immigration detention facility in Dilley, Texas. We know that it matters for us to keep showing up, not solely in response to the needs of our surrounding communities and not only in our commitments to partnership and followership in religious coalition. We must continue to show up boldly in our UU identity, clearly proclaiming Unitarian Universalism as a religious tradition in this country, especially as we seek to counter the deadly narratives of Christian nationalism.
Protesters, including UUs, made a three-mile procession from a city park to the Dilley Detention Center in Dilley, Texas. Texas UU Justice Ministry partnered with other community groups to organize the demonstration demanding the release of all people detained by there by the federal government.
Showing up as our full faithful selves we also acknowledge our deeply religious commitment to our values and to repair. I want you to know that your UUA is in the early stages of exploring how best to enter into the reparations movement, with more information forthcoming on our essential next steps. We are also working diligently to move the climate justice recommendations shared during General Assembly in 2025 from recommendations to commitments in ways that empower the entire UU ecosystem’s participation. These are not promises that the UUA makes alone, but promises we all must make to and with one another, at every level of our faith. Both of these ongoing pieces of work seek to own historic harms and move faithfully forward. We know some of our congregations are already beautifully involved in the work, including the Bellingham UU Fellowship in Washington, who have worked with JUUstice Washington to promote education and action regarding Landback and treaty rights. We humbly follow your lead as we work to help all of our congregations and communities join in these shared commitments.
Let me transparently acknowledge that all of these essential and profound commitments, along with the many systems-level shifts we are undertaking at the Association, mean that what is currently asked of your UUA staff is too much. All of our work contains multiple programs and priorities being maintained, developed, or updated in real time. We are working to meet the needs of this moment while equitably managing the capacity issues experienced by our staff. That said, we have significant structural work to do. And much of it cannot be addressed in isolation. The systems impact one another, and addressing them requires re-examining of large cross-cutting segments of our institutional systems at the same time. In this time of enormous tumult and possibility, I remain convinced that mine is a developmental presidency. Perhaps this is true for all heads of traditions in these times. It is likely true for all of you leading congregations and institutions as well. Much of this work represents a deep commitment to build for the next stages.
To that end, we have been improving the structures and organizational systems that have been holding us since merger, including our financial operations, our internal accountability mechanisms and our communications infrastructure. We are working to improve systems that sustain the faith, and as any of you who are doing similar work to sustain and transform your own congregations and communities surely know, it is literally too much, yet it is all essential. The blessing is that none of us holds it alone. We need your help.
In order to hold our living tradition faithfully together, I have an ask of all of you. We need you to be in this time of institutional transformation alongside us at the UUA. We need to know that this work is ours to share across the whole ecosystem of the faith. We need you to respond, to engage when we request constituent input on transitional work within the UUA itself. And we deeply need you to prioritize faithful and full giving to the Annual Program Fund ask from your UUA, your community’s annual financial contribution to our national body that amplifies the faith and makes transformation possible in all our congregations.
Let us continue to be partners to each other in this time of system-wide and societal change. Please continue to serve nationally in all the vital ways that you do, and hold us with some grace when processes take longer than we might wish. We are working to implement systems that meet our needs now and into the future. Some of them have not been significantly updated in a decade or more. It takes time to do the work accountably and well.
How do we do this work in partnership and deep relationship? Meet the Moment is our movement-wide framework helping Unitarian Universalists analyze, discern, and take values-based action in response to today’s religious, cultural, generational, and political realities. This framework is useful not just for congregations or communities, but for the UUA itself, where we will never ask you to do strategic work if we are not brave enough to commit to it ourselves.
Meet the Moment is also a place of deep connection with UUs who have wisdom to share about a wide range of needs and hopes for the faith going forward. Many of you have asked to hear more about some of the early wisdom coming out of the first round of wave cohorts that are just now coming to a close. Among other things, these early cohorts have informed our risk management work, encouraged expansion of gatherings for solidarity and support among trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse UUs, and surfaced potential new models for congregational administration.
Members of the Unitarian Universalist Community of Charlotte, North Carolina, at an all-ages introduction to drumming. The congregation introduced monthly Community Sunday services where instead of an hour-long worship, people of all ages attended a twenty-minute service before choosing from four forty-minute activities.
Our early cohorts have also made clear that we don’t always have to do more. Instead, we must make what we do accessible and meaningful in the day-to-day support of congregational and community life. It takes time to gather and collate the good work our wave cohorts are already doing. We want to be sure you know this collected wisdom is not being left to collect dust on a shelf. The input from our congregations’ leaders of all kinds remains a central priority and source of knowledge production going forward. My ask for all of you is to stay informed about Meet the Moment as best you can. It is not my moment to meet, nor yours alone, but ours together. Come to programming and updates at this year’s GA. Think about whether there is an area in our UU ecosystem where you have expertise to share and get involved. Let us continue to hold this work collectively together.
I told you that many areas of the UUA’s ministry are focused on development and reconstruction of systems in need of our attention and I cannot engage updates on the program areas of the UUA without centering youth, emerging adults, and family ministry.
The vision for the future of youth and emerging adult ministry is just beginning to become clearer, knowing that we need to strengthen the containers for this ministry at the congregational and local level in order to ground ourselves for more strategic thinking about the future. While much remains in transition, I want to lift several recent successes in this area, all centered in the knowledge that spiritual development is the work of the whole church.
With participation from leaders in LREDA and beyond, we are working on a new lifespan and whole church faith development curricula series that you can find out more about at General Assembly and on the JUUst Breathe lifespan faith development podcast, whose audience continues to grow.
I am grateful that the Mosaic Lifespan Antiracism curriculum is live. This long term project, created in response to the Commission on Institutional Change’s report, Widening the Circle of Concern, has resources for various age groups (K–adult) that are relevant to the aims of faith development for each age group, as well as to our growing understanding of best practices and justice centered language that arise out of BIPOC movements to decolonize and decenter whiteness.
Deeper Joy brings essential components of UU youth culture to all kinds of community builders in our congregations and beyond. Through the Deeper Joy framework, we are building leadership and community development through embodied practices, activities and conversations that engage faith development across the whole ecosystem of congregational life. The Journeys of Deeper Joy role playing game curriculum, which has gotten such wonderful reception among our congregations, equips congregations to playfully build multigenerational communities centered in Love.
And we remain proud of the long term impact of OWL on our UU community and on so many others who seek to provide honest, accurate information through lifespan sexuality education as a fundamental human right. Recently, our staff have worked faithfully to develop a beautiful and inclusive new set of visual teaching tools as part of the Sexuality and Our Faith component of the middle school OWL curriculum.
As part of the Our Whole Lives (OWL) 25th anniversary celebration, attendees of last year’s UUA General Assembly in Baltimore, Maryland, stop by for cake in honor of the beloved Lifespan sexuality education program.
My profound gratitude to our hardworking Lifespan Faith Engagement staff for these beautiful offerings and many others in development.
Many of you know that we are working on systems that support ministers and congregations in their formation, search, and settlement processes. We are also supporting the development work for a Care in Conflict Team to support colleagues across professional organizations during times of disagreement and conflict. Leaders of all UU Religious Professional organizations continue to meet in collaboration with consultant CB Beal toward that end.
The Transitions Review Task Force is well underway, and charged to design a constituent-driven process of both listening and assessment that will lead to the reimagining of our ministerial transitions system. This process will bear witness to and collect stories from those who have engaged with—and in many cases, been underserved or harmed by—the UUA’s transitions practices and policies, including making recommendations for any needed reparations. It will holistically assess the current realities, challenges, and needs for ministerial transitions, and—in collaboration with UUA staff—make recommendations about needed shifts in approach and practice for the future.
The Widening the Pathway process, which seeks to do similar work on questions of ministerial formation and training, continues to build on a preliminary stakeholders’ meeting that was held last May. Its task force that will work in collaboration with UUA staff to initiate a renewed, long-term effort toward removing systemic barriers and advancing equity in Unitarian Universalist (UU) ministerial formation and credentialing, is in the final stages of preparation and will soon begin its ongoing work.
Unitarian Universalists gather on Thursday, January 22, 2026, at a local congregation that offered opportunities for spiritual grounding before The Day of Truth and Freedom, a nonviolent moral action and reflection calling for the end of ICE operations in Minnesota.
I want to acknowledge that these two significant pieces of work primarily impact ministers and the congregations they collaborate with or serve. The UUA remains deeply committed to the support and relationships with all of our religious professional groups. We have received a formal request from LREDA leadership that the UUA track specific data about the state of religious education across the UU ecosystem and the impact of the current moment on religious educators specifically. We are actively working with LREDA to create the necessary structures to gather this vital information and collaborate on strategies to address the realities the data reflects.
We also know that as congregational realities shift and change, other religious professionals are also experiencing significant shifts in the scope and sustainability of their jobs. These trends are also reflected in the learnings emerging from several Meet the Moment Wave Cohorts, and the UUA is committed to partnering with our professional organizations in actively tracking more data and responding to these trends over time.
We cannot do this without you. My ask is that you continue to take congregational certification seriously, and help us get complete and accurate information. And when we follow up in the coming months for more information about the quality of life of our religious professionals, I ask you to partner with us in collecting this important data so the UUA and our member congregations can respond to the changing landscape with strategic creativity that centers equity and sustainability for our religious educators, musicians, administrators, ministers, and membership professionals.
Before we shift to the finances of the UUA, which impact all of us, and are a central part of our commitment to institutional responsibility and best practices, I want to also remind you that your UUA has been working on risk management and monitoring around the safety of our congregations and leaders since before the most recent presidential election. I commend to you our Community Resilience Hub that you can find online, and particularly our resources on Safety and Security in Troubled Times. We have increased our support for leaders and congregations in times of targeted risk across multiple staff teams, including Congregational Life, Organizing Strategy Team, and Public Relations. The essential message is this: When your ministry or your congregation is threatened or uniquely at risk, you do not need to go it alone, and reaching for the UUA’s partnership earlier rather than later is always the best approach.
Now, to the money, the financial underpinnings of our faith and the Association, which is a ministry and a conversation we should never be ashamed or hesitant to share. While I know that many of our congregations and institutions are experiencing increases in their financial resources due to generous donations in response to the current moment, many also are having to prioritize and evaluate their programs and offerings based on reductions in giving. This includes your UUA. I want to be fully transparent that the UUA has balanced its budget for many years through the strategic use of cash reserves. We, like many of you, are in a multi-year process to align our budget with our resources. This is the good governance you expect. This work constitutes not just fiscal responsibility, but our commitment to the future of the faith.
That does not mean it is easy work. But it is faithful work and we know that this three-year strategic rebalancing of the UUA’s financial picture would go nowhere without our congregations’ gifts and commitments. And any congregation’s withholding of APF giving is not without consequences. In the coming year, that covenantal support will go toward the further transformation of UU the Vote into an instrument for protecting our democracy. It will go to the Trauma Response Ministry, who show up for our leaders in Minneapolis as tear gas streams through their streets. It will go to the shared support of and for trans leaders in times of increased risk. And yes, it will go toward the long-term sustainability of the faith itself, so that your children and your grandchildren and chosen families will have a place of progressive faith to call their own, just as our institutional ancestors gave us.
We are with you in the journey toward financial sustainability and we thank you for the many ways that you give in support of the faith. There are congregations among you, like Ann Arbor Michigan, who are making steps to increase APF giving over time and those like Rochester, New York, and Annapolis, Maryland, who have been banner-carriers as honor congregations year after year over the span of time. Know that you are not alone. Others rise to meet you, and we need one another now more than ever. We need your financial support now more than ever, and I thank you in advance for your generosity. Along with our gratitude, all of us at the UUA want to take this opportunity to offer transparency and partnership, along with some specific details about shifts and successes in our financial landscape at the Association.
The 2025 Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly took place from June 18 through 22 in Baltimore, Maryland, and online.
Through the faithful efforts of David Valentine, our vice president for Finance and Investments and his team, we are updating our general ledger and have moved away from outmoded forms of financial management, resulting in dramatically lower error rates and more timeliness and intentionality in our financial reporting.
In the middle of the last fiscal year, our part time Senior Investment officer with the UUA’s Common Endowment Fund agreed to join us full time. Friends, it is a wonder to witness the dynamism of investment committee meetings when volunteers and staff alike know that the mission is clear, the values are ever-present, and the key leaders are empowered. From there, we launched a brand new website for the Common Endowment Fund, while also making improvements in our processes that build trust and confidence, already resulting in an additional $25 million investment in the fund.
Amid all of these commitments and successes, it is apparent that there are and have been systems to improve. Structures to build. Deferred maintenance to attend to. This isn’t always the work that makes headlines, but it’s the work that underlies both our present missional capacity and our ability to shape the future. It matters. It requires our time and our money and our attention. And every gift you give, every commitment you offer, makes that possible.
Beloveds, Unitarian Universalism is a covenantal faith. It is built on relationship rather than hierarchy, on shared responsibility rather than centralized authority. That covenant has always required structure. Your UUA exists to make that covenant real; to ensure that our congregations are not alone, our values are not fragmented, and our faith has continuity, credibility, and a future. From my perspective, the state of the Association is dedicated, determined, and nimble in how it meets the current moment. What we need from each other is continued investment in the interconnected web that grounds all of our ministries and sustains our faith into the future.
The UUA is not an optional service provider, a distant administrative body, or a substitute for congregational life. It is the institutional expression of our promise to one another. When congregations commit to the UUA, they are not purchasing programs; they are sustaining the infrastructure that allows Unitarian Universalism to function as a living, connected faith. This work is inherently shared. The strength of the Association depends on the engagement, trust, and investment of congregations, just as congregations depend on the infrastructure, continuity, and collective capacity the UUA provides.
In a time when many institutions are weakening and community bonds are fraying, choosing to sustain the UUA is a declaration that covenant still matters. We ask you to prioritize that essential investment in the heart of our shared faith, through your engagement and your giving. It is a commitment to relationship over individualism, to shared responsibility over fragmentation, and to a future in which Unitarian Universalism remains a source of meaning, courage, and hope.
In this time, we are cultivating the moral imagination, infrastructure, and skilled leadership that is an antidote to the monstrosities of this moment, and we are building a bridge toward a more liberated and thriving future. It remains my honor to be in this shared ministry with all of you. Thank you for everything you are doing in service of this faith and all of humanity. My prayers, gratitude, and heart remain with you always.