Covenant of Beloved Community

We, the members of Northern Hills Fellowship, covenant to create a Beloved Community in which the following statements are reality:

Northern Hills Fellowship is a community of mutually supportive people. We appreciate each other's values, beliefs, culture, spiritual search, and personal history, delighting in both our commonalities and our diversity. As we seek knowledge of ourselves, each other and the world, we engage empathetic listening and mutual sharing. This leads to deep, nurturing relationships and transformative growth. Interpersonal peace vitalizes our community.
We welcome all manner of people into the Beloved Community that is Northern Hills Fellowship. We cherish both young and old, for our experience, our wisdom, our virtue, and our potential. In relationships across generations, we give and receive the experience of being understood and valued. We recognize the worth of all kinds of families and treasure every child.
Through the process of communal worship, we create a safe place where challenges that are burdensome in solitude are made lighter, and we are present to each other in times of both joy and sorrow. We reach beyond the boundaries of self, finding shared meanings, and build collective commitment to justice, equity and compassion in human relations.

Context
The idea of "beloved community"... was central to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. In one of his most important addresses he said, "We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." The question is whether we respond to this reality with chaos or community. Dr. King's teachings on non-violence call us to reflect on how we want to be together in community. The step of describing in a covenant our desire for our Fellowship to comprise a life supporting and transforming community is a commitment to not only embrace the words and ideas contained, but to live them out in our attitudes, behaviors, conversations and relationships.
For almost two years the Committee on Ministry (CoM) has been developing a Covenant of Beloved Community for Northern Hills Fellowship. The CoM implemented an Appreciative Inquiry process similar to those used by many UU churches in crafting this Covenant. Appreciative Inquiry has helped us gain broad congregational participation in creating a vision for the Beloved Conmitinity we wish to have in the future.In cottage meetings, NHF members responded to three questions:
What experiences are the best of the NHF past that should be brought to the future?
What are the core values of you as an NHF member?
What are your best wishes for NHF's future?

Subsequently, the CoM analyzed cottage meeting data as it related to the core theme of the nature of relationships at NHF and consolidated it. This past winter the CoM conducted several workshops in which members generated provocative propositions which the CoM recast into the Covenant of Beloved Community. Now the CoM invites your participation in the Covenant of Beloved Community in order to create the church we want NHF to become. As we worked to create the Covenant of Beloved Community in the cottage meetings and workshops we felt the process itself provided heartening experiences of community: The Committee on Minsitry has been privileged to have the opportunity to reflect on the stories, ideas and proposals contributed by members, and the core purpose of the CoM was transformed by the experience. We trust that all NHF members will share similar experiences as we grow with our Covenant of Beloved Community.

We invite each member of Northern Hills Fellowship to commit...
to our Covenant of Beloved Community. The covenant becomes real when words become worlds, when ideas result in new attitudes, behavior, conversations and relationships. The Northern Hills Fellowship Covenant of Beloved Community is a promise to oursevles and to each other; it is a pledge that when we come together in community we will try to be the best version of oursevles we can be and to create a fellowship which supports us and brings blessings to all.