Service with the Family

Last month, we explored ways to incorporate gratitude into our family life, and service is something that often prompts an impulse toward gratitude. All of these tools are connected! Serving others helps us step outside the immediacy of our own challenges and forget that minor irritation that has grown to outsized proportions in our minds, recognizing that we are powerful beings who can contribute to the wellbeing of others. When we do, our own sense of wellbeing skyrockets!

Not sure how to start the talk about being of service with your family? Read on!

When I was a teenager, I attended an urban evangelical church in the heart of downtown Nashville. I LOVED my church experience and our vibrant youth group, but when Spring Break rolled around each year and we were invited to sign up for mission trips to go serve in faraway places like Honduras or Belize, I remember looking at the people sleeping on the street right outside our doors and wondering why we would fly halfway around the world to serve when there were people ten paces away that could use a hand. The reality is that service is more exciting when it happens some place exotic. But that brand of service can be more about what you get to experience than about helping someone else.

Similarly, we may find that our children are more excited about going across town and bagging up pantry staples at the food bank than they are to help cook dinner at home, but home is the place where our children can learn the importance of contributing to community wellbeing most consistently and even when it’s not exciting. It’s important to cultivate the skill of serving simply to be of use, even when there’s nothing novel or exciting about it. This can look like unpaid chores done simply because all members of a community (and a family is a community within a community!) must contribute in the ways that they can for the common good. That doesn’t mean that other chores can’t be compensated with an allowance, but it’s important that our children have the experience of contributing without expecting anything in return.

Once you’ve mastered service at home, it’s time to turn your lens outward. Here are some ideas for how children of all ages can serve.

3-5 year olds:

Children at this age are excellent at sorting. You can put those sorting skills to use at the neighborhood food bank, helping children take the cans to the right bins (call Linn Benton Food Share for information about their monthly family service nights), or at a grandparent or elderly friend’s house sorting laundry or pairing socks.

Children of this age are also great at giving the gift of time to those in care facilities who may not get much company and would be delighted by a visit. Call first, but many memory care centers or assisted living centers are excited for an offer of visits and can point you toward residents who don’t have much companionship from local family.

It’s fun to bake treats and deliver them to neighbors or the unhoused. Children in this age group can assist in the kitchen and then help with the hand delivery. A load of banana bread from a child is always more delicious!

6-12 year olds:

This age group can do everything from the above list, and more!

The grounds team at the Fellowship is always looking for help raking, weeding, and spreading mulch. Contact Michael Hughes to ask about opportunities to contribute to the beautification of our grounds.

At this age, children can offer to read or play board games with seniors in care centers. I used to take a group of children to the care Alzheimer’s unit near our home every Friday. We’d bring cookies and paint the women’s fingernails for them while they told us stories from their childhood. A decade later, my grown children still tell stories from those visits with great fondness.

13 years old and up:

Children at this age can volunteer lots of places. Check out the Corvallis Youth Corps (YVC) for opportunities to serve all around Benton and Linn Counties.

The public library has service opportunities for this age group (Society for the Prevention of Boredom in Teens, aka SPOBIT), as does Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore and the local animal shelters.

Teenagers are capable of mowing lawns, raking leaves, and cleaning gutters for neighbors and aging family friends. Anything adults might do to serve, teenagers are perfectly able to participate in. In fact, there’s a huge opportunity for nonfamily mentoring to develop organically when we encourage our teens to not only participate in service activities designed for teens, but in general service alongside the adults in their community. Reach out to the justice council and find out what type of justice work is already happening in our congregation and might benefit from an infusion of youthful energy and vision!

Reflections for Caregivers

When you set out to nurture a sense of service to humanity within your family, it’s important to make some things explicit to younger children. As adults, it’s easy to assume that our kids know what we know and see the world the way we see it. Try to remember that you have decades of experiences and insights that your children don’t have, and frame up your service endeavors in a way that will help them develop healthy modes of service.

  1. We want helpers rather than saviors. Helping has a vibe of humility. Saving has a vibe of superiority. One of those actually relieves burdens while the other adds a layer of shame when we’re the most in need. Talk to your little helpers about the difference. Invite them to recall a time when they felt helped or saved, and how did those feel different on the receiving end? Which would they like to give others?
  2. Be mindful of when your child might witness a new brand of suffering in the course of their service, and offer context that might make it less alarming or anxiety-inducing. It’s important not to shield our children from age and developmentally appropriate suffering, but our first time encountering unfamiliar types of suffering often stirs up questions that our children might not yet know how to ask. Anticipating the emotional impact of the suffering of others and contextualizing it without minimizing it can go a long way toward preventing vicarious trauma.
  3. Emphasize that our activism is shared within a collective, and we are not asked to do this work on our own. We want to participate in sustainable activism, that includes work and rest in healthy balance. You can mitigate the likelihood that our children will run full speed towards compassion fatigue and burnout by participating in groups of volunteers, reinforcing that we are just some of many, and the work will continue when we step away to rest and care for ourselves.

If you want to chat about service in the family, my door is always open!

“Where Justice Begins,” 2/25/2024


“Justice” has been named as a central value in Unitarian Universalism for generations. We are for it. We work for it. We work to understand it. And still, there is much to learn. Most often we think that justice is public work, community work, political work. But what if it is first and foremost soul work? Without getting waylaid by wanting to define “soul,” let’s consider what justice requires, what it asks of us, what it needs from us.


Rev. Jill McAllister

Between Us, 2/25/2024

(I wrote this in 2016. Re-reading it during this Black History Month was helpful – as if I had written a reminder to myself check in some years later..)

I’ve heard that as we age and mature, the best we can do is replace one habit with another habit. That doesn’t sound very promising, but it certainly can be. If the habit is projecting anger on others by use of physical force, and it’s replaced with a practice of walking away and cooling down on your own, the effects are immense. If the habit is to address sorrow and grief with alcohol and drugs, and that habit is replaced by finding someone to talk and cry with instead of reaching for a bottle, the effects can be life-changing and life-giving.

Replacing destructive habits with less destructive or nurturing habits is not limited to big problems, or to those with the most intense emotional content. Often our smaller habits are what get in our way – sometimes because we can’t even see them, much less name them as habits. Racism is like this most of the time, and sexism, and ageism, and homophobia, and religious prejudices, and other similar habits. For example, simply calling our approaches to diversity ‘habits’ might be something new. It is usually quite a challenge, for any of us, to recognize that what we might think are facts about the way things are – such as “those people are……” are simply habits that we have been taught, that we have learned, that we have internalized. Why for example, do White people almost never say “I met a White person”, when we nearly always say, “I met a Black person,” as if white is an accepted and therefore unspoken norm for what a person looks like? (The reverse is true in many black-dominated cultures and societies.) Of course this represents a limited perspective, which we have definitely been taught somewhere, which we have internalized so that it is a habit. If you think this doesn’t make sense, try changing it, for at least one whole day, by describing the skin color of EVERY person you meet.

Many of us at the UUFC are challenging ourselves to be more active in living our religious values in our daily lives. We keep aiming to live in right relations with others who are of different faiths, ethnicities, persuasions, personality types, etc. Right relations sometimes requires challenging truths that others hold, and sometimes having our own truths challenged. Right relations often requires being able to hold two opposing truths in order to simply stay together. This requires going beyond our initial reactions to things and people (which give evidence of our own habits), and it is often uncomfortable. That is the work of right relations.

While he was serving as a ministerial intern at a UU congregation a few years ago, a seminary student named Ricky Klein noticed how hard this work can be for both individuals and congregations. He wrote, “The greatest challenge to counter-oppression work is that (some people want) to see greater diversity without doing the deeper soul work to understand why and what that would mean.”

Deeper soul work. Perhaps that’s what it means to replace one habit with another habit. Perhaps that’s the most important thing we can be doing, the soul work or emotional work, of understanding how our habits can both help and harm. I know this requires calling on all our resources – intellectual, spiritual, and physical – and I know from experience that it’s something I can almost never do on my own. That’s why I love being part of this congregation with you. May we continue to help one another in this work.
See you Sunday — Jill

Summary of February Board Meeting

At our February meeting, the Board: Discussed

  • 2024-25 Stewardship season which will begin on Sunday, April 7, with a sermon and three subsequent after-service discussions on pledging as a vital component of our shared ministry. Pledging will commence on Sunday April 7.
  • Treasurer’s report, which shows the Fellowship to be in good financial shape
  • Questions and issues related to a potential new policy related to payments to Fellowship members and friends for tasks otherwise covered by volunteers
  • Fellowship justice commitments and related next steps
  • Anticipated internship of a Eugene-based candidate for the UU ministry
  • Upcoming reboot of the UUcorvallis.org website
  • User-problems on Breeze, of which Breeze is aware and working on
  • Agenda and logistics of the upcoming Board retreat Approved
  • Changes to the policy related to the Care of Shared Ministry
  • Reaffirmation of the Fellowship’s commitments to divestment and climate justice
  • Removal of two dangerously and increasingly leaning incense-cedars

Democracy Action Team – Get Out the Vote in 2024 Letter Writing Launch, 3/10

Join us to launch our letter writing campaign for 2024 with snacks and coffee in the Social Hall on Sunday March 10 at 1:45pm after the Social Action Lunch. We’ll write letters together, help you get started, and answer questions. You can get started on your own by signing up with Vote Forward (https://votefwd.org/). They’ll provide addresses and letter templates. Critical elections are decided by tiny margins and our letters can make a difference!

Special Dance Planet, 3/2

This Saturday, March 2, we’ll come together for a special Dance Planet at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis. From 7:30 to about 8:45 we’ll move, each in our own way, to a rhythmic flow of music from around the world and across the decades.

But starting at 7 we’ll have a special treat: a 30-minute musical soundscape provided by our own amazing pianist Lauren Servias with a little help from George Beekman. Feel free to bring a yoga mat if you’d like to stretch, breathe, or roll while you warm up.Admission to this family-friendly event is a suggested donation of $5—15. 100 percent of the proceeds will be donated to local environmental organizations.

Spiritual Practices Part 2! 4/1 – 5/6 @6

It’s almost time for the second block of the Spiritual Practices Workshop! You DO NOT NEED TO HAVE TAKEN PART 1 of the Spiritual Practices series to participate in and benefit from part 2 of this series!

This 6-session series will help participants develop regular disciplines of the spirit – practices that help us connect with the sacred. This series affirms religious diversity while seeking unity in our communal quest for meaning and wholeness. Each session offers a forum for learning, sharing, and growth that can enrich our personal faith journeys.

In part 1 of this series, we explored potential daily practices to which one might choose to commit. For part 2, join Skyla King-Christison on Monday evenings, April 1st through May 6th, from 6 to 7 pm in Room 7 as we explore the topics of creating a sabbath, the art of hospitality and belonging, work and service, spiritual retreat, life as a spiritual practice, and pilgrimage.

Please register for this workshop using this form.

Faith-based Climate Action, 2/17/2024

Faith-based climate action this week

Good News

Climate-action Opportunities

Of Note

Save the Date Vote Forward: Solving the climate crisis requires a functioning democracy!  The UUFC Democracy Action Team is partnering with Vote Forward volunteers, who encourage fellow citizens to participate in our democracy by sending handwritten letters to unregistered and low-propensity voters.  Letter writing will begin early March with Zoom and in-person writing events!

CAT sign-ons: CAT worked with the Board to establish criteria for Justice Teams sign-on to and/or endorse justice causes. Applying those criteria, CAT has signed-on to and/or endorsed:

> Support Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty (11/1/23), 

> Support Overnight Cooling Center at OSU (11/4/23), 

> Oppose GTN Xpress Pipeline (12/14/23), 

> Oppose  Removal of Councillor Chalynn Ellis (2/2/24), and  

> Support  Pause on LNG exports (2/13/24). 

CAT’s notifications to the Board of these sign-ons are in this folder.

Bottle Drop:  Support the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition by using its blue Bottle Drop bags. These are in the lime-green bucket on the window-ledge behind the snack table in the social hall. The Corvallis Bottle Drop is behind the WaFa bank on 9th St.

Citizens’ Climate Lobby: Short video describing CCL’s success with respect to advancing the PROVE IT Act.

TED Talk:  Executive director Jonathan Foley presents the Drawdown Roadmap, a science-based framework for identifying the best solutions to use at the right time and in the right place to address climate change while improving human well-being, equity, and justice.  This talk is sure to inform and inspire you as much as it did the live audience of hundreds. 

Oregon Treasurer’s Net-Zero Plan: Divest Oregon response (generally positive) to this plan