Join us on Sunday, April 23 at 10:30 a.m. as we Install Rev. Dr. María Cristina Vlassidis Burgoa as our settled minister at East Shore!
Answering the call to ministry is more than just a career choice. Being ordained into professional religious leadership and accepting a call to parish ministry are both life-changing events. With careful planning, the services of Ordination and Installation are opportunities not only to celebrate these profoundly transformative moments, but also to embody our Unitarian Universalist history and theology in meaningful and just ways. It’s our shared responsibility to create services that reflect the depth and power of our tradition as well as our unique identities and cultures.
An installation service formally celebrates the covenantal relationship between a minister and the congregation that has called the minister.
An Installation service marks the congregation’s successful completion of the ministerial search process—the weeks and months of self-examination and self-promotion as they hope to attract someone who is qualified to be, and who wants to be, their new minister. The congregational vote to call the minister—often held months earlier, during the minister’s candidating week—is the act that leads to the installation, which is a celebration of the joy both parties feel for having found one another, and their agreement to enter into a covenant of shared ministry.
The Installation isn’t something the congregation does for the minister; rather, it honors and celebrates the promises you are making to one another as you knit yourselves into shared ministry. As a result, the Service of Installation is centered around a spoken ritual that lifts up your covenant of shared ministry. As with the Service of Ordination, it’s a worship service that offers an invitation to individual and communal transformation as well as an opportunity to live our faith in the world.
The connection between a minister and a congregation is especially apparent in a service of Installation, as an affirmation of the covenant between them: minister and congregation are accountable to each other, as well as to the larger denomination and world in which they live out their shared ministry.
Yet another relationship exists as the source of call: that between minister and Spirit, the Divine, the Beloved, Humanity, or however you name it. “It is this beckoning from the divine, a desire to do our work and live our lives in constant relationship with the divine that constitutes a ‘call.’”
An installation service—which uplifts covenant and shared ministry—is about more than the match between an individual and the congregation: it’s an opportunity to affirm our covenant to work together to create the beloved community.
In the Act of Installation, the promises focus not on the minister’s lifelong commitment to serve, but rather on the new covenant between minister and congregation. These promises bind us to one another: we choose one another in a radical act of faith.
[Adapted from the UUA Ordination & Installation Handbook]