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1. Essays

Ever Onward and Upward:
A History of Religious Education in the Prairie Star District

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By Eleanor Morton

First off, let’s remind ourselves that children have not always gone to Sunday School, or even to church. In England in the late 18th century children could be found playing in the streets of industrial cities, yelling and cursing, stirring up trouble on Sunday mornings. One Robert Raikes, a well-to-do businessman in Gloucester, established the first Sunday School in 1780, and thereafter the Sunday School idea began to spread far and wide. The original intent, of course, was to teach religion, but the leaders soon found themselves teaching reading and writing as well, and thus in a very real sense these Sunday Schools were the forerunners of public-supported education.

The Sunday School idea soon spread to New England where the Congregationalists used Sunday Schools to teach morals and religion. Our early heritage of religious education is one of divergence from the mainstream of Protestant philosophy, beginning with a disagreement between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncy. Elizabeth Anastos in her paper, “Unitarian Universalist Religious Education: A Brief history,” describes the situation in this way:

Jonathan Edwards held that the child could come to know God and goodness only through a conversion experience, “by an act of divine violence suddenly and miraculously recreating the human will, making it for the first time instantly and forever capable of good.” He believed that children should be taught the Calvinist catechism and instructed from the pulpit, but that conversion was ultimately the only way to salvation

Charles Chauncy, however, believed that one came to a gradual realization and understanding of religious truths through teachings. He denied that one was saved only by a conversion experience, and left the door open to the possibilities of growth through religious education. Another 18th century liberal, Jonathan Mayhew, believed that humans had the capacity to distinguish right from wrong, to think for themselves in matters of religion, and to respect the religious conscience of others.

Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the “Sunday School Society” as early as 1790 in Philadelphia. By 1827, there were more than two dozen Sunday Schools in Unitarian churches in New England, in spite of the fact that at first some of the clergy had voiced loud opposition to what they considered a newfangled idea imported from England. They feared that attendance at services would drop, and that if the sexes were mixed immorality might result!

By 1827, the Boston Sunday School Society was formed, and at their 10th annual meeting the prophetic words of William Ellery Channing rang out and were to resound along the years:

The great end in religious instruction, whether in the Sunday School or family, is not to stamp our minds irresistibly on the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs; not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought … I do not think that so much harm is done by giving error to a child as by giving truth in a lifeless form. The trouble with some Christians is not that they hold great errors, but that truth lies dead within them.

While Unitarians and Universalists have always tended toward the more liberal movements in educational philosophy and psychology, they were to struggle along for fifty years with the standard Bible and church history-centered content accompanied by question and answer manuals for teachers. One hundred years were to go by before Channing’s charge truly came to fruition in the New Beacon Series in Religious Education (begun in 1937).

Although we know that published courses are not the sum total of religious education, a large part of the history of Unitarian and Universalist religious education is to be found in published books, course materials, and bibliographies. Another portion is to be found in minutes of meetings, in anniversary booklets of individual congregations, and in the living memories of dedicated teachers and leaders.

Available written records chronicle the rise and fall of no less than eight curriculum series, from the first one published in 1833 and edited by Henry Ware, Jr., to the “multi-media” programs of the 1970s.

The phenomenon has been aptly described by Elizabeth H. Baker in “RETSPECT, Study Paper No. 14A” for the UU Advance, 1980, as follows:

In 1875 the Rev. George F. Piper became Secretary of the Sunday School Society and he prepared about 300 lessons, which had a circulation of about 9000. These were considered too liberal by the conservatives and too conservative by the liberals; too advanced for the age group according to some people, too elementary for the age group, said others. It was ever thus!

Certain advances had been made by that time, however. In 1852, the second Unitarian Church School curriculum had been published. It was similar in content to the first, but with a graded series of eight manuals. This was a first in religious education, for the mainstream Christian denominations were developing the so-called “Uniform Lessons,” which prescribed the same Bible text on a given Sunday for all ages. Some Unitarian and many Universalist schools used these uniform lessons because of the convenient teacher’s guides, which accompanied them.

The spread of Unitarianism and Universalism across the continent proceeded along the Ohio River, up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their tributaries. According to Charles Lyttle in Freedom Moves West, preachers came to Burlington and Davenport in the 1840s and found fertile ground among German free thinkers who heartily approved of their young people dancing in the church!

The Universalists reached Minnesota in the early l850s and organized a parish at St. Anthony on the Mississippi River. Seth Barnes arrived in l855, and they built the first brick church in Minneapolis, which is still standing. A church was established in Rochester, Minnesota in 1860, and Sunday School was begun there in 1866. Davenport, Iowa, organized in l868; Cedar Rapids in 1869. Both had active church schools soon after. All Souls Unitarian Church of Kansas City was organized in 1868.

Little has been recorded of these early times. One story worth repeating is that of the “Universalist Picnic,” the tale having been recorded in Prairie Star Sagas, by V. Emil Gudmundson, 1975. Apparently the ministry of Seth Barnes was highly successful and the size of the Sunday School was the envy of orthodox congregations in the city. Rev. Barnes left for a time to go East because of his health, and immediately the superintendents of three other Sunday Schools invited the Universalists to join them in a “Grand Union” Sunday School organization, using the strategy “if you can’t beat them, get them to join you!” The ministers of these churches, however, suspected a conspiracy and refused to go along with the idea. In their minds, Universalists were not Christians. Well, it so happened that the orthodox groups chose the same day for a big parade as the Universalists chose for their Sunday School picnic. To the Universalists’ good fortune, a steamboat captain offered to take the Universalist children for a ride on the river. Two hundred people piled on. Wind and rain came up and wiped out the parade, but the Universalists stayed dry under the roof of their steamboat. The excitement wasn’t over yet, however. The water rose, the current was swift, and the boat was in danger of hitting an old bridge. Sure enough, it did, and the water poured in, but the boat was safely moored and everyone got off alive and unharmed.

By 1872, a Universalist Church school was started in St. Paul, at Cedar Rapids in 1875, Omaha in 1878, and Sioux City in 1885. It is said that in St. Paul, William Channing Gannett, minister there from 1877–1883, wrote in lesson form his own curriculum for the church school. In Sioux City, the congregation’s much-loved ministers, Mary Safford and Eleanor Gordon, supported and actively promoted the Church School program.

Indeed, by the 1870s, the winds of change were blowing strong out on the prairie. The Western Conference had been organized in 1852, and by 1873, the Western Unitarian Sunday School Association was established to publish and distribute curricula. A six-year course of study included a book, Beginnings According to Legend and According to the Truer Story, by the Rev. Allen W. Gould. His book was possibly a forerunner of Beginnings of Earth, Sky, Life, Death by Fahs and Spoerl. Mother Nature’s Children (birds, bees, reptiles, mammals) and Mother Nature’s Helpers (sun, fire water, iron) were harbingers of How Miracles Abound (1941) and The Science Series (1961–64).

According to Baker, the Curriculum of Studies in Morality and Religion for the Sunday School and Study Club of the First Unitarian Church of Davenport, IA, in 1906 listed 287 titles for use in the 15-year curriculum, plus 140 supplementary materials arranged by class, plus 24 books for parents and teachers, plus 13 books on geography, antiquities and customs. (Compiled by Dr. Arthur Judy and published by the Western Conference.)

Charles H. Lyttle’s Freedom Moves West, A History of the Western Unitarian Conference, stands as a monument to the prodigious energies of Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Along with all his other endeavors in the vast area stretching from Cleveland to Denver and Duluth to Kansas City, he became deeply involved in writing religious education material. For his own small children he wanted something better than the doctrinal, preachy offerings from the East, and so in 1872 he began publication of a periodical, The Sunday School, for which he wrote articles on theory and methods as well as lesson materials. He promoted weekly teachers’ meetings, published a songbook, and also a book for festival occasions. By 1878, the new periodical, Unity founded by Jones, began publishing Sunday School courses. The Little Unity (1881–1883) for children combined lessons with children’s stories.

It was due to the efforts of Jenkin Lloyd Jones that the Norwegian Unitarian Mission of Rev. Kristofer Janson was established in Minnesota in the 1880s. Janson came from Norway of aristocratic lineage and studied at Harvard. He came to Minneapolis with the objective of converting Norwegian peasants to religious liberalism. At least four “Free Christian” churches were organized. Two remain to this day—the Nora Free Christian Church at Hanska, and what is now the Unitarian Church of Underwood. The first record of religious education classes at Hanska are dated 1906. At Underwood the youth program began the year the church was founded—1885, and apparently in the early part of this century they had an active chapter of the Young People’s Religious Union (YPRU), with the Rev. Frank 0. Holmes of the Minnesota Unitarian Conference officiating at the organizational meeting in 1923.

Boston Unitarianism, meanwhile, was still in the throes of trying to define itself as Christian or theistic, not being ready for “new-fangled ideas. “In the 1890s under the leadership of Dr. Edward A. Horton, a fourth Unitarian curriculum was published. It followed a one-topic, three-level format with seven topics in the series, so that on a given Sunday, the entire church school studied the same topic at the primary, junior, and senior levels. Thus it did recognize different levels of development, but the content was still the Bible and Christian history. The methods of teaching were didactic, and the education theory that of “classical realism,” or the passing on of tradition and the imparting of moral character through drill and memorization. After 50 years, still no “stirring up the child’s mind!” By 1909, Dr. Horton had inspired a fifth curriculum, the first to be called The Beacon Series. It used myths from many cultures, ethics, social awareness, evolution, and applied critical scholarship to the Bible. It was still content centered, however, and did not draw upon the experiences of the children. It did not last long!

At this point, let’s step back a few years and pick up the Universalist religious education story. In 1888, the Universalists agreed that they would use the uniform lessons of the orthodox churches, but with the addition of Biblical interpretations that would illuminate Universalist principles. Finally, in 1901, the Universalist Graded Lessons were published, similar to the Protestant curricula but more liberal. By 1920, however, they were out of print and never reissued. Things picked up with the establishment of the General Sunday School Association in 1913. Funding was made available for staffing and publications. Clinton Lee Scott in The Universalist Church, A Short History wrote: “It operated in a period of tentative pedagogical theories and experimentation. It magnified the place of the child in the church, pressed for better housing of children’s classes, and enlarged the scope of religious nurture in the home and community. The Association was able to make the transition from Bible-centered to curriculum-centered to experience-centered teaching, with a facility less readily achieved in the larger denominational bodies.”

Few personal recollections from this early period are to be found anywhere. Two accounts that do exist are in the History of the Peoples Church, (1869–l959), Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by Gertrude James. The first gives the general flavor of what went on.

Grace and Elisabeth Low, whose parents brought them up in this church, have vivid and fond memories of the Sunday School in the early l900s. It was held after church from twelve to one and opened with a general meeting of hymns, prayers, and a number of quotations, called “sentiments,” by the children, chosen from the Bible or literature in general. Then the children divided up into classes. Both Grace and Betty, as high school pupils, belonged to Carrie M. Palmer’s class, called the “Blue Ribbon Class,” that met in what was later the minister’s study and is now the choir room. They studied the Bible, memorizing beautiful passages, and a booklet on Universalism. From year to year the class dipped into World Religions and thus learned at an early age their basic oneness. Salvation by character was also stressed in their class. They tried so hard for excellent attendance that they were usually the monthly winners of the banner, as an award of merit. There were 18 or 20 in the class, with monthly “spreads” and plenty of fun.

Later in the account, we read:

One of their most vivid memories was of the Iroquois Theater Fire, December 30, 1903. And the reason? Miss Josephine Munholland, who taught Mamie Doud, later wife of President Eisenhower, at Jackson School had become superintendent of our Church School in the fall of 1902. She went to Chicago for the holidays in 1903 and was in the theater at the time of the fire. She got out safely, but once outside, she suddenly remembered all the children in the audience. So she went back in to help them, rescued a good many, but she lost her life. A few weeks later, a special memorial service was held in the church auditorium, attended by both the adults and the school.

For the Unitarians, the first trickling down of John Dewey’s philosophy could be seen in the Sixth Unitarian Curriculum published in 1912, and called The New Beacon Course in Religious Education. The content was broadened to include more non-biblical materials, the study of other denominations, science, great lives, and social concerns as they affected young people. The intent was that the courses would be child-centered, yet content-centered discussion questions were given. The activity projects consisted of coloring, pasting, and writing in the missing word. The New Beacon Course was published over a period of years and was for its time far in advance of anything being done by other denominations.

In the late 1920s, two curriculum committees were meeting, trying to plan for future curriculum development. One headed by Waitstill H. Sharp (later to become minister at Davenport) was conservative in theology and educational philosophy. The other, chaired by Edwin A. Fairley (and attended occasionally by Sophia L. Fahs), was well aware of educational and psychological advances. The two groups did manage to arrive at a joint statement by 1931, which made no reference to the Bible, Jesus, or Christianity. By 1935, Rev. Ernest Keubler had been appointed Secretary of the Department of RE He was a liberal theist, influenced in his thinking by Bushnell, Coe, and Hartshorne, and in educational philosophy, a follower of Dewey and Kilpatrick. The 1936 report of the Commission of Appraisal found interest in religious education at a low point and saw this as a serious indictment of a religious denomination. The challenge was taken up when, at age 61, Sophia Fahs became curriculum editor in 1937. That fall the first title of the seventh Unitarian curriculum was published, Beginnings of Earth and Sky.

The titles that followed in the New Beacon Series are all at least vaguely familiar to us; we may not use them very often, but they are there on the shelf, and from time to time someone will come in on Sunday morning and say, “Oh, I remember we studied magnets when I was in the third grade,” or “Oh, I remember when we acted out the story of Akhenaten,” or “Mrs. Jones used to read to us from the book about Jesus, the carpenter’s son.”

Keubler and Fahs were naturalistic theists. They had great respect for the “old story of salvation,” yet saw in today’s world no division between the sacred and secular. Fahs has helped us all expand our concept of ultimate meaning, or God. In her view,” there are no acts and no things outside the moral realm. Every deed includes a choice. Every thing presents an ethical challenge.”

The assumptions about how a child learns, which are implicit in the New Beacon Series, come from John Dewey. The child’s own motivation is the starting point. In the proper environment, experience in problem solving would lead to confidence and self-control. We must replace chance activity with directed experience so that participation will lead to genuine knowledge and understanding.

Picking up the story out here in the Western Conference, from the 20s and through the 30s, we find Frederick May Eliot at Unity Church in St. Paul. From Eleanor Otto’s history, we learn that Eliot had a tremendous interest in religious education. He actually ran the program himself with a committee assisting. He paid particular attention to grading the lessons according to age; he felt that activities were much more important than lengthy readings; he had the children in for the opening part of the adult service. He had a flair for the dramatic and introduced pageants into the curriculum. At Easter for many years the children performed “The Sacred Flame,” adapted from a story by Selma Lagerlof—the flame symbolizing the immortality of the spiritual life. Eliot laid great stress on young people’s activities. Unity Guild was part of the National Young People’s Union (NYPU). It was the forerunner of the Tower Club for senior high people, begun in 1930, which continued into the 1970s.

At the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, Viola Dreesen was the Director of Religious Education in the 30s and again in the 60s. She remembers attending classes as a child in the church building at 8th and LaSalle when John Dietrich first came to the city. After several moves, a building known as The Unitarian Center on Loring Park was purchased. During the 30s Mrs. Dreesen taught classes and then directed the program. She remembers that there were no religious education committees then—people just did what had to be done. Attendance grew steadily during the early forties and temporary quarters had to be obtained in a YMCA until the new facility was built on Mount Curve Avenue. Even then, more classroom and meeting spaces had to be constructed in the early 60s.

A number of histories acknowledge declining enrollments in our church schools during the thirties, due in large part to the Depression and the falling birth rates. By the late 40s, however, it was “full steam ahead” through the 50s and 60s, the years of surprising growth for the Unitarians and Universalists. The Fellowship movement had started in 1948; the post-war birth rate was at a record high, the economy was prospering, and church schools were once again expanding throughout what is now the Prairie Star District. Building programs were the order of the day. The First Unitarian Church of Omaha built a two-story church school annex, completed in 1952. No doubt even that was crowded when enrollment peaked in 1961 at 240 children. The Cedar Falls fellowship was organized in 1952 and began church school immediately. Enrollment continued to climb as they moved from basements and bedrooms to a downtown office building to the Waterloo Universalist Church, to a university building in Cedar Falls, and then to cafeteria rooms at another university. Dorothy Grant tells us that when plans were drawn for a new building, however, “the membership was more interested in a meeting place for themselves than in facilities for the children.” They said they would add on when there were more children. It was not a plan for a congregation intending to grow. When the new church opened in 1966, instead of overflow audiences, they found that many visiting parents decided not to return when they learned there was no suitable place for their children.

It was during the 50s and 60s also that the larger societies began hiring professional religious educators. Elizabeth Whitman, hired in 1948 by Unity Church, St. Paul, was probably the first full-time director. All Souls Unitarian Church in Kansas City, Missouri, hired Dorothy Nebgen in 1950 as their first salaried director and enrollment increased from 75 students in 1952 to 315 in 1961. Several years after moving into their new church in south Minneapolis, the congregation of the First Universalist Church hired Viola Dreesen as their DRE in 1955. She developed their curriculum using The New Beacon Series and also began assembly programs for the children.

In Rochester, Minnesota, Sue Bateman became part-time Director of Religious Education at the First UU Church, the first person to hold the position, beginning in 1964. One hundred sixty-two children were registered. In Lincoln, Nebraska the same year, the RE committee reported to the congregation as follows:

Teacher recruitment has become such a problem that conscription on one hand or total phase-out on the other appear the only alternatives. The committee is considering a proposal for an RE director, hoping not for a complete panacea but at least for a partial antidote to their multitudinous ills.

In 1965, Vern Barnet (later to become a UU minister) was Lincoln’s first paid director of religious education.

In the 60s in the Twin Cities area, several new churches and fellowships were organized and immediately began church schools: the UU Church of Minnetonka, White Bear UU Church, Minnesota Valley UU Fellowship, and the Michael Servetus Unitarian Society. All but the White Bear group has contracted for professional religious education leadership. The marked increase in recent years in the number of part-time RE positions is certainly due to the increasingly limited amounts of volunteer time available.

Shifting again to the denominational scene, Sophia Fahs retired as Curriculum Editor in 1954, and Dorothy Spoerl became Editor in 1959. She was a Universalist minister, an educator, a psychologist and a humanist with a fine sense of history. Under her leadership were published The Science Series, Conversations With Children, Unitarian Universalism by Henry Cheetham, These Live Tomorrow by Clinton Lee Scott, and Tensions Our Children Live With. She supervised the publication of teacher’s guides for all curriculum materials, pamphlets for parents, and statements of philosophy. She resigned in 1964.

Shortly after merger came the report of Commission III on Education and Liberal Religion, published in The Free Church in the Changing World, 1963. While the Commission was supportive of the experimental, developmental philosophy of the Beacon Series, it recommended that more emphasis be placed on ethics, UU ideals, theology, freedom and responsibility, and social relationships. In 1965, the Rev. Hugo Hollerorth was hired as curriculum editor, and shortly began the publication of the multi-media curriculum programs—the eighth UU curriculum! He put together teams of educators, theologians, and writers to create curricula in response to Commission III’s recommendations. Decision Making and Freedom and Responsibility dealt with ethics; Man the Culture Builder and Human Heritage with human culture, Man the Meaning Maker with perception, and About Your Sexuality with social relationships. The kits were designed to be sold to public and private schools as well as UU societies. The About Your Sexuality is no doubt the outstanding achievement of the Hollerorth era. It has become the “rite of passage” for our junior highers from childhood to youth.

Rev. Hollerorth was a follower of Paul Tillich and the philosophy of existentialism. He felt that liberal religion failed to address the dark side of life—the potential for evil, the essential aloneness of each individual being, the sense of alienation experienced in today’s world. Critics say that there is no underlying educational philosophy in the multi-media programs, that there is no acknowledgement of problem solving through intelligence, science, and the democratic method. Instead, the message seems to be that human beings are buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so let’s try to make the best of it. Nevertheless, the “kits” met a real need in that they provided the busy volunteer with a range of valuable resources: background books, audiovisuals, stories, values clarification strategies, detailed lesson plans, and other teaching aids.

The early and mid 70s was also a time of much experimentation with educational methods. We began to use the open classroom approach. Children were offered choices as to what courses they would take on Sunday mornings; we had interest groups on everything from futurism to tie dying. It was exciting and challenging, but we kept asking ourselves, “What does this have to do with religion?” and “Should we really be doing this on Sunday morning?” Some of us could answer, “Yes, all these experiences have a religious dimension.” At Unity Church in St. Paul, however, the answer was “No, children should get on Sunday morning what they cannot get in weekday school—something that gives them a sense of who they are religiously.” And so by 1973, Unity Church had published their Images for Our Lives curriculum—their answer to the multi-media “kits.” Soon the Boston area team of Brotman-Marshman-Fields was publishing content-centered curricula, with Why Do Bad Things Happen? and How Can I Know What to Believe? RE leaders at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis began developing their own framework for a liberal religious humanist education program. Using the developmental levels from preschool through adulthood, and the five broad themes of the UU Principles—self, others, community, environment, and world—they drew up a grid or framework of 45 curriculum modules. Connections, An Education Program for Liberal Religious Humanists, was published in 1982.

By 1980, the UUA again called for a denominational rethinking of religious education curriculum and goals. The Religious Education Futures Committee was set to work, and in 1981, issued a report asserting that Unitarian Universalists must aim to help their children build an identity through the affirmation of our Principles, while at the same time recognizing the theological diversity within the UUA. Curriculum-writing teams were established by the UUA beginning in 1983, to work in the following areas related to our newly adopted statement of principles (1985):

  1. UU identity
  2. Peace and social justice
  3. Gender identity
  4. Racial justice
  5. Judaism and Christianity heritages
  6. Ecology and interdependence
  7. World religions for Junior High
  8. Spirituality and religious identity

The ecology and interdependence team is made up of people entirely from the Prairie Star District.

That many societies in the district have made outstanding contributions to the cause of religious education attests to the creativity and imagination of their leadership. I want to mention just a few such projects by way of example. During the 1950s, the Cedar Rapids church school produced several puppet plays, beginning with “Rebekah at the Well,” adapted by Polly Ely from the Biblical story. As The Peoples Church Puppeteers, they delighted audiences with further productions based on the lives of Albert Schweitzer and Joseph Priestley.

Unity Church ran a one-week day camp for 15 years, from 1956–1971. Also during Betty Whitman’s time, they had what was called the “expanded session” for at least 10 years, offering activities and classes for children from 9:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. every Sunday, concurrently with the adult forum and service.

The Willmar Unitarian Church started their Lake Camp on Green Lake in the summer of 1946, with 13 children. The program now serves 50 children from several Midwestern states, and they have celebrated their 40th year, thanks to Edith Haroldson, camp director for 27 years, and to Linda Mork, her successor.

Symbols and Golden Rules by Dorothy Grant of Cedar Falls, was published in 1960, and over 1000 copies were sold to UU church schools throughout the country. The booklet carries out the idea that each of the main world religions has its own Golden Rule, and each also has its own very different symbol. It is now being revised and will be reprinted by the UUA.

Religious Education and the Prairie Star District Organization

No history of religious education on the plains would be complete without mention of the role of the Prairie Star District through its Board and Committees. Under the Board, the Education and Program Development Committee sponsors teacher training and leadership workshops within the district. It operates a resource library, which lends materials free of charge to local societies. If offers scholarships to religious educators so that they may participate in training opportunities in other parts of the country. Members of the Committee are in touch with all societies several times a year, offering assistance and support to leaders of RE programs. In 1981, The New DRE Handbook, written by several religious education leaders in the district, was distributed to all Prairie Star societies and is presently being prepared for publication by the UUA. Financial support for the projects of the Education and Program Committee from the District has been substantial since at least 1975.

A big plus for religious education programs in the Prairie Star area was our participation in the Inter-District Religious Education Program which operated throughout four other districts in the mid-section of the country. A consultant was hired and journeyed far and wide leading workshops, introducing new curricula, advising local committees, and offering encouragement and support to RE leaders. The position, begun in 1971, was first held by the Rev. Margaret Odell, and then from l978–1984, by the Rev. Beth Ide. The position ended when the funds contributed to the program by the district were shifted to the salary of the District Executive.

Another important program of the district was the Extension Ministry program in operation from 1979–1982. Rev. David Phraener was employed. With a good background in religious education, he and Beth Ide sparked a new fellowship in Rice Lake, Wisconsin (Blue Hills), where the impetus for organizing was the hope for a church school program, and revived the Sunday School of the Fargo-Moorhead Fellowship to the point where it was growing faster than the adult membership.

Another district-wide activity supported by the Prairie Star Board has been the youth organization. During the time of the Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) during the late 60s and throughout the 70s, the attitudes and activities of the local and district LRY groups were worrisome to many adults. Problems involved the role and selection of advisors, the ties of LRY to the local church and the denomination, and conference rules. After a continental Youth Assembly in 1981, the dissolution of the Liberal Religious Youth was proposed. At a “Common Ground” conference in 1982, a new organization, the Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) was established as a planning, coordinating, and resource organization for local and district youth programs. Here in Prairie Star, a district-wide youth conference including youth leaders and advisors is held once a year at a camp near Boone, Iowa, planned under the direction of the Prairie Star Youth Committee.

Last, but not least, is the organization sponsoring this history—the Prairie Star Professionals. All salaried religious education directors have been members of this group since the mid 70s, sharing in the responsibilities and benefits of a once-a-year three-day retreat following the Easter/Spring holiday. It is an opportunity to exchange experiences and insights with colleagues from throughout the district, and to hear speakers on recent trends in philosophy, theology, and ministry.

Eleanor Morton,

DRE Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 1986

Bibliography

Publications, letters, and essays received from the following people: