Universalist National Memorial Church

Vitality Workshops – All Come!!

Mark your calendar for Saturday and Sunday, April 26-27, when everyone in the congregation is encouraged to attend a series of vitality workshops with the Rev. Evan Keely that will help all UNMC members and friends prepare for a new era in our ministry.

Lunch will be provided both days. Child care will be available, if requested.

Please let the Search Committee know by Easter (4/20) whether you will be attending the 4/26-27 workshops and, if so, whether you will need child care. The Search Committee also asks that you keep those comments, emails, letters, and prayers coming!

Here's the schedule for the vitality weekend:

A Joyful Path!

Very exciting news! After a long hiatus, religious education has started again at UNMC with this great curriculum from ProgressiveChristianity.org. The class for kids 6-8 is meeting once a month. Perhaps you know a family who would like to introduce the idea of spiritual life to their children in an inclusive, non-dogmatic way that honors the teachings and path of Jesus?

International Domestic Abuse Seminar - March 29 - FREE

Saturday, March 29 -- International Domestic Abuse Seminar -- Featured speakers include Eliserena Kimolo, LPN, founder of Jambo Africa Child Hope; Queen Afi Gaston, founder of Domestic Violence Wears Many Tags; Harriet Shangarai, RN, founder of Brothers and Sisters of Africa; and Kenny L. Mitchell, noted author of the "Loves Me Not" series. Admission is free, and an international buffet lunch will be provided.

Incarceration / Self-incarceration

Sermon by Karen DeWitt, March 16, 2014

Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. -- Hebrews 13:3 

The first part of this sermon is about our nation’s outrageous incarceration rate.

If we’re losing our prominence in other areas, the United States today yields to no nation in the number of people we put behind bars. The United States represents about 5 percent of the world's population, but houses around 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Among all the Western nations, we’re undisputably number one in the area of incarceration-- 756 people per 100,000-- even ahead of repressive regimes like Russia and China. Rwanda is number two with 593 per 100,000 people behind bars, but most of them are awaiting trial or serving sentences for crimes associated with the 1994 Tutsi Genocide. 

The second part of this sermon is about our relationship to our incarceration culture and about how we spiritually imprison ourselves. Our strength is always present even in our weakest moments, but most of us don’t really believe in it. Each week here, we say the Prayer of Jesus which ends with the lines: For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

How many times have we all prayed for some greater good in our lives and then silently told ourselves: I hope it works.

Why is that?

One reason is that we are all caught up in this material world, what we’ve come to think of as reality. But we are not, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes, human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.

That’s very hard to accept, so most of us are stuck with what we see and hear and touch and from that perspective flows all kinds of assumptions about birth and death, the world and our and others places in it.