Connecting with my faith (GA Recap, Part 1)

I've been asked to lead our church service on July 26 to reflect on my experience at this year's Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (June 24-28).  This annual gathering of UUs from around the world is part business meeting, part educational workshops, part rejuvenating worship, part social witness, and part networking event.  Thankfully, I knew I'd have to report back on my experience, so I took some notes on the flight home from Portland.  And lucky for you, faithful blog readers, you get the day-by-day recap of GA!  If you'd rather have the streamlined highlights, you'll have to come to ORUUC on July 26.

Let's start with the flight out to Portland on Tuesday, June 23.  After months of planning with Amanda Weatherspoon (my friend and Young Adult Worship Coordinator for GA), we had pinned down the music, musicians, and rehearsal schedules for our worship services for Young Adults at GA.  So, after getting up at 4AM and driving 2.5 hours to Nashville, I was sitting on my flight to Portland with my iPhone, headphones, and a notebook of sheet music.  I bought a magazine at the airport, but never read it.  Instead, I listened to the songs we had chosen... Songs of hope, songs of resilience, songs of strength.  I thought about the musicians who had agreed to lend their talents to making this music come alive in our worship services.  I took notes about possible arrangements that we could learn in a very short amount of time.  When I landed in Portland, it was still early afternoon - so I was able to catch up with Amanda, check in to the hotel and GA, and register for the GA choir.  The GA choir is my very favorite part of GA.  Singing with close to 200 people from around the country on Sunday morning and afternoon is just wonderful.  I also had the first of MANY milkshakes on Tuesday.  Many.  I kid you not.

Wednesday.  What a great day!  I love to be busy and I love to make music and that's really ALL we did on Wednesday.  We invited Young Adults to join us to make music with us and a couple of them (Em D. and Amanda P.) actually turned up to sing!  So, we did a vocal rehearsal earlier in the day, then pulled together vocals with the band (Matt Meyer, Yuri Yamamoto, and Jeff Chamberlain) later in the day.  Wednesday night's young adult worship was hymn-heavy so that we could pull things together quickly, put we were able to make quite a few of them have a more contemporary feel with the rhythm (thanks, Matt!) or the accompaniment (thanks, Yuri & Jeff!).  Amanda had also recruited two friends from Starr King seminary (Derrick and Jim), who really helped to fill out the harmonies on vocals.  It was a great group - I really enjoyed working with them.  Everyone pitched in with suggestions on arrangements, feel, and even a this-song-sucks-lets-pick-another-one.  It was a great, collaborative process and I think the music worked really well.  THEN, the endless opening ceremony happened.  Our worship was scheduled to begin right after the opening ceremony.  Unfortunately, that event ran over by close to an hour.  Normally, I think we would have just started somewhere in there and let folks come in as the ceremony wrapped up -- but we were collaborating with musicians who were also helping to provide music for the ceremony and couldn't get off stage!  Now there's a fun lesson for ya - musicians are busy folks.  When we finally did get our worship service started, even with the stress of it being late, we had a full room of very engaged young adults who were there ready to hear our message, share our ritual, and join their voices in our songs.  It was beautiful.  I had also been in charge of planning the altar for the worship, which ended up looking amazing.  We had planned for stones in the middle (to represent "you" in this space) and colored sand in the black napkins (to co-create our space), but what happened was something so much more creative and representative of the imaginations of our young adults.

We ended up continuing to add to this altar throughout the week.  It was incredible to watch it evolve.

I'm sensing themes here: collaboration, connection, evolution.

Next up: Thursday - Sunday.  There's so much more to tell!