Cambridge Unitarians

Weekly Update 11 July – 18th July

Greetings to you all.

This email contains: 

A link for the Morning Service of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation
A note about taking services during the second half of the minster’s sabbatical leave in August/September
A note about the upcoming, face-to-face, post-morning service, “Life of the Church” meeting on Sunday 20th July
A link for the Thursday morning/evening Zoom “Kiitsu Kyōkai” Seiza Meditation & Conversation Meeting. The next meeting is on Thursday 17th July at 19:30-21:00
Links to the minister’s address/podcast
A link to additional national Unitarian news
Minutes from the last “Life of the Church” meeting on 18th June

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 note the following new, permanent link:

Join Sunday Morning Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86882949446?pwd=kliXbdABEfbU8FjDMtNRNJ4Lr2lb5z.1

Meeting ID: 868 8294 9446
Passcode: 612407

A note about taking services during the second half of the minster’s sabbatical leave in August/September

Our minister, Andrew Brown, is on the second part of his sabbatical during August/September. As before part of this time will be spent working with the President of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF), Prof. George M. Williams, to produce an English language edition of Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s essays, and to further develop the educational programme of the IARF’s “Free Religion Institute.” On this occasion, Andrew will also be beginning work with the Czech Unitarians to produce a final translation of Norbert Fabián Čapek’s “To the Sunny Shore: A Guide to Living Joyfully”.

To help make this possible, the Cambridge Unitarian Church’s “Life of the Church” group are asking members of the congregation whether they can help to run our Sunday morning services during August and September?

Please use the following Google form to tell us which dates you are available to help, and which roles you are interested in:

https://forms.gle/rqs8G839k7vygvwM9

If you have any queries or difficulties using the form, please contact Jacqui (jacquicarnall@googlemail.com)

A note about the upcoming, face-to-face, post-morning service, “Life of the Church” meeting on Sunday 20th July

At the end of this email, you will find the minutes of our last meeting. If you are intending to come to this meeting, please do read them because they are an essential introduction to the conversation we’ll be beginning on Sunday 20th July over a picnic lunch in the hall following the morning service. Central to the conversation will be the list of existential challenges that face any modern religious community, which is currently being used by the International Association for Religious Freedom’s “Free Religion Institute” to shape its own curriculum. We will be using this list to help us begin to explore other meditations and possible liturgies of care and concern. You can find this list at the following link <https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/15-Existential-Crises.png>

A link for the Thursday morning/evening Zoom “Kiitsu Kyōkai” Seiza Meditation & Conversation Meetings:

This coming Thursday, 17th July, the meeting will be at 19:30-21:00

“Kiitsu Kyōkai” Seiza Meditation and Conversation Meetings on Zoom
1st and 3rd Thursdays of the month: 19:30-21:00
2nd and 4th Thursdays of the month: 10:30-12:00 noon
No meetings on any 5th Thursday, or during August

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:

For additional national Unitarian news, please click on the following link:

Uni-news
https://us20.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=1590ea5f53cdc6fb8a17c311c&id=7bce4a21b7

A report from the Life of the Church Zoom Meeting, Wednesday 18th June 2025:

CAMBRIDGE UNITARIAN CHURCH LIFE OF THE CHURCH MEETING

PRESENT BY ZOOM: Andrew Brown (ABr Minister), Sue Tombs (ST Trustee), Jacqui Carnall (JC Trustee), Laurinda Luffman (LL), Tony Burns (TB), David Burns (DB), Ruth Gilman (RG), Marianna Michell (MM), Celia James (CJ Trustee)

A) Andrew spoke to his short report about the first half of his sabbatical, which can be found at:
<https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-wider-fellowship-free-religion.html> ABr thanked the Cambridge Congregation for our support of and engagement in his work. ABr told us that, although we are a small group, our expression of free-religion and Kiitsū Kyōkai is spreading through the connections he is making in his work and outreach as our minister. He has had word that the Japanese IARF chapter has been particularly delighted to have the opportunity to rediscover Imaoka Sensei’s teachings and to have them returned home.

B) We described our experience of holding the Sunday meditative space in ABr’s absence. From our accounts and descriptions of other settings we’ve experienced, we noted without a commitment to maintaining continuity in services that things can quickly get ragged/scattered. We describe our Centre of our Continuity as having the binary form of Meditation and Thoughtful Speech/Conversation in our Sunday Liturgy of The Mystery and Miracle of Life. We noted the need to maintain our shared sense of pulling together around a shared vision, which this group (as the Future Directions Group) worked to collate as our Guiding Principles found on the Church Website <https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/>. A small booklet containing these principles will be available on Sunday 22nd. A PDF of this can be accessed here: <https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Cambridge-Unitarians-Principles-of-Living-2024.pages.pdf>

C) Now that we have published our Shared Principles on the website, and we return to being the “Life of the Church Group”, we will begin to look to see how we can deepen and expand the nuance of our expression of these principles in our own Liturgy: the word’s origins most distantly coming from the Greek term for the “work of the People”. We agree that our Sunday Morning Service will continue to have at its core Meditation and Thoughtful Speech: our led Meditation and given Thought for the Day, followed by a time for beginning conversation. We shall maintain the Public Continuity of this format so that all who come may always expect to have included in our Service: Meditation: Music: Intelligent Talk: Conversation.

D) We agree that the Life of the Church Group will start this work by exploring a list of Major Existential Concerns being used by the IARF’s Free Religion Institute, which ABr has shown us <https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/15-Existential-Crises.png>. From this we’ll choose some initial themes for other meditations and possible liturgies of care and concern. We shall explore what is entailed to find appropriate phrases for meditation, sections for readings and themes for thoughts: with a sense of tradition, yet which continue to express our Principles of Free Religion. We envisage that once we have built it up, a collection of Liturgies and Meditations will enable us to move between them to respond well to world events, and, when necessary, choose one with the assurance that we are offering something which we have already thought through deeply together and crafted carefully to share. Furthermore, we noted the historical model for producing a collection of themed variations on a basic pattern is found in the Unitarian book of liturgies, “Orders of Worship” that was used extensively by the denomination between 1932 and the 1960s <https://archive.org/details/ordersofworshipf0000gene/page/n5/mode/2up>.

E) We agree that the Group will from now on meet monthly: alternately, the third Wednesday, on zoom at 5pm, as on this 18th June, then in August, October etc. and then on the third Sunday for an informal picnic lunch after Coffee at Church, maybe 12:15 onwards, so, on July 20, in September, November etc. This will give us a mix of meetings between Face to Face and Online, as well as two different days and times of day. We agree that on July 20th we shall look at the list of the existential concerns and consider our first choice/s.

F) We heard from ST, JC and MM about the logistics of setting up the rota for April and May, to cover leading the Liturgy, the Meditation, the Thought for the Day and the Music. We ask ABr and JC to send the details of how to volunteer for August and September in this week’s Bulletin. To overcome, or simplify, technical problems of using various laptops, we agree to buy a dedicated laptop for our use with the zoom Service. We ask ABr and/or ST to explore getting a refurbished MacBook Pro from John Lewis.

G) date of next meeting: 20th July, in the Church Hall, after coffee, at about 12:15 with individual picnic snacks.

Signed
Andrew Brown
Celia James

Every best wish as always,

Andrew

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
http://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com

Podcast—Making Footprints Not Blueprints
https://footprints.buzzsprout.com

Jiyū Shūkyō / Free Religion
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/p/free-religion.html

Kiitsu Kyōkai
https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/p/kiitsu-kyokai.html