Core Values
Whether we are talking about relationships with staff, lay leaders, members and friends of the congregation or our partners and friends in the wider community, these are the values that drive and ground me in my approach:
- Living in Covenant: Collaboration and partnership through relationships of mutual accountability and trust, built on promises of loyalty and love, practices of forgiveness and beginning again. "We are promise-making, promise-breaking, promise-renewing creatures."
- Transformation - Let's focus on our time and energy on the stuff that's going to change our lives - and the world.
- Developmental, Adaptive and Appreciative Approach: Love where we are; use it to become our best selves. Pay attention to and respond to the changing culture around us.
- Learning Orientation / Experimentation: Rather than a posture of certainty, I value working from a place of continuous learning and discovery. This fosters deeper creativity, humility, experimentation, curiosity, openness, and courage, and allows us to meet today in all its possibility. It also means I'm not afraid to try things that do not work, to gather up lessons and try again.
- Multi-Generational, Pluralist Community: We all have access to a piece of the truth as it unfolds. We are better together.
- Compassion, with Boundaries: Discern where we can best use our limited resources to build the Beloved Community; support a healthy "yes" as well as a healthy "no."
- Joy: Joy tells us that we are on the right path, and cultivating joy helps us stay on the path when it is right but not easy.
- Ground all we do in Unitarian Universalism: What does our tradition ask of us? "We inherit covenant before we create covenant." Believe that our good news is enough to transform lives, beginning with our own.