Young Church is a cooperative religious education program provided by parents and non-parents of our church family. Our RE program strives to provide a program where children and youth can develop spiritually and ethically. They explore the religious dimensions of life in a safe and caring community, while allowing families to fully participate in the activities of the congregation.

We believe that our young church should provide our children and youth with experiences that are mutually supporting and provide for their cumulative growth as they progress through the program.

These experiences should help children to:

• Learn to know themselves and develop a sense of worth, leading to loving relationships with others.
• Develop a joyous response to the wonder, order, beauty and mystery of life and its evolution.
• Embrace from our religious heritage those ideas and values that the children and youth find to have relevance and meaning.
• Understand and develop a sense of belonging to a community.
• Build the basis for a deep-felt, sustaining and living religious philosophy.
• Learn to apply this developing philosophy to themselves and others.

Special Programs

For the theatrical we offer a chance for the children and youth to participate in a "No Rehearsal Holiday Pageant." Young people are also asked to participate in a play at the end of the year.

Young Religious Unitarian Universalist (YRUU)

YRUU is a safe place for teens to be authentic, to explore pertinent life issues, and to reinforce basic ethical values. We offer programming every other Sunday for Youth in grades 6-12. Building community, fundraising for social justice, and conventions are just a highlight of the activities available.

Regular Sundays begin with “A Time for All Ages” in the sanctuary (item #6 in the Order of Service). Children sit with their parents until they are called forward. They hear a brief lesson related to their curriculum is offered. Then children proceed to class with their teachers. On the second Sunday of every month the children and youth have worship in the Children’s Chapel (the Moore Room off Benker Hall) and then participate in a social action project.

Our Whole Lives is a series of sexuality education curricula for six age groups: grades K-1, grades 4-6, grades 7-9, grades 10-12, young adults (ages 18-35), and adults.

Our Whole Lives helps participants make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual health and behavior. It equips participants with accurate, age-appropriate information in six subject areas: human development, relationships, personal skills, sexual behavior, sexual health, and society and culture. Grounded in a holistic view of sexuality, Our Whole Lives provides not only facts about anatomy and human development, but helps participants to clarify their values, build interpersonal skills, and understand the spiritual, emotional, and social aspects of sexuality.

Our Whole Lives uses approaches that work. The curricula are based on the Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education produced by the National Guidelines Task Force, a group of leading health, education, and sexuality professionals assembled by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).

Our Whole Lives covers topics and skills that both parents and students want to have available but schools are less likely to cover. The Kaiser Family Foundation has an interesting report on this subject called “Sex Education in America: A View from Inside the Nation’s Classrooms.” New national surveys are challenging the convention that Americans are reluctant to have sexual health issues taught in school, the surveys show that most parents, along with educators and students themselves, would expand sex education courses and curriculum.

The Our Whole Lives Values ...

• Self Worth
• Sexual Health
• Responsibility
• Justice and Inclusivity

Each level of Our Whole Lives Offers ...

• Up-to-date information and honest, age-appropriate answers to all participants’ questions
• Activities to help participants clarify values and improve decision-making skills
• Effective group-building to create a safe and supportive peer group
• Education about sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment
• Opportunities to critique media messages about gender and sexuality
• Acceptance of diversity
• Encouragement to act for justice
• A well-designed, teacher-friendly leaders’ guide
• Parent orientation programs that affirm parents as the primary sexuality educators of their children
• Sexuality and Our Faith, an optional religious component for Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ settings

Our Whole Lives is appropriate for use in a variety of congregational, school, and community settings, including classrooms, after-school programs, and youth groups. Although developed by two religious organizations, Our Whole Lives contains no religious references or doctrine. Religious references are contained in a Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ companion publication, Sexuality and Our Faith.

Our children and youth programming depends on the involvement of our entire religious community. Experience is not necessary and those new to Unitarian Universalism will find that if you bring a nurturing spirit, you will gain as you give to children and youth. You will be helping to keep our congregation healthy and strong, while getting to know the children and parents; and you will be developing closer friendships with adult volunteers through teamwork.

The Spirit in Practice class exemplies our occasional adult RE class offerings. Spirit in Practice was created to help Unitarian Universalists develop regular disciplines, or practices, of the spirit-practices that help them connect with the sacred ground of their being, however they understand it. Spirit in Practice affirms religious diversity while seeking unity in our communal quest for meaning and wholeness.

Whether participants follow a path they identify as Humanist, Jewish, Christian, Pagan, Theist, Atheist, Agnostic, Mystic, and/or any of the other paths we follow in our diverse congregations, the Spirit in Practice workshops offer a forum for learning, sharing, and growth that can enrich their faith journeys.

The most recent Spirit in Practice class began on February 23, 2011, and continues for 9 weeks in total.

Are you interested in finding out more about our congregation, and our faith? Would you like to discover how to become a member of this church, and just what that means? Then please come and join us on one of our periodic Saturday orientation classes. Sign up is in Benker Hall when a date is announced.

Here is the text from the orientation ceremony when we welcome newly-declared members during a Sunday service:

Present Members : As a church we are a community of individuals from many different backgrounds and varied interests, ideals, needs and hopes, but are united in our quest for a rich and abundant life.

New Members : We recognize that life takes many forms, but whatever form it takes it is always the quest for the good life – what some may call the search for God.

As a church we are guided by the ideal of respect for the individual. We believe that we should have the responsible use of freedom to think for ourselves, to choose for ourselves, and to be ourselves.

We believe that each of us is unique, and has the most to offer when we are ourselves.

As a church we accept the fact of differences among people and we believe that in unity of spirit there may be great value in a creative use of differences.

We recognize that no one can stand alone, for we all need support and concern of friends who seek the same goals.

We desire to build a church community that will be rich and rewarding: a community in which each person will have the opportunity and the inspiration to grow.

We seek to build a church sensitive to human need, deeped by understanding, encouraged to think and to feel and to share and to worship.

In this spirit we repeat together our Covenant:

All :
Love is the doctrine of this church,
the quest for truth is its sacrement,
and service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
to seek knowledge in freedom,
to serve humankind in fellowship,
to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine.
Thus do we convenant with each other and with God.

With its historical roots in the Jewish and Christian traditions, Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion – that is, a religion that keeps an open mind to the religious questions people have struggled with in all times and places. We believe that personal experience, conscience and reason should be the final authorities in religion, and that in the end religious authority lies not in a book or person or institution, but in ourselves. We are a “non-creedal” religion: we do not ask anyone to subscribe to a creed.

Our congregations are self-governing. Authority and responsibility are vested in the membership of the congregation. Each Unitarian Universalist congregation is involved in many kinds of programs. Worship is held regularly, the insights of the past and the present are shared with those who will create the future, service to the community is undertaken, and friendships are made. A visitor to a UU congregation will very likely find events and activities such as church school, day-care centers, lectures and forums, support groups, poetry festivals, family events, adult education classes and study groups.

More information on Unitarian Universalism is available at the Unitarian Universalist Association website. The Wikepedia page on UUism is here.