by Rev. David Usher I need to issue a full disclaimer right at the beginning of this sermon. I need to acknowledge my debt to a colleague, Rev. Sue Phillips, who is Regional Lead for the UU congregations in northern New England, and whose article, also called A Declaration of Interdependence, I read this past […]
by Rev. David Usher November 22, 2015 After becoming a member of UUCM, it took me 2 years, before I started to understand what membership really meant. When I was a Lutheran all I had to do was say I believed what the church said and I could be a member. The UUCM bylaws say […]
by Rev. David Usher My first ministry was in Atherton, a small town on the western periphery of the Greater Manchester conurbation in north west England. It was a very nondescript working class town, caught in the grip of Thatcherism so that its only two industries of cotton and coal had been ruthlessly closed down, […]
by Rev. David Usher Given that it can be such a contentious issue, particularly in our Unitarian Universalist context, I thought it would be useful if this morning I preached about religious language. Words are our primary medium for communication, but often they also lead us down the path to misunderstanding each other. I am […]
by Rev. David Usher November 1, 2015 Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet […]
by Rev. David Usher Twenty or so years ago, the congregation in New Hampshire where I was then minister held an auction, and recklessly I offered two items. I offered four hours of yard work, raking the approximately 4,589,357 leaves which fall on every square yard of ground during a New England Fall. And, I […]
by Rev. David Usher Well, the pressure is on. The other day I was looking at the results in so far of the congregational survey compiled by the Search Committee as part of the process of determining what you most value about this congregation and therefore what qualities and strengths you would most like to […]
by Rev. David Usher Some years ago, I read a wonderful book called Drinking the Rain. It was a memoir by the journalist and author Alix Kates Schulman about the summer she spent in a small, remote family cabin in rural Maine. She was fifty years old at the time, and had just been through […]
by Rev. David Usher A month or so ago I attended the UU Ministers’ Spring Retreat. The program theme for the retreat was death. We talked together in pairs and small groups contemplating the end of our own lives, reflecting on the losses we’ve experienced, and grieving the violence in our nation that disproportionately takes […]
by Rev. David Usher Whose church is this, anyway? Whose would you say it is? One answer is, It’s mine. It belongs to me, the minister. If ever you are having a really slow afternoon, I mean, a really slow afternoon, you might be tempted to read a church history, and if you do you […]
