Religious Exploration at UUFC is more than a collection of Sunday morning classes. Across the lifespan, we create opportunities to deepen relationships, encounter new ideas and experiences, and develop spiritual practices and capacities that can keep growing and changing with us.
Throughout our lives, we return to four big questions:
What do I inherit? What stories, traditions, values, and wisdom have been handed to me from my family, culture, and religion?
Who am I? What do I believe? What matters to me? What does my own inner voice tell me about what is true?
How do I live in right relationship with others? How do I care for myself and other people, navigate differences, repair harm, and participate in community?
How do I use my power and values to shape the world? How do my choices help create the communities and world I want to live in? What action are my values asking me to take?
We explore these questions through the lens of our shared JETPIG values, returning to them at different ages, in different circumstances, and with different answers as we grow.
Relationships take time
We want you and yours to have more than a place you recognize on Sunday morning. We want you to have friends you look forward to seeing, a community of care that you can trust, stories and rituals that belong to you and enrich your daily life, and a spiritual home base that makes room for your questions, uncertainty, joy, mistakes, and growth.
Those relationships don’t happen overnight. They are built through repeated encounters.
We invite you to consider what role you hope Religious Exploration will play in your life. There isn’t one right answer. But whatever your hope is, tell us. Talk about it with staff, lay leaders, and friends. Together, we can consider what fulfilling that vision asks of you and of this community.
Come as you are
Families come in countless configurations. Children arrive with different bodies, brains, communication styles, identities, histories, capacities, and needs. Adults do, too. We each bring different needs, abilities, experiences, questions, energy, and ways of engaging.
Participation doesn’t have to look the same for everyone, and participants of all ages are welcome to take the time they need to become comfortable in our spaces.
If there is information that would help us give you or your child a smoother first experience, we’d love to hear from you.
The role of the Religious Exploration Council is to provide support, guidance, and coordination of RE programs. The RE Council works closely with the Director of RE to monitor learning needs across the lifespan of our congregation and develop materials and structures to help address those needs through classes, workshops, events, and volunteer mobilization.
The primary tasks of the RE Council include:
~Developing and promoting programs that deepen our community’s capacity for spiritual and faithful living;
~Assessing unmet congregational needs for learning and communicating those with staff;
~Identifying potential volunteers and connecting them with the opportunities best suited to their skills and interests.
Seeker Space is where children get to put the stories and values they’ve inherited to the test. This is an age when kids are increasingly able to notice contradictions, hold competing ideas, spot hypocrisy, and ask whether what they’ve been taught actually makes sense. We think those emerging capacities belong in religious life.
Through immersive adventures, role-playing, stories, games, and plenty of movement, Seekers practice questioning, disagreeing, discerning, collaborating, and figuring out what they believe. Rather than asking children simply to absorb our values, we give them opportunities to try those values out in complicated situations and notice what holds up.
This is also the first age at which our children create a covenant rather than simply working within classroom rules. A covenant is an agreement about how we will be together, and at this age children have increasing agency to participate meaningfully in creating, testing, and keeping those agreements.
The promise underneath it all is important: you can test what you’ve inherited here. You can share what’s hard and ask difficult questions. You can change your mind. None of that puts your belonging at risk
What Sundays look like
Seekers begin in the sanctuary with their families and leave together after Time for All Ages.
In Seeker Space, we light our lantern, check in, revisit our covenant, and then dive into immersive exploration. Role-playing adventures, values dilemmas, active games, and wisdom stories from around the world give children ways to explore big questions without spending Sunday morning sitting around intellectualizing them.
The games are fun on purpose. They’re also doing work underneath the surface: practicing deep listening, noticing context clues, honoring other people’s contributions, negotiating differences, making decisions together, and trying out ways of being in relationship.
Relationships matter here
Peers become especially important at this age. Kids are much more likely to want to spend Sunday morning here when the people they consider their people are here, too.Our Guides are becoming trusted confidants as well as teachers. They listen seriously to children’s needs, ideas, struggles, and hopes and offer warm, loving feedback. They shape the program in response to the group while still providing most of the structure and direction.Regular enough participation for acquaintances to become actual friends—and relationships that sometimes extend beyond Sunday morning—helps make Seeker Space a community children experience as their own.
Participation can look different
Children may opt out of any activity. They can watch. They can sit nearby. They can take their time.We believe engagement requires trust, and trust requires time. We also believe that more learning happens from the sidelines than most adults realize. Proximity to learning is often excellent learning.What children may not do is make participation difficult for everyone else. If a child’s way of opting out becomes disruptive or communicates to other children that their participation is embarrassing or “lame,” we’ll first invite them into a more relational way of being present. If that’s simply not possible for their body that morning—which can be entirely developmentally appropriate!—we’ll lovingly reunite them with their family in the sanctuary. They’re welcome to try again another Sunday.
Good to know
Seeker Space children begin Sunday in the sanctuary with their families and leave together for Room 9, at the top of the classroom wing stairs, after Time for All Ages.
Pick-up is at 11:15 AM, or immediately following the service if it runs long.
In this tender season of remembrance, we are approaching our traditional Ancestor Tree with gentle intention and a small change. In an effort to care well for our grounds and to make this ritual more accessible to all, we’ve reimagined where and how we gather the names of those we carry in our hearts.
You are invited to visit the table in the classroom wing, just outside the RE office, where you will find an altar box, paper leaves, and pencils. On a leaf, write the name of someone or something that has meant something and has died. A mentor, a teacher, a beloved pet, a family member, a forest, a river, a place that held you. Let this be a moment to name what matters. Add your leaf to the trees placed on either side of the altar box—our new Ancestor Trees.
There, you will also find a basket of blessings for what was real and lost. You are welcome to take one. Read it there in a quiet moment, or tuck it into your pocket for a day when you need to remember that you are not alone. That love persists. That absence, though real, is never the full story.
Please linger to read the names others have offered. Let yourself be moved by the web of connections among us—the invisible threads of people and places that have shaped the ones we now hold in Beloved Community. These names are echoes of resilience, tenderness, and transformation. They remind us that we are always standing on sacred ground.
And as you reflect, consider this: What does it mean to become an ancestor? To live in such a way that one day, someone might speak your name with love and longing?
This is not just a ritual of memory. It’s a quiet invitation to live with greater intention, greater courage, and greater tenderness, for those who came before, those who walk beside us now, and those who will follow.
“By their groups shall ye know them.” ~James Luther Adams
Let your group be known! It’s time to get registered for the 5th Annual Teams and Councils Trick or Treat event!
WHO: All UUFC teams, groups, and councils are invited to represent!
WHEN: October 26th, after the service
WHERE: Social hall, porch, and patio (under the market tents!)
DEADLINE to REGISTER: October 15th (earlier is helpful to our planning team!)
This event was born out of the RE Council’s understanding that we can only nurture a next generation of UUs when newcomers and whole families feel integrated into our wider Fellowship community enough to stay and take root here. Often, the missing first piece is simply knowing what’s available and how to join in.
Your participation in this event meets a 2-fold need by creating a joyful and lighthearted Fellowship experience in a time when our emotional and spiritual resources are feeling particularly taxed AND you are helping folx understand who we are and how they can expand their engagement with Fellowship life when they’re ready.
This isn’t just fun! It’s the sacred work of community building and memory making.
To participate, you must:
Register by October 15th
Have volunteers to work your table (costumes highly encouraged!)
Have signage to demonstrate what your team does and works on (photographs highly encouraged!)
Have individually wrapped treats to pass out
We would LOVE but don’t require participating teams to:
Have table decorations
Have a game or activity to generate engagement
Have a sign-up sheet for those who would like to volunteer or be added to your group’s mailing list (please only take this step if your team has the capacity to follow up with those who sign up for more information)
If you have any questions, please reach out to Skyla for help. We would love to see every group, team, and council join in the fun!
“October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!” ― Rainbow Rowell , Attachments
Greetings, Families!
The soggy, foggy season of all things cozy is finally upon us! Between sipping soup and reading Pumpkinheads to the kids, please take a moment to catch up on your Religious Exploration news and add some events to your calendar.
Please note that this is the last month that this newsletter will be sent to last year’s registered families. If you are not sure whether you have registered your child for this new year in RE, please reach out to me, and I’ll help get you all squared away so that you don’t miss any of the fun!
UPCOMING EVENTS:
10/12 Monthly Family Breakfast is Back! register HERE
10/16 Parent Peer Support Group is Back! Register HERE
10/25 Youth Overnight: registration information was sent home and to parents’ inboxes.
10/26 Teams and Councils Trick or Treat (wear your costumes to service!)
More information about our events can be found below, and info for all events can be found at uucorvallis.org by clicking “News” in the menu bar and then selecting “RE Council” from the drop-down menu.
You want to know what’s going on at the Fellowship and what different groups there are to be a part of. Your kids want to have some fun and wear their costumes. Okay, let’s face it. You want to have fun too! That’s why we’re hosting the annual Teams and Councils Trick-or-Treat event after the service on October 26th.
Wear your costumes to the service and plan to hang out after to wander around and check out the information, goodies, and games presented by many of the wonderful groups, teams, and councils that keep us up to good trouble at the Fellowship and beyond!
Registered OMG! youth and their friends are invited to this year’s Fall Overnight at UUFC! As always, we’ve invited youth from Eugene, Salem, and Willamette Falls congregations to join us, but it’s still unknown as to whether they have enough volunteer support to get their youth here this year.
Please ASAP, but no later than October 8th. Registration information went home with youth and was included in the email version of this newsletter. If you have not received it and are interested in registering yout youth please reach out to Skyla at dre@uucorvallis.org.
We will have a pizza dinner, and social hour, followed by a trip to the Melon Patch corn maze, and then come warm up with a candelight worship before bed. More details can be found in the Registration link!
By request, we took September off of our regular family gatherings, but it’s time to get back into the swing of things with the return of the Family Breakfast and the Parent Peer Support Group.
The Breakfast will be sticking with its 2nd Sunday Schedule this year, so please come join us on the 12th at 8:45. Registering each month helps us plan, but please come even if you forget to register.
The Parent Peer Support Group (with free childcare!) will start on the 3rd Thursday in October, and will be on 2nd Thursdays beginning in November. You don’t want to miss this first session back on October 16th! Register anew with this link to be kept up to date on changes regarding this group.
All of our Sunday morning groups for school-aged children are using the Mosaic antiracism curriculum this year. One of the upcoming lessons involves the use of candy. Because we don’t generally hand out candy in RE, I want to give our parents a heads up and a chance to share their family norms and concerns around sweets so that we can make sure all children are included and their dietary preferences are honored. These lessons will be taking place in Spirit Play on October 19th and in the Seeker Space on November 9th.
Kids will sanitize their hands and then sort and handle various candies throughout the lesson. Each child will be invited to taste 2 pieces of candy during class time, and the rest will be divvied up and sent home with consenting parents at pickup. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to me!
I’m so pleased to share that a new RE team has formed with the focus on safety! Below is a copy of what they shared in the monthly journal. Because there is information specifically for parents, I want to make sure you have a chance to encounter it, even if you aren’t in the habit of reading the journal.
We are fortunate to have a growing Religious Exploration program here at UUFC! To support this program, we have formed a Safe Congregations Support Team made up of parents and other members of our fellowship. Its purpose is to bolster the safety of all who engage with Religious Exploration programs by partnering with the Director of Religious Exploration to support uniform policy and procedure implementation and execution, consult on ambiguous background check results or interpersonal conflicts that have the potential to disrupt RE community-building efforts, and lovingly invite RE volunteers and participants back into covenant when our safety policies and procedures have been violated.
As part of our role of fostering the safest environment possible for our UUFC families, we would like to remind parents and guardians that RE staff and volunteers do not supervise children during the coffee hour after the service or at any time they are not engaged directly in RE programs. Please stay mindful of your children’s whereabouts and safety during social gatherings and bear in mind that, as an inclusive community that values transformation, we welcome strangers and individuals with diverse histories into our midst.
If you have a concern that needs to be addressed by our team, please contact Kyle Cupp, chairperson of the RE Safe Congregations Support team. Additionally, if you are passionate about safety and have skills and time to share, we’d love to hear from you!
If you have any unmet needs for support, unanswered questions about how or why we do what we do in RE, please reach out any time! Our offerings exist because families share their dreams and needs, and we rely on your partnership!
May we hold Love at the center of all we do together in this new RE and beyond!
Due to the shifting nature of our Sunday morning services, several of our RE leaders have requested that we have a designated pickup time rather than trying to monitor the service progress and quickly wrap up at various times. We would like to experiment with having parents pick up their children from their RE spaces at 11:30, even if the service wraps up earlier than that. If it runs longer, you do not need to step out to pick up your children. We would simply like to have at least until 11:30 to move through our materials and enjoy each other’s company.
If you have any questions about the plan, please contact Skyla at dre@uucorvallis.org.
Parents and guardians, it’s to register your children for the new year of Sunday morning Religious Exploration!
CHILDREN WHO WERE REGISTERED AT ANY POINT LAST YEAR MUST STILL BE REGISTERED Anew BEFORE ATTENDING RE THIS YEAR.
Please read the following descriptions carefully and register each child for the appropriate space. We acknowledge that school grades are not a perfect proxy for age or development. Nonetheless, we find them useful for determining the most appropriate group for most children. If you feel your child would benefit from being in a different group than the one designated below, please reach out to the Director of Religious Exploration, Skyla King-Christison.
THE RAINBOW ROOM
This space is for new walkers through preschool. We may occasionally be able to accommodate infants if the caregiver-to-child ratio allows; however, your infant may be returned to you in the service if more children arrive and it can no longer be safely accommodated. Children in this space may be dropped off in Room 4 of the classroom wing no earlier than 9:50, and should be picked up before their guardians attend coffee hour.
Please register for the Rainbow Room HERE prior to dropping your child off.
SPIRIT PLAY
This space is designed to meet the approximate developmental needs of beloved children in grades K through three. Children in this space begin in the service with their families, and will depart for room 6c as a group after the time for all ages. Guardians should pick them up before attending coffee hour. This group may occasionally be on the playground, through 6c, at pickup time.
Please register for Spirit Play HERE prior to their first Sunday.
SEEKER SPACE
This space is designed to meet the approximate developmental needs of beloved children in grades four through six. Children in this space begin in the service with their families, and will depart for room 9 (upstairs) as a group after the time for all ages. This group will prioritize outdoor time and project-based exploration, so please ensure that they are dress for the weather all year round. This group must be picked up before attending coffee hour.
Please register for Seeker Space HERE prior to their first Sunday.
OPEN MINDS GROUP (OMG!)
This space is designed to meet the approximate developmental needs of beloved children in grades seven through twelve. Youth in this space will be released to come join the adults in the social hall. They do not need to be checked out by guardian, but they are not permitted to linger in the classroom wing unattended. Please discuss expectations with your youth prior to their attendance.
Please register youth for OMG! HERE before their first Sunday
If you have questions about any of our Sunday morning offerings for children and youth, don’t hesitate to contact the Director of Religious Exploration, Skyla King-Christison at dre@uucorvallis.org.
WHAT: A fun and connecting communal exploration of radical inclusion through the lens of race and culture.
WHEN: Monday evenings, 9/8 – 10/20 from 6:30-8PM
WHERE: Room 7 @ uufc
WHY: Because the social and political landscape is ever-evolving, there will always be more to learn about how to be inclusive, and this will never be a topic we can check off the old to-do list and call it done. In 2020, the Commission on Institutional Change’s report, “Widening the Circle of Concern” (UUA), the commission recommended that we “hold conversations across generations about issues of inclusion, with the goal of recognizing the evolution in our Living Tradition and that spiritual development needs change over time.” Let’s answer that call in Corvallis!
More details:
Each session will include the following elements:
Opening: chalice lighting and check-in
Read: audio or video of a book or an article to explore together
Watch: video
Do: craft, game, or other activity
Close: chalice extinguishing words and other classroom rituals to close the circle
Take Home: suggested activity and/or conversation starter to encourage further faith development at home
We want to see a majority of our adults engaging with this material. We want to see teams and councils putting this learning to work in all we do in every corner of Fellowship life and beyond. We want to do whatever is needed to help you engage deeply, share bravely, and welcome wildly, so if you want to be included and can’t figure out how, or if you have questions or concerns, please reach out to Skyla King-Christison at dre@uucorvallis.org .
PS Our children will be engaging with Mosaic across the year, too! Below are some pictures of our leaders of the children and youth programs getting ready for the juicy and community-building year ahead!
