Preface (1986)

BRING, O PAST, YOUR HONOR

Bring, O Past, your honor: bring, O Time, your harvest,
Golden sheaves of hallowed lives and minds by Truth made free;
Come, you faithful spirits, builders of this temple:
“To Holiness, to Love, and Liberty.”

Ring, in glad thanksgiving, bell of grief and gladness,
Forth to town and prairie let our festal greeting go,
Voices long departed in your tones re-echo:
“Praise to the Highest, Peace to all below.”

Church of pure reformers, pioneers undaunted,
Bivouac of comrades sworn to keep our spirits free;
Long o’er life’s swift river, preach the eternal gospel:
Faith, hope, and love for all humanity.

– Charles H. Lyttle
 

PREFACE

Every April, during the week following Easter, the professional leaders of the Prairie Star District—Ministers and Directors of Religious Education—get together for purposes of fellowship and continuing education. In April 1986, Melissa Helgesen, DRE at First Unitarian Church in Omaha, and I were in charge of the program, and we decided to focus the group’s attention on the history of liberal religion in the area now the Prairie Star District.

This little book is an outgrowth of that meeting. Since there is little material on the history of our district available in most church libraries, the professional leaders decided that the essays presented at the meeting, along with brief histories of churches and fellowships in the district, would be published and sent to every society in the District. The five essayists each submitted “photo-ready” copies for the project. Every church and fellowship in the district was also asked to submit a one-page, photo-ready history of their society. The final product, resulting from a wide variety of typefaces and the necessity of reducing a number of submissions, lacks uniformity, but it is the best we could come up with, given our limited resources. Although there is no attempt to be comprehensive, it is hoped that churches and fellowships will find this little book helpful in understanding and appreciating both the history of liberal religion in our area and our contributions to the larger Unitarian Universalist movement.

I would personally like to thank all of those who contributed to this project: the essayists, the artists from the Omaha church, and the people from churches and fellowships who wrote and submitted brief histories. I would particularly like to express appreciation to Alan Egly, who assisted in the drawn out task of securing histories from almost all of the churches and fellowships; to Camie, the district office secretary, who retyped a number of the manuscripts; and to Maurice Jay, office secretary at First Unitarian Church of Omaha, who did a lot of work in getting this material ready for publication.

Ronald Knapp
Omaha, Nebraska, April 1987