I am Linda Olson Peebles and I have been so honored to be your Interim Lead Minister, and to offer you encouragement for this year’s Pledge Drive and the Future!

Hope is Our Door!  Members and Friends of UUCville – You have been through such hard times in the last 5 years.  Your congregation and the world have suffered from conflict and division, the impact of racism and injustice, the Covid pandemic which has taken over a million lives and kept us apart from one another.

And yet – through it all – you have been able to keep your eyes on the horizon.  You have kept the glimmer of hope alive, and you have done marvelous things!

Last year you gave yourselves a new name and you gave enough financial support to help move the congregation out of debt.  THANK YOU for your generosity!  This year, even as we struggled through good times and bad, you decided to move ahead and put your faith into action by organizing to help some of the refugee families newly arrived here from Afghanistan.

Through it all – you have kept Hope as your Door.  A Door which is the opening to invite all into this congregation.  A Door which became much more than just the physical doors on our building, but include now the doorways of our web site and our on-line worships and our outdoor gatherings in regional parks and our work with community partners.

Hope is Our Door!  With our doorways of hope swinging wide open, UUCVille can feel the power of welcoming and sharing hope with the community.

UUCVille is guided by wonderful leaders, good stewards of your visions, and our financial house is stronger than ever.   The congregation needs to be generous in order to fund its growing capacity for positive ministry.  Now is the time to make your pledge of monetary support for the new fiscal year beginning this summer.    Members and friends need to give an average of 5 – 10% more than we did last year.  For some of us that will be impossible, which is why we ask others of us to give even more than 10%.  We are also excited that we will be welcoming new members and friends to make first time pledges!

Hope is Our Door!    It is YOU who are the ones to open the door!!  As the poet Amanda Gorman wrote in her poem for 2022 “New Day Lyric” –

Hope is our door, our portal.
Even if we never get back to normal,
we can venture beyond it….
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.

Listen to Amanda Gorman read her poem

As we prepare to open the doors to be together in person again, may we also open the doors to the hopes we share for the coming year – a new exciting ministry beginning and deeper and wider connections with one another and the community.

May that Hope be Our Door.