OK, I know, auto-debits and religious education are not two topics that go together, but since my job covers both areas AND I have something to ask you in each category AND I only have one blog to do it in, here we are. Auto-debits first.
ATTENTION!! We have 60 donors who use bank account or credit card auto-debits whose accounts will not be debited starting in July unless you take ACTION!!! You have already been individually contacted multiple times. Now it’s time to go public. IF your commitment payments happen automatically right now and you have not already acted, they will stop in July unless you either use REALM to change your account information or contact your bank and ask them to make the change through their system. (Contact Tish Murphy for the UUCA bank routing number that you need.) Here’s how to use REALM to make the necessary changes.
This action is necessary because REALM uses a different set-up than MY INFO and I decided to stop paying for both systems. This has caused confusion that I regret, but it won’t help now to reverse that decision because we have about an even distribution of people using the new REALM set-up and those that have not yet changed over. So please, if you have not yet done so, avoid a phone call from our follow-up team by changing your auto-debit details today.
Next up, religious education. The soon-to-be-Rev. Claudia (she gets ordained THIS Sunday!) was in Asheville for a few days last week looking for housing and took some time to meet some of us. She met with me, Rev. Lisa, Kim, Jen and the RE Council and attended a Wednesday Thing. We all came away feeling like this whole new staffing arrangement might actually work out well, while still admitting that change is definitely uncomfortable.
Be that as it may, we told her lots of good things about UUCA, one of which is that we are growing our proportion of non-parent RE program contributors. Now, I sure wouldn’t want to be wrong about that, so I’m asking all of you child-friendly folks to think long and hard about how you can volunteer in our RE program. We have easy Sunday tasks (classroom assistant for the summer or in Spirit Play), non-Sunday tasks (usually organizing stuff or copying), the stereotypical Sunday task (part of a teaching team for grades 4-8 or leading one summer program) and our most challenging tasks (1) previously trained teachers for Our Whole Lives classes—we pay for your training, 2) Coming of Age teachers, or 3) YRUU advisors.
Pick your interest level, your capabilities, your time commitment and volunteer to work in our program. For more information or to volunteer, contact Kim Collins (LREC@uuasheville.org). We need you. The kids need you. And what you will learn is that you need our kids for your own faith journey.