Services

Reverend Furrer will lead this traditional service... virtually! Bring some water so you can visualize pouring it into the communal bowl.

What does it mean to make promises to ourselves and others? Join us to reflect upon the challenges and rewards experienced when we make promises to one another in our faith community. Presented by the Right Relations Team.

Bias is an inescapable part of the human experience, but what we do with, and how we react to our biases is very much in our control. While our natural instinct may be to put things into categories and boxes , there is a space that can enrich our interactions with everyone around us, the space beyond boxes. This Sunday, please join us as our BCT facilitator, Amanda Schuber, talks about the ways that identity and bias impact our relationships with each other and the wider world.

Let me begin this year by reminding everyone that it will be my last among you and that Carol and I will be leaving come June. Which is a good thing. New wine is not to be poured into old wineskins, else the new wine will burst them and ruin the whole project. New wine must be put into new receptacles. Citations from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Stephen Levine, Forrest Church, and more.

“A Thousand Names for Joy” is a book commended to me by church member Lassie Jordan. Lassie also made the top bid at last year’s auction, gave me a copy, and asked me to preach on author Byron Katie’s guidebook for healthy, wholesome living. Come for a synopsis and invitation to everyday spiritual practice.

Rev Furrer. on resisting the temptation to cut corners, fake results, or fudge data. And what one gains in the process. 

Rev. Furrer, preaching on the perilous state of democratic society in the current age, how we can defend it, and what are our prospects of success?

In 1925 Mohandas Gandhi published his Social Sins of the Modern World, the last of which was Religion Without Sacrifice. The celebration Veterans Day reminds us of our fallen veterans' sacrifices, but what can we say of their religion? 

Les McCann and Roberta Fleck’s hit protest song/single “Compared to What” was subsequently recorded by more than 270 artists, including Ray Charles and Brian Auger. Rev Furrer will use that platform to consider what we can and should be thankful for.

Many congregations are adopting an 8th Principle of Unitarian Universalism, which calls us to anti-racism, the beloved community, and accountability. What if there was a 9th Principle? What still needs to be said? What is missing from who we say we are, and how can we make that real?
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson is the Senior Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church, Rockford, IL, where he has served since 2008. He spent his teenage years at East Shore (you know his mom, Wenda Collins), before attending Whitman College, Meadville Lombard Theological School and Iliff School of Theology. He is the author of Newborn Bards: A Theology of Preaching for Unitarian Universalists.

Rev Furrer, preaching on the evolution of the mythic figure we all know as Santa Claus.

Good King Wenceslas has long been my favorite Christmas Carol, partly because it includes a verse with my name in it, but far more because of its poignant social outreach message in a medieval context, its crisp, clear images, and its lovely melody.