by Sherri Dietrich, UTO Board President

As the UTO Board and staff continue to think back on 2021, we want to share with you our reflections, successes, failures, and goals as we look toward this new year. Each month in the e-newsletter, you’ll find an article from our 2021 Annual Report. Once it is ready, the entire annual report will be shared with you digitally, and a special version will be distributed at General Convention. In the meantime, articles will be posted on our website here: https://unitedthankoffering.com/annualreport/

It’s difficult to reflect on 2021 and UTO’s accomplishments in it because the ongoing COVID pandemic has created a mental fog for most people, a feeling of suspended animation, like we are all just marking time until we can resume “normal” life or something like it. Although the UTO Board and staff met nearly monthly, created and completed successful projects and webinars, and communicated frequently about all things UTO, we didn’t get to meet in person as a board and build those working relationships, didn’t get to hold live events for UTO members, didn’t get to visit grant sites or speak at diocesan conventions. Everything for the past two years has been stripped down to make it suitable for Zoom; in-person church attendance has been on again/off again, and communal Ingatherings have been difficult to arrange. It has often felt like we were all just holding on, simultaneously stuck in limbo and scrambling to make things happen. 

But that’s just what it felt like, not what it really was. You’ll read in this annual report about the good things UTO did in 2021—webinars, trainings, materials, campaigns—but it’s harder to describe our less concrete accomplishments, which I think are even more important for UTO’s future. The pandemic’s forced enclosure and stripping away of nonessentials gave us time to reevaluate what’s important, to think about what is essential to our mission, to begin to envision how UTO might look in the future. 

It feels to those of us on the Board that we are on the cusp of the next great thing if only we can find our way to it. My wife and I live in a 300-year-old house in Maine, and we are always renovating something. The end results are beautiful, but before we can enjoy the painting and wallpapering—the pretty parts of renovation—there are hours and days of woodwork sanding, wallpaper stripping, paint scraping, plaster repairing, and throwing out all the old stuff. It’s dirty, demanding, and exhausting, but without all the prep work you don’t get the gorgeous final product; stripping away the old reveals the great bones on which to build the renovation. That prep work is a lot of what the UTO Board worked on in 2021—rediscovering UTO’s strong bones created by its founders and its long history of ministry in the church. We’re getting closer to the pretty parts of the renovation.

We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re asking the big, important questions. The world was already going digital in so many ways, and the pandemic moved that forward one huge step. How do we adapt UTO participation to our changed and changing world? How do we get people to think of gratitude and UTO giving as something they do alone or at home with their families every day AND as a parish, rather than just something their parish does for a month or a week each year? How can we spread the good news of gratitude within the church and beyond? And why don’t people use the Blue Box app when they use apps for everything else?! I invite you to think about these questions, too, as you read this annual report and over the next months, and invite you to share with us any inspirations that come to you. Thank you for your support and for your prayers.