I am so excited to be with you this Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. for our Service of Installation as we covenant together and make promises to one another to ground and lift our shared ministry. This is a service about us and our future. It is an invitation to individual and communal transformation, in the months and years ahead, within our congregation and through our engagement in the wider world of which we are a part.
Some people have asked about this service versus what happened last May during candidating week. Last May, you affirmed the call. This week is about affirming our covenant.
On May 22, 2022, you voted with great enthusiasm to call me as your next Senior Minister. Our week ended in cheers and singing. We celebrated finding one another and our agreement to enter into a shared ministry together. Candidating week was the tail end of a couple of years of a discernment and a robust search process led by your Ministerial Search Committee.
I arrived in Portland in August, and we began our journey together. It has been so meaningful to begin to get to know you better as individuals and as a community throughout these first eight months together. You have testified to both the power and place this church has held in your lives and in our city, both recently and over the decades. You have also begun to share some of your hopes for the future of our community of all ages.
Our theme of the year, “Rooted in Relationship,” grew out of some early conversations with some of you who shared a longing for re-connection to our faith, to one another, and to our city as we emerge from the pandemic. A number of you shared that you had become disconnected during the pandemic, or that you are new to the community and want to have opportunities to know others and be known by others. I am so glad to see that there are new small groups and practice groups popping up throughout the year to begin to expand the connections among us. And, it has been wonderful and moving each Sunday, to meet new people and returning people in our sanctuary for worship. We will continue to build avenues of connection and belonging.
Our Service of Installation marks the completion of the search process – searching, finding, calling, covenanting. We will be companioned in our ritual by special guests, including the Reverend Rosemary Bray McNatt, the President of Starr King School for the Ministry, and Charles Du Mond, the Co-Moderator and Chief Governance Officer of the Unitarian Universalist Association. The order of service, the liturgy for this worship, is intended to celebrate, to challenge, and to inspire us to rise to the promise of our faith in this place and this time and in the years ahead. By the way, ‘liturgy’ means ‘the work of the people.’ Again, an installation is about ‘We’ who love and guide this church – you and me together.
Our Installation Team has been talking about how Spring is a fitting time for this celebration. It is a time of renewal, hope, and planting seeds for our future. May the words we speak and the words that are offered to us by our guests cultivate in us joy, wisdom, resilience, and faith. May our lives and our spirits be nourished by what we grow together in all the months, and all the years to come.
In faith,
Alison
Rev. Alison Miller (she/her/hers)
Senior Minister, First Unitarian Church of Portland
1034 SW 13th Ave., Portland, OR, 97205
503-228-6389
amiller@firstunitarianportland.org
www.firstunitarianportland.org
To make a pastoral appointment on my calendar, go to:
www.calendly.com/alisonmiller