From Your ReVisioning Task Force

Part of our Strategic Plan calls on us to “explore, experiment, and evaluate new and innovative worship services.” We are several weeks into the experimental single service format each Sunday morning, and the ReVisioning Task Force would like your opinion on how it is going. Please take a moment to complete this survey and share your experiences with us.

The survey will be available until midnight Wednesday, March 11^th.

Thank you for your feedback.

Spring Blooms at UU Coffeehouse

Want to celebrate the Ides of March or Saint Patrick's Day early? Get your songs, poems, dances, etc. ready for our next Coffeehouse beginning at 7:00 pm on Saturday, March 14th, in Fellowship Hall! Signup sheets for performers, helpers, and desserts are available after service on Sundays. All ages are welcome. 

Performers, we ask you to time your act so it runs five minutes or less to allow the maximum number of participants and keep the Coffeehouse length at two hours. 

Questions? Contact Sarah Wisseman at suwissem@gmail.com.

Photo Directories are Here!

The photo directories have arrived and are available for pick up in Fellowship Hall after Sunday service.

If your photo is in the directory, if you are a voting member of the church, or if you have made a recent pledge, come and pick up a directory! We have enough directories for each household to have one copy; if more copies are desired, they can be purchased for $10.

Please note that directories will be reserved for you until mid-April. At that point, all unclaimed copies will become part of the holdings for future new members. So, come pick up your directory as soon as possible! 

If you have any questions, please contact Karen Retzer at karenfooteretzer@yahoo.com.

Open Bidding: Join the AUUction Committee!

The AUUction Committee will hold an organizational meeting on Sunday, January 25th after the service in Children’s Chapel. We will discuss many aspects of the auction and assign preliminary roles. The auction is our largest fundraising activity of the year and is a lot of fun to work on. If you are interested in helping, there are many opportunities both large and small for you to participate.

Please email the committee chair, Bill Childers, at wchilder57@gmail.com to be included on the listserv for the committee for this year and/or to RSVP to attend this month’s meeting.

Setting the Stewardship Table

Save the date for the Annual Stewardship Campaign Kickoff: Sunday, February 15th, immediately following our worship service at 11:15 a.m. We'll have brunch, fellowship, activities, and information to share as we prepare for our future together. Stay tuned for more information! 

Welcome to our New Accompanist

We bid a fond farewell to Gonzalo Farias, who has served as our Interim Accompanist since September, and we plan to welcome Matthew Gladden as our new Accompanist.

Currently a DMA candidate in Vocal Coaching and Accompanying at the U of I, Matthew has served as a pianist/organist for the First United Methodist Church of Urbana, he currently accompanies The Singing Men of WGNN, and he has also been an accompanying assistant at the U of I. In addition, he owns Gladden Music LLC (www.methodbooks.com), which sells instructional books to piano teachers. Prior to moving to Champaign in 2009, Matthew served as a pianist in various churches in Oregon, Colorado, and Washington, and he was the winner of a number of musical awards.

Many thanks to members of the Accompanist Search Committee: Marsha Clinard, Axel Gehrmann, Tanja Hodges, Frank Knowles, and Matt Sheppard.

-- Millie Davis, Chair

Monthly Shared Offering: The Public i

January’s Shared Offering will help support The Public i, the longest-lived alternative paper in Champaign-Urbana (C/U). Affiliated with the Independent Media Center for all of its 12 years, the Public i is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. We are all volunteers to “a collectively-run, community-oriented publication,” and invite anyone from the community who wants to attend editorial committee meetings and contribute a story. Providing a forum “for topics underreported and voices underrepresented,” we are local authors writing about local, national, and international issues, plus people originally from C/U who continue to contribute or let us reprint their stuff (Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, Dave Roediger, Sarah Lazare). Every article promotes social justice by valuing diversity, fighting injustice, and promoting equality. Pieces range from “A Day at Stateville,” performed at UU church last May, and Pete Seeger's 1958 visit to UIUC, to the Northwestern Football Player Union, to Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary, and from local healthcare and local prison and police reform (not building a new jail, returning the MRAP, not employing tasers) to the environment and environmental justice (Mahomet aquifer, Homer Bulldog mine). For these and other stories, visit our website at http://publici.ucimc.org/.

We operate on a shoestring budget. In addition to an online edition, we publish an eight page print edition that works out to 10 issues/year. We distribute our ca. 3000 print run in numerous cubbies located throughout C/U. The poor quality, old-timey newsprint vs the better-looking online version means you have to wash the ink off your hands when you're done reading.

Money from UUCUC Shared Offering will go entirely towards publication costs, approximately $300/issue. The Public i does not run ads and all labor (editing, distributing) is volunteer-donated.