Is God Keeping You From Going to Church?

Lay Ministry

I have put my name in the hat for Lay Ministry at UUCA. I have a past history for helping people spiritually as a Shaman and being a leader, so I am very excited about using my history to do good work at UUCA. I had an interview tonight with a Lay Minister and a Professional Minister (who also was a Lay Minister before going pro). The interview has really excited me about the prospect, and I will sit on pins and needles until they decide who will be selected to join the program. I worry that my age and newness to UU will be an issue.

They brought up some interesting points like my role in the church changing. As a lay minister, I would not be as free to voice a dissenting opinion or take a position. It reminds me when I took a jump from technical person to management the first time (I eventually went back to being technical, but ironically I am making jump back into management). As a manager I was asked to be sure to understand the goals of the company and to save disagreement of those goals to be discussed with other managers. I believe that this is what they were trying to convey. I do see the need for this. The position of a congregation could have a much larger impact on someone's life than a change in company policy. Some might think the welcoming nature of UU allows for public dissent. This may be true, but when you are building a foundation of trust for a congregation, you need to represent a united message. So that people can can faith in the organization as well as the people running it. There's place for dissent, but to do with the staff so to not cause confusion in the congregation.

The other thing that seemed interesting to me is to what degree UU can help people with they need it. I read A Faith for All Seasons by William R. Murry over the extended weekend and it highlighted ways that UU can help those needing big questions answered. It gave ways of applying the 7 principles to give a strong foundation to really allow someone to heal. This has really peaked my interest in pastoral care. I thought I would be doing more leadership type activities, since that is my strong suit, but this stuff is very powerful, at least to me. I can't wait to read more as I go through the lay ministry program. I hope to learn enough to make UU resonate for most people, no matter their background.

I do hope that I will be a part of the ministry staff at UUCA, because I am very excited about being a UU and being a member of UUCA. With a new senior minister starting this fall, there will great things happening at UUCA and I want to help make it happen.

The Belief-o-Matic!

Apparently the The Belief-o-Matic agrees with faith journey, with Pagan, UU, and New Age being my top 3. Though I did get 59% Scientology... maybe I should go check them out ;) . I love how Roman Catholic is at the very bottom. Rather impressive little quiz.

My results:

1.	Neo-Pagan (100%)
2.	Unitarian Universalism (95%)
3.	New Age (94%)
4.	Liberal Quakers (79%)
5.	Mahayana Buddhism (79%)
6.	Theravada Buddhism (74%)
7.	Secular Humanism (65%)
8.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (64%)
9.	New Thought (62%)
10.	Scientology (59%)
11.	Taoism (54%)
12.	Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (51%)
13.	Reform Judaism (49%)
14.	Hinduism (48%)
15.	Orthodox Quaker (41%)
16.	Jainism (40%)
17.	Bahá'í Faith (38%)
18.	Sikhism (38%)
19.	Nontheist (34%)
20.	Orthodox Judaism (23%)
21.	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (20%)
22.	Jehovah's Witness (14%)
23.	Seventh Day Adventist (14%)
24.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (14%)
25.	Eastern Orthodox (12%)
26.	Islam (12%)
27.	Roman Catholic (12%)

Hello UU World

Today on May 20th, 2007, I officially became a Unitarian Universalist (UU). I am very excited about this, since I never thought that I would be a member of a "church". I am also a geek, so what better way to express this elation than to start a new blog! I currently have a professional blog at http://xavier.ashe.com called The Lazy Genius. It covers hackers, crackers, and all thing dealing with information security. It's not really the place for discussing my spirituality, so I decided to start a new blog here. Bonus geek points if you understand the blog title, but for everyone else, "Gnu" is pronounced, "New".

Thank you very much for stopping by. I will be discussing and musing about my exploration through UU. I live in Atlanta and attend the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta (UUCA). I have been attending since early fall of last year, but finally made it official today. So far I have participated in many interesting adult religion education (RE) classes, attended a few events with the 20s/30s group, enrolled my daughter in children's RE classes, and plan to do a lot more.

I'll cover my faith journey history in future posts, but expect to see topics that include shamanism, humanism, existentialism, catholicism, and of course Unitarian Universalism. Man, that's a lot of -isms. Feel free to comment on anything, to disagree or just to tell me I am being silly. I've got some pretty thick skin, so please be honest.

Again, thank you for reading my spiritual blog and sharing in my experiences.