For the first time in our 11-year history, Prairie has participated in our national process of making statements on social justice and change.

It wasn't a perfect process from the standpoint of our church and our usual way of working on important issues. We usually spend much more time in conversation before taking a vote.

Our relatively new Social Justice Council only had the month of January, however, to hold the forum and present the Statement of Conscience on Peacemaking at our congregational meeting. There was a February 1 deadline to get information to the national Unitarian Universalist Association, if our congregation wanted to participate.

Because we haven't participated before, the deadline slipped up on us. But the council and I thought it would be important to let the Prairie community know what was going on with the national Peacemaking Statement, rather than to be completely out of the loop.

The vote at our congregational meeting was to put the statement on the General Assembly agenda. 25 percent of our 1,000 or so congregations must vote for it to be on the agenda for it to be considered at the national meeting in June.

All of our congregations send delegates to this national General Assembly. This June will be the last of a four-year process on the peacemaking statement conducted by the national Commission on Social Witness. Last year the peacemaking statement failed by a relatively few votes. Last year our delegates in Salt Lake City listened to the debate and voted their conscience based upon what they heard at the meeting.

This year, Prairie members, through a continuing education program on the peacemaking issues and through conversation, can let its delegates know how the congregation feels for the June meeting.

We have three lay delegates from the congregation and one minister delegate - me. Our board or the congregation can "instruct" its delegates on how to vote on important issues. I will listen carefully to anyone who has a particular point of view and we may decide to have a formal process for allocating our delegate votes, or not. But I know that all of the people who have been delegates in the past or who might be delegates to this year's meeting in Minneapolis, want to know what our church members think and want to represent this view fairly in our votes.

Our Unitarian Universalist Association is a representative democracy with each church providing delegates based upon their membership. In this way, over the years, since 1961 when the Unitarians and Universalists merged to form our Association, we have taken numerous important stands for civil rights, elderly and children's rights, women's rights and the rights of gays and lesbians. In this way, we also are more of a "grassroots" movement, with the people through their churches bringing issues to the assembly. The next four-year study issue will be on ethical eating.

I look forward to continued, respectful conversation and the opportunity for our church to participate in our larger movement.