Every month we honor one of our many great volunteers.
Teresa Meeks was brought up in a pretty conservative Protestant church in Falls Church. She stayed with it until a close friend was fired by the church for being gay. After that, she was only interested in communities that supported LGBT members and staff. Her journey began with Arlington UUC and then Paint Branch where she met her future husband Fred Teal.…
Margo Kelly grew up in an Irish Catholic family but the religious part did not quite fit. While she liked the rituals, she did not like the patriarchy or the church’s stance on many social issues. For a time, she found the folk services at National Cathedral filled some of the gaps, but found the…
Jamie Jorgensen was happily Mormon for most of the first forty years of his life. He remembers with affection the structure and community that the church gave him with special fondness for his year and a half doing missionary work in Brazil. Over time, differences began to build up. Jamie leans non-theistic and socially liberal, neither of which are standard Mormon doctrine.…
Laurie Mears started off as a child in Unitarianism, and that’s important. Unitarians were rare birds in Kansas in the 1940s and early 50s, and the congregation held their children as precious. She always felt that folks were interested in her and who she was becoming. Fast forward to college, where she meets Preston Mears…
Pre-K Colin arrived with his parents Drew and Beth in the early 1980’s and like many of our children found Bobbi Pohl teaching his RE class. Colin went through the whole RE curriculum, the predecessor to OWL, and then YRUU. From this experience, UUism came to mean seeing our place in an interconnected web of…
Carolyn Savadkin and her husband came to UUCSS from Paint Branch UUC in the Fall of 1966. They were looking for a church that was socially active willing to preach and work against both the Vietnam War and racism. On the day they Signed the Book, Fred Cappuccino was in the pulpit and announced he…
Jo Paoletti learned the basics about the UU faith from an elementary school friend – UU’s don’t believe that Jesus is God and John was drunk when he wrote the Book of Revelations. She didn’t revisit UUs again until 1982, when she was horrified at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres in Lebanon and…
UU speak has many special touchstones, none more powerful than spiritual home. For many of us, a spiritual home is a place of repose and safety. For Eli a spiritual home is a place where we are called to fulfill our purpose. She has fulfilled many roles since joining UUCSS in 1999 – Worship Commitee Chair, steward for the Annual…
Bob and Bev McGaughy knew their time with mainline Christianity was over when their young son Danny pointed to a cross on a church steeple and said, “That’s where the Jews killed Jesus.” This led to twenty years at All Souls UUC that better fit their religious understanding. They moved again when their daughter Ay…
Erica Anderson grew up Catholic in northeastern Pennsylvania, but Catholicism had never held much meaning for her. After a time of being unchurched and now out of college she began looking for the community that a church provides. Erica found the UU Fellowship of Centre County in State College, Pa. which was much more in…