Ministry Teams
While the board of trustees oversees policy and what our mission is, the minister oversees how we will achieve the mission through a variety of ministry teams. Some of them are listed below.
Engagement Team
The purpose of the Engagement Team is to develop a membership engagement path via hospitality groups, social activities, ministry team involvement, and leadership development. Our goal is to strengthen the member connection to the fellowship community and to encourage members to become involved in committees and leadership roles.
Worship Team
The UUFoM Worship Team is charged with the important work of assisting and supporting professional staff and lay leaders in building meaningful worship services every Sunday of the year. The team assists and supports Rev. Eric Severson with worship services on the Sundays that he speaks and is responsible for creating and managing all of the other services during the year. The team creates one service each month during the church year when Rev. Eric does not speak and provides all of the Sunday services during the summer when Rev. Eric is on vacation and study leave.
Worship Team members work with Rev. Eric as well as the church accompanist, the choir director, the director of religious education, lay leaders, guest ministers, and professional and non-professional community speakers to create worship services. The team is actively engaged in a wide range of hands-on work, including tasks such as building the church worship calendar, reaching out to ministers and other speakers, filling the worship associate and other worship service roles, selecting readings, creating orders of service, as well as acting as worship associates or lay-led speakers themselves.
In March of 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, the team worked diligently with Rev. Eric and the professional staff to learn how to create meaningful virtual worship services over Zoom, and team members were recognized as unsung heroes for their work. The tasks of virtual worship included learning the technology required to hold services through Zoom conferences; training volunteers to act in technical roles required to run slides and multiple Zoom functions; training volunteers in other behind-the-scenes roles required for virtual services, including document editors for creating the slides and the script; and actively holding the majority of those positions each week to maintain services for congregants when they could not meet in person.
The Worship Team continues to learn and create visions for future worship, working with professional and volunteer staff to provide multiplatform worship (continuing virtual services after in-person services resume). The team envisions revisiting their work on creating sacred space for worship and what that looks like in our congregation so that all who enter may feel welcome.
If you would like to know more or would like to participate in the Worship Team, please reach out to Wendy at [email protected].