We gathered once more to enjoy choir-leader Amanda Taylor’s wonderful music, whilst those of us (including yours truly, who had been allocated to the tenor section) who had volunteered for the scratch choir due to perform in the final day’s worship hoped we could live up to our billing. We then listened to our panel of keynote speakers exploring topics raised by the previous day’s keynote speech and afternoon sessions, such as:

Leadership and Congregations

There is a Unitarian leadership crisis – how do we meet it, and what will leaders’ careers look like? There are also considerable resource imbalances between congregations, and it is difficult to manage this given the historic commitment to congregational freedom and independence. Also, how can we ensure that people who do not have graduate-level education can do ministry and leadership training, without devaluing the training?

New Unitarians, and Serving Our Communities

The younger generations are spiritual, but often not ‘church people’. How do we serve them, and wider society? We should not get too caught up in ‘how do we run churches better?’, rather we must think about ‘how do we practise being human?’ We need to be approachable.

International Unitarianism

We have spoken a lot during this event about our geographical heritage. Can we move beyond this to a national or international Unitarianism? It is clear that many Unitarians have loyalties to more than one community. We must also be sensitive to issues of privilege, and the knowledge that world history is a history of violence and violation.

Managing Change

We need to be aware of the role of grief in all that we discuss, as well as the need for change – as one speaker commented, “Some of the space is filled with grief.” We have all had to deal with rapid shifts from the circumstances we were born into, and some of our older members have had to deal with this for a very long time. We need the capacity to recognise our grief. Another comment, which stood out to me, was “Whatever is next, some people do not want to be there. How do we minister to them? How do we catch them where they fall – and give them the courage to stand up?”

Following that, it was time for lunch. I nibbled the plentiful snacks kindly provided by the Prague Unitarians, then went for a good sightseeing wander before the afternoon sessions.