Greetings to you all.
This update contains:
- A link for the Morning Service of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation. Remember, we are now meeting in the hall for the duration of the cold months. Please note that the morning service will be preceded by the MUSIC GROUP (see next item).
- Marianna writes: “The MUSIC GROUP will meet at 10 a.m. to run through no. 215 in the purple hymn book (as last week), to support the congregation who will sing with us during the service. Also, please note that the full rehearsal for our 21st December service will take place on Sunday 14th December. The time of this rehearsal is to be decided. Information/scores will be circulated in the meantime. All new material – but not complicated!”
- A note about this coming Thursday’s Zoom “Kiitsu Kyōkai” Seiza Meditation & Conversation Meeting, this week, 4th December at 19:30-21:00
- Links to the minister’s address/podcast
- Minutes of the Cambridge Unitarian Church CIO “Life of the Church” Meeting, Sunday 23rd November 2025, following the church service
- A link to additional national Unitarian news
- A photo from the Kite and Christ’s Pieces Residents’ Association AGM in our church on Tuesday 25th November at 7pm. The guest speaker was Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter talking about “In an age of uncertainty, how can we live with ignorance, chance and luck?”
- A summary by Nick Butler-Woods from the General Assembly of the Three Horizons Workshop on 18th October in which we explored the present and future of Cambridge Unitarians
- A copy of the church’s Planning Application
A link for the Morning Service of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation
Our regular Sunday Morning Service of Mindful Meditation, Music and Conversation starts in the church on Emmanuel Road at 10.30 am and finishes at 11:40 am. Should you wish to join this by Zoom, please use the following permanent link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86882949446?pwd=kliXbdABEfbU8FjDMtNRNJ4Lr2lb5z.1
Meeting ID: 868 8294 9446
Passcode: 612407
The Music Group will be meeting this Sunday, 30th November at 10:00
Marianna writes: “The MUSIC GROUP will meet at 10 a.m. to run through no. 215 in the purple hymn book (as last week), to support the congregation who will sing with us during the service. Also, please note that the full rehearsal for our 21st December service will take place on Sunday 14th December. The time of this rehearsal is to be decided. Information/scores will be circulated in the meantime. All new material – but not complicated!”
A link for the Thursday morning/evening Zoom “Kiitsu Kyōkai” Seiza Meditation & Conversation Meetings:
This coming Thursday, 4th December, the meeting will be at 19:30-21:00.
For more information, please visit:
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/p/kiitsu-kyokai.html
https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/evening-service/
Join Thursday Zooms at the same link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85775868333?pwd=LEuyKnfbRJORbqsuzkhsonHui4ttwA.1
Meeting ID: 857 7586 8333
Passcode: 970614
Links to the minister’s address/podcast:
In written form at:
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com
Or as podcast episodes at:
Minutes of the Cambridge Unitarian Church CIO “Life of the Church” Meeting, Sunday 23rd November 2025, following the church service
PRESENT:
Sue Tombs (ST Trustee), Marianna Michell (MM Church Musician), Jennifer Bishop (JB), Jerry Carr-Brion (JC-B), Stephen Lawrence (SL), Elden Horner (EH Trustee), Andrew Brown (AB Minister), Celia James (CJ Trustee)
PREVENTED:
Jacqui Carnall (Trustee)
AGENDA:
Our main agenda item was to look at Norbert Fabián Čapek’s “Ten Advices”, which we have included in the booklet of our Liturgy that we are compiling. A copy is included after the words of our Service of Mindful Meditation, together with a copy of the Principles of Living which we have designed and committed to ourselves, and two versions of The Principles of Living by Imaoka Shin’ichirō, which we have previously studied. We were going to look in particular at Advice no.10, which had been included in the Thought for the Day we had just heard.
10: “Have faith. Take care of your faith in God (Bůh [m.]) — the Supreme Wisdom (Nejvyšší Moudrost [f.]). Be aware of her presence within yourself and in everything.”
A) We attended first to items of Any Other Business:
We agreed to Sue Tombs’ suggestions that 1) we will set up the Christmas tree after the service on December 14th: 2) we shall have our monthly shared lunch on the 21st December, after the Carol Service, instead of on December 7th: 3) we shall hold our Christmas Eve Communion Service in the Common Room.
B) ST will look into Stephen Lawrence’s request for a stool which can be used by those who find it hard to keep standing during the, often long, conversations during drinking coffee after the service.
C) SL raised the possibility of buying a second microphone, to use during the time when members of the congregation respond to the Thought for the Day. (The microphone does not aid the sound in the church but allows those online to hear what is being said, away from the table.) Andrew Brown explained why we would need to buy a new piece of kit because our system only allows for two microphone inputs, which we already use. We agreed that, instead of incurring that expense, it would actually be better to make sure that we do not speak until we are holding the microphone to avoid confusing cross talk — using the microphone somewhat like “holding the conch”. We can remind ourselves of this at the time.
D) Before we discussed Čapek’s tenth Advice, AB reminded us that both Čapek’s “Advices” and Imaoka’s “Principles of Living” were drawn up because of their experiences of the rise of right-wing politics in and around Czechoslovakia and Japan in the 1930s. Čapek, in particular, was writing in the full appreciation of the looming threat to his country and to Europe of the rise of Nazism. We noted that Imaoka’s principles addressed the building of structure of a free-religious community, whilst Čapek’s advices were concerned to suggests ways by which individuals could better and more resiliantly face the difficulties around them: maybe, addressing how to keep faith with their souls in dreadful times. Both Imaoka’s and Čapek’s Groups were destroyed by the political and sociological forces of their times but their principles and advices were the things that helped them rebuild their communities after the Second World War.
We paused to think of ourselves in our times, with the previous day’s very disappointing outcome of the COP Conference much in our minds. We considered how we ourselves might be heartened by the practical advice in the Ten Advices: how do we still live?
AB spoke of his work translating a book by Čapek into English in collaboration with Ruth Wieneger, the official translator for the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians, and how Čapek had said that not every one of his 21 chapters was for everybody, writing: “Not everything is for everyone, but each will find something special for themselves. They will mark these pages and revisit them often to soak up their warmth.” The point is to take from his ten advices and his book those things that can help as prevail. In connection with the Richard Boeke’s hymn “Father Spirit, Mother Spirit” — a poetic reinterpretation of Čapek’s hymn “Mother of the world, Father of spirits” [Máti světa, Otče duchů] which continues to reference “God” — some of us also shared our concepts of the divine/deity. One concept we looked at that of “Kami”, which is valued in Japan because it is both plural and singular and relates equally to a conception of “deity” and also to a divine presence/spirit in the natural world. We noted how the founder of Konkokyo (a kind of liberal Shintō), Kawate Bunjiro, taught that “Kami needs us as we need Kami!” and we wondered how this could be be felt to link with the suffering of God/Nature in our own Unitarian and Free Christian tradition?
E) We have decided to explore Čapek’s “Ten Advices” as Thoughts for the Day in the new year, being very mindful of our strong links with the Czech Unitarian heritage. We have decided that the Thought for the Day on every fourth Sunday will, ideally, be taken to a member of the congregation. It will not matter if various Advices are repeated because we feel that it’s the individual contribution which it is important for us to share. Our earnest hope is that individuals will commit to engaging with this move and embrace it as part of the Unitarian Tradition in our own Life of the Church.
We spoke about how it is open to us to be creative about this: for instance, to work together on writing and offering a piece: to present an existing poem which also engages with the chosen theme of an Advice. We hope that people will volunteer and that this will become a regular part of our Sundays: like the Jazz and our Shared Lunches. JC-B volunteered to give the first of these Čapek related Thoughts for the Day on Sunday 25th January.
AB said he will always be prepared to step in to give the Thought for the Day if there is a Sunday for which no-one has written a contribution. Besides that, he is always on hand to take care of technical things (including music if Marianna is unable to be present).
F) So as not to overload people because of various Christmas related activities, we decide that there would be no Zoom, Life of the Church Meeting on 17th December.
F) Date of next meeting: A Zoom Meeting on January 21st, 17:00-18:00.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83972967530?pwd=WOFnbQa24AjVWXrOnQvX3Fc9jyx0YT.1
Meeting ID: 839 7296 7530
Passcode: 214070
For additional national Unitarian news, please click on the following link:
Uni-news
https://us20.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=1590ea5f53cdc6fb8a17c311c&id=7bce4a21b7
On Tuesday 25th November at 7pm, the Kite and Christ’s Pieces Residents’ Association are held their AGM in our church. The guest speaker was Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter talking about “In an age of uncertainty, how can we live with ignorance, chance and luck?”
A summary by Nick Butler-Woods from the General Assembly of the Three Horizons Workshop on 18th October in which we explored the present and future of Cambridge Unitarians
Planning Application—if you would like to look at the Planning Application, the Church has put in can be found at the following link:
https://applications.greatercambridgeplanning.org/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=SYVKZODXGQW00
There are a lot of drawings, sections and plans as separate documents on the application, but the Heritage & Access Statement draws everything together in one PDF (see below) and outlines the process leading to the final plans. Please remember that these plans have been submitted simply so that we will soon have before us some necessary information so that, as a congregation, we will be able to decide together how best to use/reuse/reconfigure our buildings in the coming years. It’s vital to be absolutely clear that no decision has been reached about what we might, or might not, do, and no such decision can be reached before the congregation has worked through all the possibilities available to it.
Andrew James Brown
(Days off are generally Monday and Tuesday)
Minister
Cambridge Unitarian Church
Emmanuel Road
Cambridge
CB1 1JW
07477 462 110 (Mobile)
http://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/
Blog: Caute
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/
Podcast: Kiitsu—Returning-to-One
https://kiitsu.buzzsprout.com
Jiyū Shūkyō / Free-Religion
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/p/free-religion.html
Kiitsu Kyōkai (Returning-to-One Gathering)
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/p/kiitsu-kyokai.html
Seiza Meditation (Quiet Sitting)
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/p/seiza-meditat