Partner Church Matters

by Carol Hays

In 1993 through the UU Partner Church program, our congregation became partners with a UU congregation in the Transylvanian village of Szekelykal, Romania. Over the course of our now twelve-year partnership, members of our congregation have visited with our partners in Szekelykal three times, with the most recent being Axel’s visit during his sabbatical last spring, and sustained a vibrant relationship through letters and now e-mail correspondence as well as exchanged gifts as reminders of our relationship. We have officially designated the entry area downstairs by the elevette as a space to honor and continually remind us of our church partnership. The Szekelykal congregation has given us a beautiful hand carved chandelier, which we have hung along with samples of Romanian hand stitching in this space. And last month the Partner Church committee reciprocated with a framed copy of the lovely pen and ink drawing of our church as a visual reminder of our relationship for their church building.

In order to build and sustain a relationship that is meaningful to both partners, we have also planned and carried out specific projects to increase our partner’s capacity and opportunities for spiritual expression and learning, and found ways to practice our own guiding UU principles in very real ways.

Over the past 2 years, we have contributed around $5,500 toward several capital projects implemented by the members of the Szekelykal congregation that have helped the church remain a viable and vital center for spiritual growth and practice in their village. These include:

Building and beginning to furnish a community hall--a parish building similar to our parish hall where the congregation can come together for church meetings and social gatherings. This building provides a space for the youth and women’s groups and the minister is now able to use his living room as something other than a meeting space.
Helping to install a furnace in the minister’s house—we hear that a warm minister offers more insightful sermons
Repairing water damage to the church building—we’ve certainly experienced that frustration and cost ourselves.
Re-roofing the church and restoring the clock tower, so that it is once again a visual and meaningful reminder throughout the village of the church’s presence and social importance.
We also provided a small fund for the congregation’s youth group to use toward helping others outside of their congregation so that they may practice and grow in their generosity, a value we have spoken much of this past year in our own congregation.

What we would consider to be a small investment can go a long way toward making a sustainable difference in the spiritual lives and experience for many people in this small village half a world away from us.

The Partner Church committee is now seeking to develop a scholarship fund to provide educational opportunities for young people, especially young girls, beyond those available in the village of Szekelykal. Promoting educational opportunities and advancement for women contributes to social justice, general economic advancement and democratization.

While the Partner Church relationship is not meant to be a checkbook relationship, and especially not to create a financial dependency between North American UU churches and UU partner churches, it does offer us as a congregation an opportunity to provide very real foreign aid to people we know will be able to put it to effective and meaningful use. It is mutual responsibility of the partners to carefully dedicate financial resources in ways that promote the healthiest possible partnership relationship between our churches.

The explicit focus of the Partner Church program is to support the development of shared understanding, friendship and experience between partner congregations. Most importantly, as partners, we are advised to seek to understand how we and our partner may view the partnership differently.

What is most important to know about the UU Partner Church program, and the reason I joined our own Partner Church Committee, is that it is indeed about building and sustaining the wonder, learning, satisfaction, and admitted messiness of relationships. Our partner church relationship offers our congregation and us as individual UU’s with opportunities and benefits beyond friendship and a meaningful way to direct our resources and social action. Reports of how these relationships have manifest and enriched the lives of other UU partner churches fill the pages of the Partner Church Newsletter. We’ll be adding a link to the newsletter on our church’s new social action website and you’ll find samples to peruse at the display table in the Fellowship Hall after the service.

As we learn and experience throughout our lives, relationships are what feed us, encourage us to grow and sustain us emotionally, spiritually, and physically. The partner church experience offers both partners an opportunity to learn and practice listening and to increase our knowledge, understanding and acceptance of each partner’s history, culture, customs and theology—skills that we all need to co-exist in and to sustain a diverse yet increasingly interdependent world.

At the upcoming annual meeting on May 10th, the Partner Church Committee will be asking for the congregation to re-affirm our existing partner church relationship with the Szekelykal congregation and to extend our hand in partnership to a second congregation in the Khasi Hills of India, where Axel to visited on his sabbatical last spring. As we do so, the Partner Church Committee will be seeking new ways to expand opportunities for practicing partnership and all the bounty that comes from building and sustaining such relationships. We invite other congregational committees to consider how they might contribute to and benefit from the gift of our Church partnerships.