The Rev. Jenny Peek will speak. Sometimes climate change feels like the elephant in the room we struggle to talk about. We may feel carried away by Joanna Macy’s steady message of the decades, frightened by the harsh truths as told by Naomi Klein, and moved to tears and action by Greta Thunberg’s clear minded message and school strikes for climate.

And still, here we are. When human ingenuity fails to save the day, what is next?

Rev, Jenny serves our sibling congregation in Pocatello, Idaho.

Melody Lenkner is the Worship Associate

Pam Blankenheim will lead the discussion of the thirteen original Freedom Riders. One of them was Pam’s husband, Ed Blankenheim, who traveled from Washington, D.C. to the deep South in hopes of sitting blacks and whites together to challenge the Jim Crow laws that were active in the South despite UCC rulings that desegregated interstate travel.

The bus Pam’s husband was on was firebombed. These thirteen Freedom Riders barely escaped with their lives. Ed was a young Marine in North Carolina, where he witnessed segregation and racism.

Perri Gardner will lead a celebration of chocolate. “In all its varied and protean forms, love is the tether binding our whirling lives. Without that biological anchor, all of us are flung outward, singly, into the encroaching dark” (Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love, 2000).

Join Magic Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship congregant Perri Gardner for a conversation about how love defines who we are and how we live in community. This service will incorporate an emerging Unitarian Universalist ritual–chocolate communion. Chocolates will be provided!

Cindy Strausbaugh is Worship Associate

Our intern minister Timothy Ellis will be here to explore the principles and values that make up our Unitarian Universalist tradition. Rev. Ellis will reflect on the history of how we built a faith tradition based on principles and commitments rather than doctrine or creed. We’ll also consider what it means for us to reflect on and refine the ways we talk about these principles and values.

Don Morishita is Worship Associate

Nancy Gibson will present a program about wellness. Wellness encompasses our whole being, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Holistic wellness is flexible, forgiving, and aware. Embracing the ancient traditions of civilizations that thrived on planet Earth for millennia is where we begin our wellness journey…

Nancy Gibson is a Certified Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitoner, as well as a Student Success Adviser at CSI. She is a life-long learner, teacher, counselor, and health-minded human.

Cindy Strausbaugh is the Worship Associate

The Rev. Jenny Peek will reflect on Martin Luther King. When the Rev. King dreamt his children would be judged not for the color of their skin but by the content of their character, he was visualizing a path not of color blindness but of human wholeness. Have you ever said or thought, “I don’t see color?” Or its sibling sentiments of tolerance, “I don’t care who you love,” “It doesn’t matter to me if you come from rags or riches.” Such expressions arrest King’s vision, imprisoning the potential in one fell swoop of dismissal.

Join us this Sunday, as our visiting minister Rev. Jenny Peek joins us via Zoom to share her message on the value and necessity of perceiving wholeness in order to love King’s vision into full being.

Jen Okelberry is Worship Associate.

Collete Hoglund will lead a discussion. Continuing with this month’s theme of Finding Our Center, this week’s discussion will focus on mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is present moment awareness without judgment. This discussion will explore further what it means to be mindful and some of the benefits of mindfulness. Also, we will try out a few mindful practices that can be useful in our lives.

Perri Gardner is Worship Associate.

This service will not be on ZOOM.

Don Morishita will present the program. Unitarian Universalism affirms and promotes seven Principles used to guide our lives. Our seventh Principle affirms and promotes respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Social justice, equality, climate change, air and water quality, endangered species and recycling are just a few topics, among the many things in our lives, that are a part of the interdependent web of our existence. According to the Rev. Forrest Gilmore, our seventh Principle may be our Unitarian Universalist way of coming to fully embrace something greater than ourselves. Join us as we discuss how this Principle influences how we live our lives.

Melody Lenkner is the Worship Associate.

The Reverend Timothy Ellis will be reflecting on noticing where we put our energy and the multitude of ways our actions serve us. In the season of New Year’s resolutions, we’ll re-examine New England Transcendentalist beliefs about self improvement through the lens of our current values.

Sylvia Wingfield is Worship Associate

The Reverend Timothy Ellis will present the Christmas program.

Cindy Strausbaugh is Worship Associate.