By JONAH Board Representatives, Jackie Christner and Paul Savides (Chair since 2008)
Other present First Congo JONAH Core Team members: Sandy Ayers, Shannon Joshi (staff liaison), Elina Lane, Deb Mathson (secretary), and Lynn Wilson
Even before First Congo (our nickname) became a founding member of JONAH in 2007, our congregation was actively involved in advocacy for social justice issues through various committees working beyond the work of our many charity volunteers. Since then, our JONAH Core Team (as a sub-committee of our Mission Education and Social Concerns Committee) and the wider JONAH have partnered with these committees to expand community awareness of and advocacy for change in regard to our common concerns.
Our church’s Welcoming New Neighbors and our Immigration Committee, both led by Ginny Close, have been collaborating with JONAH’s Immigration Task Force for after-service forums and displays of quilts made from cloth squares of welcoming messages made by children. (Ginny received JONAH’s Justice Ally Award in 2024.) Each year our Mission Ed. and Social Concerns Committee organizes, with additional volunteer help, a Global Market, which features hand-made items made by people in impoverished countries. All profits return to the makers. First Congo’s Creation Justice Team is another collaborator with JONAH’s Environmental Task Force, with our core team, to present an educational forum and ongoing information.
Our very first core team was organized and led by Jill Christopherson, First Congo’s Director of Education and also JONAH’s very first president. As a JONAH Core Team member, she led the way by inspiring us, through many one-to-one conversations and listening sessions with congregants, to learn what issues were important to them both within our church and outside it. David Liners, Director of WISDOM, helped us learn about organizing around those issues and joining with other local congregations of diverse faiths to create task forces around them. At the same time, our core team helped to solve various issues that pertained only to our church. Our team has had various members over the years, but Paul Savides has been our core team chair since he and Jackie Christner attended a week-long Gamaliel Leadership Training near Chicago in 2008. Paul and Jackie are the only core team members who have served the team since the founding of JONAH.
First Congo has been hosting the Round Table Revival (RTR) meetings and meals for about three years. This group was created and is administered by Don Mowry as an outgrowth of JONAH’s Chippewa Valley Justice Action Team (now the RE-Entry Task Force). Don also had a women’s RTR group at his UU Congregation. The purpose here is to mentor Chippewa Valley men who are coming out of jail or prison in their process of re-entry into society. Several of our Men’s Covenant Group serve as mentors who meet regularly with these men both in (for meetings and meals) and out of our building. Our Core Team organizes their meals at first Tuesday meetings, by providing the food by our team and by enlisting other First Congo groups to do so.
About two years ago, First Congo added a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. The first year the committee studied racism, with a series of Zoom classes, documentaries, and readings led by Kris Watson of Nurturing Justice. Then the DEI Committee began a process to inform the congregation about the meaning of and reasons for becoming an official Open and Affirming (O&A) congregation. The committee developed a Covenant that, with input from many congregants, would say specifically what we mean by O&A. After many meetings with other committees and after-service forums, our congregants voted to adopt the covenant and become an official O&A congregation. Our JONAH Core Team hopes to work with the DEI Committee on projects that help specific groups of people identified in the Open and Affirming Covenant.
Our First Congo Core Team’s most deeply held values are inclusion, compassion, service, and community. To that end, we seek to build warm and lasting relationships among congregation members and to share with them the activities and opportunities that JONAH provides. We are proud that First Congo was a founding member of JONAH and that our core team has been a strong and active part of JONAH, which has been a strong and active affiliate of the state organization WISDOM.