Cottage Meetings

In September and early October, the Ministerial Search Committee held 17 Cottage Meetings, which gave us invaluable input from 117 people in our congregation. One meeting was held at Partridge Knoll (independent-living apartments), one meeting was for our church staff, and another was held for the Youth Group. All other meetings were open to UU Canton members and friends. Congregation members generously opened their homes to host meetings and provide us with snacks.

At these meetings we asked four questions, listed below with the feedback.

A member of the Ministerial Search Committee facilitated each meeting, and participants wrote their responses to the questions on large index cards. Another MSC member served as “scribe,” taking notes on all of the responses. Between those notes and each participant's four index cards, we came away with a lot of great data!

We have gathered all the feedback and decided that the answers to our questions are best described in a "word picture" format that allows either the frequency of the words and phrases or the weight of the words and phrases to signify how often they came up in our Cottage Meeting conversations. We hope you may capture a sense of who we are in a format different from the statistical models.