By the end of our retreat, we had come to the conclusion that our future, as Districts, lay in our capacity to create connection and serve our Faith at the most local levels. We shared the belief that our Faith is not best served by Districts acting as middle-agents in our UUA's organization. We believe we have a mission and a ministry that was ours and that we could claim for ourselves. By the end of our retreat we voted on the following:

In service of our goal of sparking a great awakening of liberal religion in New England, the Massachusetts Bay and Clara Barton district boards of the Unitarian Universalist Association move together with excitement toward repurposing our boards to steward associational connections among our congregations and beyond. To this end, we will entrust governance functions to our Unitarian Universalist Association Board while maintaining our fiduciary stewardship of District assets. Therefore we will not pursue a New England-wide regional governance structure, even as we enthusiastically affirm our UUA's vision of the unified regional field staff serving our congregations and beyond.

Now that we knew what we wanted to hold onto, the next step was to better understand the logistics of change. In the months that followed our boards' votes, we checked in with our UUA Chief Financial Officer (disentangling our system of paying dues into both Districts and our UUA will take some time to achieve), met with our UUA moderator (we needed to be certain that our UUA board was ready, willing, and able to govern our congregational life staff), and worked alongside our UUA staff as they developed their own regional management structure (assets, for example, that had once been administered by our District Staff would now need to be administered by our boards). As we dove deeper into the details, one thing became crystal clear: we need to engage every member of our Districts in this discernment process. The determination of what our new mission and ministry might be is not for our boards to determine on our own, but for our membership to discern. We board members are not "the District." Our members are the District and it will be up to all of us, working together, to set our new course.  

If we are no longer doing "governance for governance's sake" as former UUA Moderator Gini Courter has described it, what is our purpose? What is the gift that we, as Districts, are particularly poised to share? What is the ministry that is truly ours to do? This is the question for all of us as we move into our future. At our April 26 Annual meeting, we will engage these questions more deeply and kick off a year of discernment during which board members will meet with congregational leaders to discern how we might best serve our Faith.