Customer Reviews

Salted With Fire: Unitarian Universalist Strategies for Sharing Faith and Growing Congregations

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I have a shelf full of books on UU. This was the one I most enjoyed reading. It contains about 20 essays by different UU leaders, exploring different aspects of improving our ministry. The piece by Suzanne Meyer was particularly useful to me as a Worship committee chair. My congregation is beginning to build Covenant Groups - small lay-led group ministries. These are on the Meta-Church model. The meta-church literature (Carl George, and others) is good, but very much out of an Evangelical Christian tradition. For UUs to make small-group ministry work, we need to be able to articulate what special gifts *our* tradition holds. I found this book so useful in that regard that I've bought eight copies of it, and been giving them away to other members of my congregation.

Salted With Fire has a powerful and straight-forward message: evangelism is not a dirty word. Unitarian Universalists have often been hesitant to "push" their views onto others, but Salted With Fire makes a very powerful case that this is a serious mistake. Is the message of UU not worth sharing? Others, who have what UU's regard as much less constructive and hopeful and helpful messages, do not hesitate to push their views and attempt to influence public policy in any way they can. Salted with Fire should be required reading for all UU's, and top of the list for all present-giving occasions. The message of Unitarian Universalism is worth sharing, must be shared. This book will fire you up to do so. Tony A. Larsen's chapter on religious education is worth the price of the book.

A collaboration of UU authors share how they have been successful in promoting congregational growth. There are many great ideas and inspiring stories.