Thank you to all who joined the Quarterly Meeting on January 31st! These one-hour meetings are a great opportunity to learn more about all that is happening at Skyline UCC. It is also an opportunity to reflect on how you can become more involved in the activities of the Church. All teams welcome new members. If you are interested in a Service Team or if you have ideas of your own, please reach out to one of the Chairs or let me or Pastor Laurie know.
This quarter, my personal goals are continued focus and support on safety (members, staff, preschool teachers, children and families). I am also facilitating the ad hoc group (Nancy Taylor, Becky Taylor and Pastor Laurie) who is developing the office manager position requirements and assisting Pastor Laurie with hiring Nancy Montier’s replacement. Lastly I plan to work with Council and volunteers on developing our long-term goals.
At the Quarterly Meetings, members and guests heard from Service Team Leaders:
Jane Medema for the Spiritual Life Team
janiemedema@comcast.net 510-263-9798,
Nancy Taylor for the Justice & Witness Team
ngtaylor94619@yahoo.com 510-325-4957, and
Catherine Kessler for the Green Team
cath.kessler@comcast.net 510-499-8114)
Spiritual Life has several activities planned to help guide us through the Lenten period. Justice & Witness has planned several events (including a movie night) in recognition of Black History Month Green Team has been busy maintaining and beautifying our facilities and grounds.
Tom Manley provided the update on the church finances. The good news is that we are doing much better than originally budgeted primarily due to the preschool enrollment being steady and the preschool remaining open since March. We recently received notice that the first PPP Loan has been forgiven. That update will be shared at the next Quarterly Meeting in April.
We announced the retirement of Nancy Montier who has been our Office Manager for 8 years. Everyone will miss Nancy! Her kindness, creativity, commitment and flexibility to the evolving requirements of the position will be hard to replace.
We hope you are finding these quarterly updates valuable and informative. There is always a lot happening at Skyline UCC (please reference your weekly emails for details). I welcome any suggestions or recommendations of what you would like to hear at the next quarterly meeting.
Your Moderator, Carolyn Noble
Thank you for our inspiring experiences on Sunday, both in worship and at our 2nd virtual quarterly meeting! I’d like to extend my deepest thanks to each one of you, for all that we’ve accomplished together, in our 50th year, and during the year of Covid.
One of the many aspects that I love about Skyline is our polity, rooted in a foundational tenet of Congregationalism: the priesthood of believers. That includes YOU! Together, we as a local church, have the right to decide what our faith community’s forms of worship and confessional statements are, who are officers are, how we administer our affairs, and what our ministries are. Given the insistence on independent local bodies, our structure continues to be important in many grassroots, social reform movements, abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, climate justice and the sanctuary movement. Skyline has, over these past fifty years, has been a powerful force, locally, and nationally, in these efforts as a progressive faith community.
This Sunday in worship, we will explore the powerful healing story in Mark’s gospel, about a man in the synagogue possessed by an unclean spirit. I look forward to wondering with you, about this “unclean spirit”. What are you longing for Jesus to name, to silence, and to call forth from you? From this faith community? From this country? What is It that needs healing, and forgiveness, to restore us to wholeness?
Uniting to fight the foes we face: anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. With unity, we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome the deadly virus. We can reward work and rebuild the middle class and make health care secure for all. We can deliver racial justice and we can make America once again the leading force for good in the world.
In June 1965, the Voting Rights Act languished in the House Rules Committee after passage in the Senate. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote 
Join Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity on January 14, as we reflect on the radical legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Let us go beyond mainstream portrayals of Martin Luther King Jr, and how he continues to influence the work of many movements. Participate in prayer, song, storytelling, and action! Featuring Benjamin Mertz!
As part of our commitment to being a Sanctuary Congregation, the Justice & Witness Ministry Team made a proposal to Church Council recently that Skyline become a Congregational Sustainer by having a special offering over several weeks in January, with a goal of raising $2,000 for Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity (IM4HI).
IM4HI began a Congregational Sustainers program in 2019. We currently have 40 congregations who in addition to engaging and partnering with us around the collective work of supporting newcomer immigrants, freeing folks from detention and advocating for new social policies which center people, dignity and liberation, support through the making of an annual gift or an amount that is generous to them. This gift helps support the wider networking, training and capacity building that has really grown in the Bay Area to support congregations. Today we have over 50 sanctuary congregations.
We will meet with legislators, elevate the stories of those most impacted, organize public witness with families, undo all the harms Trump and those before him have done, until we have humane and compassionate policies towards immigrants.
It’s the season of Epiphany! I’m searching for the light of that star, especially this year, how about you?
more, during and after the service about their work and how we can be of support.
Those of us who are hikers know what a cairn is, right? A cairn is a little pile of stones that we sometimes see along the trail — or maybe a marker of some sort — that marks a turning point, or a crossroads in the trail, a decision point.
