Looking Ahead Together

Dear friends,

It is a real pleasure to greet you as the incoming Executive Director of the Canadian Unitarian Council.

I am still a new face to many of you, and I look forward to getting to know you more in the months ahead. My background has been in the education, environmental, and housing sectors, and I come into this role with deep respect for the work, care, and commitment that already live within this community.

I also want to begin with gratitude. The CUC exists because of the many congregations, leaders, ministers, religious educators, lay chaplains, volunteers, staff, and community members who have carried this movement through many seasons of change. Your dedication has helped shape Unitarian Universalism in Canada, and it is from that foundation that we now look ahead.

Unitarian Universalism is at a crossroads in Canada. But this is not the first time. I have been reading Unitarians in Canada by the late Rev. Phillip Hewett, and our history reminds us that we have lived through many periods of growth, contraction, transition, and renewal.

One of the central questions before us is this: how do we respond to membership decline, especially among younger generations, while continuing to serve and honour our existing aging membership?

For decades, we have often measured the health of Unitarian Universalism by who shows up on Sunday. By that measure, we are facing real challenges: declining membership, aging congregations, and buildings that are becoming harder to sustain. Across many denominations, the story is similar.

But I want to suggest that what looks like an ending may also be an invitation.

Unitarian Universalists have never been people who waited for permission. We were the ones who said women could preach when others said they could not. We were the ones who affirmed same-sex couples when doing so still required courage. We were the ones who stood with refugees, with Indigenous communities, with the climate movement, not because it was easy, but because our principles demanded it.

We have always been a people of imagination. We have always been innovators.

So the question before us is not only, “How do we bring people back into our buildings?” though those spaces remain deeply meaningful. The question is also: where is the sacred already gathering, and how do we meet it there?

It may be gathering in a community garden, where strangers become neighbours over shared soil. It may be gathering in cafés, in circles of care, on meditation cushions, in music, in justice work, in co-operative housing, in social enterprises, and in all the places where people are seeking meaning, connection, compassion, and covenant.

Some have called this the Church of the Imagination, a way of naming the spiritual creativity already emerging among UUs in Canada. And in many ways, it is already being built by you, in communities across this country.

Our work in the years ahead is not only to preserve a model. It is to liberate a movement. It is to take the deepest gifts of our tradition: radical welcome, fearless inquiry, beloved community, and the conviction that every person carries inherent worth and dignity, and to set those gifts loose in the world in new forms.

Some of those forms may look different from what came before. That does not have to be a loss. It may be a faithful response to the times we have been given.

As we move forward together, I invite us to carry a different question. Not only, “What did we used to be?” but “What are we becoming?”

Unitarian Universalism in Canada is changing. And if we are courageous, attentive, and faithful to our deepest values, it can be renewed in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

I am grateful to be entering this work with you, and I look forward to listening, learning, and helping care for what is emerging.

With appreciation,

Michael Jodah