They are making this so hard

Several months ago I made a personal commitment that I was going to stick it out with this UU church no matter how challenging that was. I have felt quite disconnected for a while now. The entire congregation is going through a difficult time now (attendance is down, key members have left the church, complaints about the minister and board run rampant, etc.). Over the summer we've been having communication (ha!) sessions to try to figure out what exactly is the problem and then in August we are supposed to take the information gathered and figure out how to fix it. A major problem they've found so far is poor communication (both in quantity and quality). There is a sense of "gatekeeping" at the upper levels and lots of people are feeling left out of the process.

I have to admit that I feel funny even talking about this publicly and probably will limit how much detail I give out just because I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings just in case someone from church stumbled upon my blog. It feels very painful...almost like marital trouble. Going to church and even reciting the covenant has become very painful (for me, anyway). I have been avoiding the services and only going when I am teaching kids' RE.

Well, yesterday we had a guest speaker from the Heartland District (our district within UUA) to speak about building a nurturing community. Following the service was a "light lunch" in the social hall and then there was supposed to be a workshop for the entire congregation in the meeting house/sanctuary. I was teaching the Preschool RE class for the day and had my 4yo son along with me. Overall attendance was low (even for a summer service), but I had 5 kids in class. After the children had been picked up and I straightened up the room and vacuumed the carpet, I took my son over to the main building for lunch before the workshop I'd been planning to attend. I'd been "on duty" for two hours and needed to stop at the restroom first.

When we came out of the restroom and made our way to the food table, I was shocked to see that there was nothing left!! Well, no real food anyway. On the children's table all that was left were marshmallows, bite size candy bars, two trays of cookies, a bowl of jelly beans, a couple of tubes of gogurt and some string cheese. On the adult table there were maybe two spoonfuls of salad left and on the drink table there was one little cup of lemonade. I gave D the lemonade and he grabbed a gogurt and a cookie. I had water and the salad and a handful of peanuts.

It was crowded with no place left to sit so we took our things outside to sit under a tree by ourselves. There were a couple of other RE teachers behind me and I had to warn them there was no food left. Guess that's what you get for volunteering your time to teach RE, huh?

We ate what little we had, but I could tell this wasn't going to cut it. I was hungry and a hungry 4yo is no fun to be with, let me tell you. If we stayed, we'd have been there another two hours. I said forget it. We got in the van and left. I decided we'd eat lunch at home and forget the workshop.

So much for community building...