New Blog for the Church of The Larger Fellowship!

2015-11-10

You know how it is; you’re going along with your own life and it all seems obvious to you, just the usual. But at the Church of the Larger Fellowship, life is interesting and complicated. [quote style=”boxed” float=”right”]We’re an experiment in process, seeing what it means to create authentic connections in a virtual world.[/quote] We’re an experiment in process, seeing what it means to create authentic connections in a virtual world. So this new blog is for the folks who want to look behind the curtain—to know the who and the how and the why that goes into what we all do. Here, we’ll share the news about CLF as it unfolds—milestones and decisions and questions that are baffling to us, new programs coming down the pike, policies from the board, reflections from our lay volunteers, interesting tidbits about our community members.

We hope you’ll enjoy it! There are a lot of people who will be blogging. If it gets hard to keep track of who’s who, please go to the about section of our website to meet our board and staff and fellows.

[quote style=”boxed” float=”left”]Our interest is in making what we are doing transparent, and also in providing a place where people can see a bit about the many pieces of our work.[/quote] We will share stories that computer geeks will like and others for church geeks. Some for totally hip people who aren’t geeks at all . . . surely there must be a hipster amongst us. There will be excitement about new projects and frustrations shared when things aren’t going as we’d hoped. Our interest is in making what we are doing transparent, and also in providing a place where people can see a bit about the many pieces of our work.

Here are some basics, in case you don’t know:

• CLF’s administrative staff is housed at 24 Farnsworth Street in Boston, Massachusetts, through the generous hospitality of the Unitarian Universalist Association, of which we are a member congregation.
• The rest of our staff is all over the place—Rev. Jorge Espinel, doing our Latino Ministry in Colombia, speaks on a regular basis to staff colleagues in every time zone of the United States (OK, we’ve got no one in Alaska or Hawaii).
• Our board gathers twice a year in person from all over the US–we have had people from other countries at times but not right now.
• Much of our creative programming is done by a group of five Learning Fellows—these folks are in or just out of seminary, or other passionate learners who are exploring new ways of doing ministry.

Here are more basics:

• Overall our congregation is about 3,500 people from dozens of places.
• By the time you read this, our prison ministry will have surpassed 700 members.
• Lots of religious professionals and lay leaders keep us as their home church as they move around professionally.
• CLF was started during WWII as an outreach to American soldiers, and was a program of the American Unitarian Association.
• In 1970, CLF became an independent congregation and ceased being a program of the UUA. This means, before long, we’ll be turning 50!

I’m delighted to have you get to know our fantastic team in this blog. Whether or not you consider CLF your congregation, I hope you’ll comment on our posts in the section below. Ask the questions you’d like to have answered. We’d love to hear from you!