First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg's Podcast

August 4, 2024

Ash Burkowski, from Friends of the Living Prairie Museum, will provide an overview on why native plants are something to consider and pay attention to, including their environmental and horticultural benefits. They will discuss how natural prairies are important for climate change, preserving endangered species, and providing a way for gardeners to have a low-maintenance landscape. They will briefly discuss some plants that are great to start gardening with, and discuss some of the relationships between endangered species and their host plants.

April 6 2025

What does it mean to flourish? What does a flourishing congregation look like?
What are the pathways from stability to vitality, surviving to thriving? And what difference would it make for the world? Let’s take time to imagine the next three years, the next decade, the next generation.

January 19, 2025
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) didn’t quite write “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” This ubiquitous quote is a Readers Digest summary of a few lines of dialogue from one of her short stories, yet it feels true about how we connect to the element of water, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and are healed by it. At other times, salt (and fresh) water can be hugely destructive.

This is the second service of the Elements Series, in which five speakers share personal perspectives on the five classical elements of earth, water, air, fire, and love. Christina will explore the complexity of fostering a healthy relationship with water in its many forms: salt water, tears, the sea; clouds, snow, rain; rivers, lakes, and the ghosts of inexorable waterways that have shaped our landscapes and communities.

2025-03-23 Sermon

Theologians and philosophers spent the last century talking about the death of God, but today it’s reasonable to ask if society is living through the death of truth. In his book on tyranny, Timothy Snyder notes that “truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed” – open hostility to verifiable reality, shamanistic incantation, magical thinking, and misplaced faith. As truth dies, we become vulnerable to cynicism and indifference, which serves the interests of authoritarianism.

Service Coordinator: Jill Moats

https://uuwinnipeg.mb.ca/services/how-truth-dies/

2024-03-16 Sermon

What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist in 2025? What are we actually choosing? Reverend Anne Barker will invite us into a reflective worship space –where we consider the emerging possibilities. Rev. Anne Barker is the Canadian Unitarian Council’s Congregational Life Lead for Western Canada. She is visiting Winnipeg this weekend to consult with our congregation about its future ministry.

Service Coordinator: Rev. Stefan Jonasson

https://uuwinnipeg.mb.ca/services/choosing-to-be-uu-in-2025/

2025-03-09 Sermon

“Over the past two years, I have described the kinds of ministry available to this congregation in workshops, meetings, and individual conversations, but I have tried to keep the space open so that you could express what ministry means to you and what kind of minister you wish to have. I have mostly refrained from telling you what ministry means to me – why it exists, what it does, and why I have devoted my life to it. I haven’t shared my hopes in entering this vocation, or my disappointments and regrets along the way. Today, I plan to express my personal views about ministry.” - Rev. Stefan

Service Coordinator: Cate Ziegler
https://uuwinnipeg.mb.ca/services/what-ministry-means-to-me/

2024-12-22 “No one is outside the circle of love,” wrote Rev Susan Frederick-Gray in a 2017 pastoral message. Canada’s commitment to universal health care is rooted in the fundamental belief that every resident, regardless of their background, deserves high-quality care when they need support for their well-being. On this morning after the winter solstice, as we emerge from the longest night of the year and welcome the growing light, Mounir (Mike) Nader, President and CEO of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, reflects on the ongoing need for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in healthcare—and the path to achieving it.

Service Coordinator: Christina Swindells-Nader

There are slides, which you can see in the video embedded here: https://uuwinnipeg.mb.ca/services/claim-the-growing-light-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-healthcare/

2025-02-16 

Like the proverbial olive, winter is an acquired taste for many. But if you do acquire a taste for it, “only in the winter,” says Ruth Stout, “can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savour yourself.” Amidst the frigid cold and dark nights, it is easy to miss the beauty and bounty of this season, its warmth and blessings. In this land of long, vivid winters, we can embrace the season or retreat from it, but we cannot ignore it.

Service Coordinator: Christina Swindells-Nader

https://uuwinnipeg.mb.ca/services/an-ode-to-winter/

2025-01-12

In the beginning there is no desire to mark time, and in the end, there is no reason. But in between beginnings and endings, we mark time almost compulsively. Minutes lead to hours, hours to days, days to months, and months to years. And then we repeat. Calendars are the yardsticks with which we measure the passage of time and organize our lives while the proverbial clock ticks.

Service Coordinator: Cate Ziegler

https://uuwinnipeg.mb.ca/services/marking-time/

2025-02-23 “Do not obey in advance,” says Timothy Snyder in his book On Tyranny, warning that, “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” In England, Unitarians emerged within a religious movement that was dubbed Nonconformity, while in America, our kindred spirit Henry David Thoreau was acclaimed for his essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. As authoritarianism is on the rise, with its false promises of security and prosperity, are we once again called to embrace our heritage of nonconformity and disobedience?