Giving to the UUCP

"As an interfaith couple, UUCP welcomed and allowed us to celebrate our common values and explore our individual spiritual paths, provided our children with a meaningful religious education, and offered religious community for our family.” - Susan & Jon Sachs

In this congregation, people gather together seeking a higher purpose and a deeper life than they can find alone. We are grateful for each one of you, that you have found your way here.

This is a generous congregation which gives away the money in every Sunday’s collection plates to social justice work. It gives away the proceeds from its two major find raisers to social justice work. It is supporting the desire of the Youth Group to go to the Gulf Coast to help with the recovery work ongoing there.

Our support of this congregation is like a table’s four legs. We support it with our presence, attending whenever we can, knowing that the particular chemistry of our history and longing, our humor and questioning, our need and our giving help make the community whole. We support it with our money, knowing that the substance of what we make our living with is needed for the congregation to live as well. We support it with our work, turning our hands, hearts and minds to the congregation’s outreach and in-reach, creating a sacred space, worthwhile programs, meaningful work groups, transformative conversations, and passing our values on to our children. We support it, finally, with our good will, bringing open hearts to the community and assuming good will on the part of those who are there with us.

This year our Stewardship Drive takes seriously the fact that there is no “they” in our congregation who ask for money every year. We ask one another. The first part of any conversation about commitment is about what the community has meant to us. After that, we talk about what kind of financial commitment we wish to make to support the congregation and its work. We use the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Fair Giving Guide to see what would be expected of us if we were giving at ideal levels, levels that would create a congregation that was truly going to be a force in Princeton.

Also, since Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. famously said “Anonymous giving promotes anonymous non-giving,” this year we are asking members to self-report about what percentage of income they are giving. This way, it is not the dollar amount alone that makes a gift significant, but the relationship between that amount of support and the person’s income and assets. Someone who makes 25,000 a year can be as significant and weighty a donor as someone who makes half a million a year. In this way, this congregation differs from theater companies who list their donors in categories, like “gold,” “silver,” “platinum,” etc. according to the amount of the gift. UUCP recognizes donors according to how much they give of what they have. This congregation honors your gifts, and wishes you to be blessed as givers.

Letter from the Ministers