By Sherri Dietrich, United Thank Offering Board President
I live in Maine in a 300-year-old house that was last remodeled 150 years ago when a sea captain Victorian-ized it, so my wife and I 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 of the old stuff. It’s dirty, painstaking, and exhausting, but without all the prep work you don’t get the gorgeous final product; stripping away the old reveals the problems to be fixed and the great bones on which to build the renovation. That kind of 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.
UTO was first built more than 130 years ago, and like my house, it was built for the way people lived then. The basic structure of both is still strong and beautiful, but the world and the way we live in it have changed so much that some parts of the “décor” don’t function best for us now. An unheated summer kitchen was a great thing to have in a house in the 18th century, but a heated laundry room/mudroom works much better for us in the 21st century. Missionary boxes (one of UTO’s early efforts) were helpful in the 19th century but are not now.
The UTO Board is looking at UTO communications and practices to discern what is the essential structure that should remain and what things need remodeling to best engage with and work for people today. 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. 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, over the next months, and to share with us any inspirations that come to you so you can be part of both the stripping away of the out-of-date and the pretty parts of the renovation. As always, I thank you for your dedication to UTO and your support.