Bob gave a talk titled “The Multifaceted History of UUNB” at UUNB on Feb 26, 2023. The slides and transcript from his presentation follow.
The service this morning is going to be a departure from what you’re used to. I’ll be taking you on a slide ride through the history of CCUUS & UUNB as seen through various lenses. BTW, since Unitarian-Universalism is such a tongue twister, I’m going to forego saying it every time and use the abbreviation UU instead.
Our history is a story of faith and determination that we could make what we wanted to accomplish happen.
As this talk developed, the time divided itself into 4 to 5 year chapters as shown here.
I’ll use these to keep you oriented to the timeline.
Beginnings
Our beginning was an idea in Thea Chessher’s mind.
This is Thea, our founder and Matriarch. She was a political activist, a yellow-dog Democrat, an evangelical UU, and a get-er-done kind of person. One thing she wanted to get done was save the drive to Austin for church by starting a UU church here in New Braunfels and this advertisement in the H-Z was the result. Seventeen people responded to her invitation and met at her house, the beginning of our church in October 1995.
This fledgling, still nameless group was nomadic for a while but found a home for our Wednesday night forums, as they were called, at Faith UCC’s Fellowship Hall in early 1996. The Live Oak UU church in Austin donated money for us to open a bank account to help us get started, and needing an account name, CCUUS was born. We hired a retired UCC minister, Rev Les Pugh, to speak one Wednesday night per month. So, as we have now, we began with a mix of professional and lay led services.
A couple of years later, in 1998, we voted to join the SWUUC and the UUA, we elected our first full slate of officers and Board members under newly adopted bylaws, and became a Texas corporation. In January 1999, the UUA Board of Trustees approved CCUUS as an official UUA Member Congregation. We became the UU church in NB that Thea dreamed of and was determined to create.
Expanding
We sent our first delegation to the UUA General Assembly …
… in 2001 and church members created a banner to carry in their Procession of Congregations, still proudly hanging in our church today. We did the study effort required to be a Welcoming Congregation from 2001 to 2003 earning the plaque that hangs in our hallway. We also made the decision in late 2001 to start Sunday mornings services, an idea that had come up earlier. We we formed a worship committee to create the order of service, and arranged for renting two rooms at the Comal County Senior Citizen’s Center.
Some folks still preferred the Wednesday night Forums over Sundays, so we accommodated them by having both.
We gathered our Sunday service needs in January 2002 and moved into the Senior Center. Some supplies had to be shared with our Wednesday night forums so we became the “Church of the Sacred Car Trunk” as we moved between venues.
Our first Sunday service was on February 3, 2002, with the banner prominently displayed in front. About 30 people showed up, a really good turnout and a harbinger for the solid future of the Sunday services, still going on today, 21 years later.
By the second Sunday …
… we had the lectern banner and the beautiful chalice designed and commissioned by two church members that is on our altar today.
Here are a few scenes from our days at the Senior Center to contrast what we enjoy today to then, in both the meeting room and children’s RE.
Our October 26 sermon that year was to be on the Wiccan roots of Halloween, which caused a major ruckus. A Senior Center member looked up Wicca, saw its connection to witchcraft and threatened their Board with revocation of their 501C3 designation if the sermon was allowed to go on. They tried to get us to not present it, which we refused to do.
We arrived at the Senior Center Sunday morning to find our entry door chained and padlocked. We milled around in the parking lot extremely upset but, in the end, being determined to not allow their censorship and to have our service, we adjourned to Thea’s house for it.
Our relationship with the Senior Center was rocky for a while and required some finessing to continue there. So, we launched a search for other venues in NB that might not be so biased but found nothing available to us. Thus, our very first thoughts that we needed a place of our own. This memorable event contained both joy and sorrow; sorrow at the censorship we experienced but joy at seeing a possible new future for us. We really need our own building.
We had our first Mission/Vision workshop in January 2003, led by two folks from the SWUUC. They started with an overview of the process then had us meet in small groups to discuss our values, our goals as a congregation, and our vision for our future. After that, we gathered to share all our ideas and create a final picture of who we are and where we wanted to go. A particular vision from Thea was land with lots of trees and greenery and windows to see it all, which we have today.
We started searching for land to build on, initially focused on land in the county where we could build ourselves since we had all the required talent, unencumbered by city permits and inspections. That continued for many months without success. So, we started considering land or even buildings in town that might be within our budget but found nothing that fit our needs and budget.
Building
Our land search ended in 2005. After fruitless searches over the previous two years, members Paul McGaffic and Jim Berry set out one day determined to find a property – and succeeded; 135 Alves Lane. This was biggest step yet in our church development but we were confident of our ability to do it and determined to not let fear of commitment get in our way.
We arranged financing with a church member and completed the acquisition in June. We reviewed the paperwork, signed on the dotted line, and handed over the check.
On the 10th anniversary of the founding of CCUUS we had a birthday party, put up a sign announcing our future church home, and had a land blessing ceremony with the old house still on the property.
The blessing included scattering seeds to the four corners of the property to make it green and pretty for all of us. We declared 2006 the “Year of the Building,” starting with a fundraising house concert and dinner in January.
For the rest of 2006 and into 2007, our Long-Range Planning Committee wrestled with possible designs for our building, getting ideas and wish lists from the congregation. In the end, we voted to pursue a design by our member architect, Dwight Micklethwait. We also had an offer to sell the old house to be moved off the property and promptly accepted their $5,000 payment toward our new building.
We formed a Finance committee to consider the important question of how we could raise the money to proceed. The first step was an estimate of how much we would need to build, provided by Dwight; a big gulp, $400,000. The second was a capital campaign to see how much we could raise just to start. Not enough. After several options were considered for financing the balance, we decided on selling Promissory Notes with an attractive interest rate.
The congregation then met to consider the scary decision to go ahead; it was debated and approved. We opened the sale of Promissory Notes and added $20,000 per year of debt service to the budget, about tripling it. But, we were fully confident and determined that we would find the means to cover it.
Dwight then took on the very large task, gratis, of creating the detailed drawings needed for construction, soliciting bids, selecting a contractor, and supervising the construction process.
On April 1, 2007 we had a huge garage sale on the property (click) as a fundraiser and to help us get acquainted with our new neighbors on Alves Lane. It also gave us a chance to show off a model of the initial design by Dwight (click) so that everyone could have a preview of what would soon occupy the site.
Dwight later made some grand modifications to the design to make it much more dramatic, the building we have today.
Then, the old house was removed …
We broke ground for the new building on April 15 and received our building permit in June.
The next group of slides document the construction and the sweat equity that we put into doing much of the interior work and finishing both inside and out.
It started as a dream.
The dream started to grow with the pouring of the foundation.
Then rose with the framing of the building.
Which included an early inspection by some of our members.
Once the construction was complete, it was time to start earning sweat equity.
We finished the inside of the foyer and meeting room.
We finished and painted the Religious Education room in bright colors with help from the kids.
We painted the kitchen and installed cabinets that we had purchased separately.
Everybody pitched in as we prepared the floors for staining.
And as we did the outside finishing and painting.
The end product was worth all the effort. How wonderful indeed.
In 2008, members and friends contributed the final items needed to open. Like 100 chairs so we would have adequate seating in our meeting room. Interior furnishings, some new and some used, like the altar table and the foyer credenza, among so much more. We knew we were bound to be successful when Jackie Russell and Jane Miller gifted us with an extraordinary Steinway baby ground piano. We put lightbulbs in all the sockets and toilet paper in the bathrooms and FINALLY…
On May 18 we had our first Sunday service. We called it “Celebration Sunday” and celebrate we did. After preparing the meeting room, we tied the doors closed with a ribbon. As people entered the building, we had them que in the hallway and handed out hymnals. Then Dwight cut the ribbon and we processed into the meeting room singing “Enter, Rejoice, and Come In”. We gathered for the first service and at the end, we danced – as we often did when “Let it be a Dance” was played.
On October 25, thirteen years to the day after our first small meeting in Thea’s living room, we dedicated the building which we now call home.
We settled into our new building and continued with our Wednesday night Forums and Sunday services. We started working on church improvements inside and out to make it more comfortable and attractive, just as you would do after moving into a new house.
Maturing
From the beginning, we had wanted to build as green as possible, with the objective of earning a UUA “Green Sanctuary” designation to show our dedication to the environment. So, we used the best insulation in the building walls to save energy. We used a metal roof so we could have a water catchment system, installed soon after we moved in, to use for landscape watering.
We installed solar and battery powered parking lot lights. We installed a gravel- based parking lot to minimize the impervious ground cover and allow rain to soak into the ground rather than run off. This, BTW, proved to be a popular playground for cutting doughnuts, still occurring today. As the result of this effort from the congregation, we did receive our Green Sanctuary certification.
We needed a sign out front to let the world know we were here. But being in an R2 zoned neighborhood, we couldn’t put up the giant electronic sign we wanted, so we opted for the large but rather inconspicuous sign, on wheels so that it is “portable,” that we have today. Of course, it hasn’t been moved since we put it there 15 years ago but it meets the zoning requirements of not being permanent.
We added a small playground for the children, with thoughts of adding an even larger one when possible. We continued cleaning up the property and adding landscaping with regular member work parties.
Squeezed into our long narrow lot, we eyed the mostly empty lots next to us. We discovered the lot to our North was in two parts and bought the vacant back part directly from the owner. The front part, with a small decrepit house on it, eventually became available and was purchased by Jackie Russell and Jan Estes. The house was offered free for removal, and after it was gone, the church purchased the lot from them.
A Memory Garden was created to memorialize our members, called that to avoid permitting challenges associated with the name memorial garden, and built on the recently acquired land. The garden was constructed with help from Dwight and church members. The first stones were laid in 2013. The Memory Garden has been a popular place for memorial services, rituals and other celebrations over the years.
Recognizing that many people had contributed significantly to CCUUS’s development, the Board created the Thea Award for Exceptional Service to CCUUS in 2012. It was awarded to Thea first for starting the church but to several others since and hangs in the foyer in recognition of their many contributions.
Children’s RE and childcare have always been a valued part of our church, with various paid helpers and volunteers over the early years. Recognizing the importance of professional skills, we hired our first paid DRE, who generally had 5-6 kids in RE during her tenure.
We became active in the community with many outreach ministries that continue today; delivering Meals on Wheels, manning the SOS food bank, participating in Habitat for Humanity, joint participation with Unity Church in Family Promise, the Interfaith Welcome Coalition, the Community in Schools backpack program. Social justice is obviously a core value of UUNB. We also rented the building to outside organizations with values similar to ours, sometimes at near zero rent as a way to support groups such as Narcotics Anonymous. This made our presence in NB better known.
Our building is popular as a performance venue for concerts, with good acoustics thanks to Dwight, who researched and installed the sound baffles, and to the presence of our fine Steinway piano. In particular, the Piatagorsky Foundation frequently schedules their concerts here and we how have the Chamber Music series on a regular basis. We’ve also had a few house concerts with local and visiting musicians, including a fabulous cabaret night with Yesenia McNett early on.
We celebrated the 20-year anniversary of our first meeting in Thea’s living room on Oct 25, 2015. We enjoyed a catered dinner and a special program by Pete Goodwin, with a 35’ timeline of our history displayed across the back wall. As a part of this celebration, our name was officially changed from CCUUS to UUNB. This new name was chosen to avoid having to make the contentious decision of whether to call ourselves a church, fellowship, society, congregation or whatever. A form of consensus at work.
Growing
Our Treasurer had strongly encouraged the congregation to make extra donations during the early years in our building so that we could make as many extra principal payments as possible. The congregation responded and we were able to pay off our Promissory notes earlier than expected, in July 2019, ….
and had a ceremonial burning of the retired notes in the parking lot.
We had tried to purchase the vacant back part of the property to our South, as we had the North, without success. When that property finally came on the market, a member purchased it, offered the house free for removal, and then gifted the land to UUNB. That increased the size of our campus to four and a third acres, ample room for future development.
Jessica Blasingame-Acox took the position of DRE in August of 2016. Since then, our kid’s RE attendance numbers climbed to an average of 12 to 16 before the pandemic. We were bursting at the seams in the RE room, prompting us to consider and plan for expansion of the building, with a proposed RE addition on the Southwest corner of the building. Dwight completed a design, priced it, and we considered how to pay for it though never got to the point of pursuing construction.
Our history just says that we hired our first quarter time Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev Addae Ama Kraba in 2017. There is so much behind that simple statement that it begs for expansion. Two regular congregational meetings were intended to make a decision, but – the second became so contentious that the then President called a halt to the meeting and declared a negative vote. A majority of the congregation didn’t accept that result and called for a special congregational meeting to reconsider. The result was then a vote to proceed. I include this because it emphasizes that the congregation always makes the final decision.
We then went through the UUA suggested hiring process starting with a congregation approved minister selection committee who wrote the job description, posted the opening on the UUA/SRUUA web sites, received and reviewed responses, interviewed candidates and made the selection. That was, (Click) of course, Rev Addae, who was hired under contract and delivered her first sermon in October 2017.
Our congregation continued to grow. Our parking lot was often full and needed enlarging. We increased the handicapped parking area to accommodate more disabled members and visitors. At one time, we reached a maximum membership of 100 people and, on one memorable Sunday, had a total of 100 people in the church between the meeting room and children’s RE. What a thrill that was.
Covid
At the beginning of 2020, we began to hear of this illness called Covid 19 in China, not realizing the major impact it would eventually have on us. By March of 2020, the Board decided we needed to end in-person meetings and meet via the on-line application Zoom. Which we did entirely for the rest of 2020 and much of 2021. It was certainly not the same as in-person, face-to-face but did allow us to maintain some much-needed contact during that time.
Zooming entirely from home, the congregation sorely missed service elements such as a real chalice lighting, live music on our Steinway, a speaker at the lectern and just seeing the inside of our building.
So, we had our first Zoom service from church on October 24, 2021. We did this for some time with a pianist, a service leader, and speaker, along with the Zoom operators.
During the pandemic, we maintained virtual RE and childcare sessions, and offered outdoor special events, keeping our RE families connected as much as possible. Post pandemic, we still have most of those families involved, and our RE attendance is steadily increasing in numbers again, averaging 5-7 school aged students in kids’ RE each week, with just as many of our younger ages in childcare. We now have a weekly 2 person childcare staff, with Jessica and a volunteer, or another paid helper in RE. Through the years, our superstar RE Committee has supported Jessica and previous DREs through thick and thin, including transitions between DREs and rebuilding after the pandemic. Without them, there would be no Kids’ RE.
As the pandemic waxed and waned, the Board took a cautious approach to reopening, first with social distancing, full vaccination and facemask requirements, and no hymns or coffee and conversation in the meeting room. Since children weren’t vaccinated yet, we divided the church into adult and children’s areas for a while to keep them separated and allow children to return. Then, over time, the requirements were gradually relaxed to recommendations and we are still slowly working our way back to normal.
The two years of Covid certainly had a major impact on UUNB, I guess most notably on children’s RE. Though Jessica got the children together in person as best she could during this time, RE attendance fell off dramatically. We went from needing to expand our RE space to needing to fill it again. Which is in progress now.
Adult attendance once we reopened was also down as were Sunday donations, earnings from rentals, and sales of HEB cards. So, finances didn’t look too good. And guess what, we are not alone. At Zoom sessions with other churches in the Southern Region as part of the Leadership Experience that Irene and I have been taking, and others are just starting, they all report the same. And that is true for other denominations as well, not just UUs. But we are in a rebuilding mode now and can undo the Covid damage.
BTW, I’m sorry that the UUA calls the Leadership Experience that. It really doesn’t benefit just those wanting to get into church leadership. The information in it about UUism is valuable to anyone in the church who takes the course.
And since we are an Honor Congregation because we have, from the very beginning, paid our Fair Share donation to the UUA every year, there is no cost to anyone who takes it. Give it some thought.
I hope this slide ride has been a walk down memory lane and a source of pride to you longer term members at what we have accomplished through our determination and faith in our future. And for the newer members, I hope it gives you some inspiration, a picture of the work it took to make this church happen, and a vision of our possible future.
On to the next chapter.
Thank you.