August’s Letter from Liz
Each month, we publish a letter from Liz Slade, the chief officer for the General Assembly. This is Liz’s letter for August 2026.
I am very proudly an infrastructure nerd.
I am delighted by the well-designed or organically grown systems that enable things to work – often the unloved essential networks that so many important things depend on.
Part of this love perhaps comes from my former career in the world of health systems – work that included creating tools that helped doctors design local health services that met their communities’ needs while following best practice care. Our glorious and frustrating NHS is some of our most precious national and local infrastructure, yet so much of it was designed at a time when people’s lives were very different, and it can be hard to uproot ways of working when new needs or new treatments appear. And it’s infrastructure that is tended by people with extraordinarily deep care and commitment – for many NHS workers, it’s far more than just a job, but a calling, knowing they are part of something bigger than themselves, something worth going all those extra miles for.
Britain’s spiritual infrastructure has long fascinated me too. Each church building is a story of the cultural context in which it was built – whether it’s a Norman church with an ancient yew tree in the churchyard telling a story of its pre-Christian history, or an early dissenting meeting house deliberately made to look unlike a church so its congregation may be ‘hidden’, or a confident neo-gothic celebration.
In recent decades as church attendance has dropped, there are fewer pairs of hands to tend the inherited infrastructure, but also less creative energy to build what is newly needed now.
Buildings designed a few centuries ago with a higher level of congregational support in mind can eat the best part of a community’s attention; the physical infrastructure is hard to ignore, and so often takes the first bite of the available energy.
Meanwhile, there are new demands placed on congregations that their Victorian or Georgian ancestors wouldn’t have had to deal with in the same way. Financial management, meeting Charity Commission reporting expectations, implementing safeguarding policies well – these are all essential for tending the invisible infrastructure that keeps a congregation healthy.
Beyond those management responsibilities, there is of course cultural infrastructure – the coffee rota, the pastoral care team, the person who keeps track of members’ birthdays, or finds the right words for the poster on the noticeboard.
All of these play an essential role in a congregation being a place that can safely, reliably, sustainably offer spiritual health. All before a candle has been lit or a word has been said from the pulpit.
A lot of these can take the same amount of work whether there are six people in the congregation or sixty.
An important question for us as a movement is how to make the care of our collective infrastructure viable. Is it appropriate to expect a congregation of half a dozen people to steward their inherited infrastructure alone? What might alternatives look like? We know that the risks of weak governance affect us all, through reputational risk and the potential to lose precious parts of our network of spiritual infrastructure.
Might Unitarian congregations take a route similar to the Quakers, who are combining multiple local and area meetings into a single charity?
What are the ways that support can be provided to congregations that ease their burdens, like the Midlands Unitarian Association’s district-wide Estate Manager, who provides expert insight to congregations on their buildings? (A recommendation implemented from the district’s Sustainability Audit commissioned from Unitarian Transformers.)
We are keen that the GA’s innovation fund supports the health of the invisible infrastructure, enabling different approaches to governance and management tasks, or getting some outside help to get over a hurdle.
The practical, management side of tending our infrastructure is necessary for our movement to be healthy, but it is not sufficient.
The energy to tackle this practical work comes from a sense of calling, a clear vision of what the congregation offers, what it stands for, the impact it makes on people’s lives and the local community. This needs the space for imagination – exactly the thing that is hard to call on when local leaders are worrying about the hole in the church roof, or managing hall rentals.
But without this clear vision, the practical work can feel impossible or overwhelming.
Amid the demands our buildings, governance structures, and charity management make on our time, we need to create space for the reason why we are gathering in community. Each congregation will express this uniquely, and it is more than a rational ‘mission statement’. I think of this sense of vision and purpose for a congregation as something that is alive, that is embodied, that is held in the hearts of leaders, and is held in relationship. It’s something that is tender, and so relies on trust and good relationships – it’s very hard for someone to express the deep calling they feel in the congregation amid an argumentative committee meeting.
We want the innovation fund to support this exploratory work too. Many of you (over 150 at last count) have taken part in ‘Three Horizons’ workshops that Nick Butler-Watts, the fund’s Programme Manager, has hosted around the country. These aim to help create an environment where the future visions can arise, be shared, and serve as a guide for local leaders to steer their work. The Three Horizons model is very helpful as it creates space for the ‘management’ work of the here-and-now, the innovative work of looking to improve what exists, and the visionary work of focusing on the better world we want to bring into being. All three are essential, and deserve our attention. I strongly recommend this five-minute video, which gives a simple taster of how these three horizons will already be showing up in your congregational conversations – I’ve found this framing incredibly helpful, and it can help ease collaboration when things seem stuck.
Some congregations and Districts will be blessed with skilled facilitators who can create the conditions for exploratory conversations to happen, where members can tune into their deep sense of what the world is asking of the congregation, and others will choose to engage an external facilitator who can support the right conversations to happen.
It’s important that amid the noisy clamour of the day-to-day demands of keeping our congregations going, we also create the spaces for stepping back, reflecting, imagining,
We welcome expressions of interest to the innovation fund if this is something you would like to try; the smaller development grants are designed with this kind of work in mind, the groundwork that prepares the soil for new ideas to grow. And do get in touch with Nick if you’d like to know more about him hosting a Three Horizons workshop in your area.
This reflective work is a different approach to tending the infrastructure that we are stewarding to the work of preparing accounts, or getting quotes for fixing the guttering, or managing the hall rentals – but it is just as essential.
I have deep faith that the ideas for the future flourishing of our congregations are already held by its members – at least as a tiny kernel, if not yet fully formed. But I also know that ideas don’t let themselves be known until the conditions are right – and that means making space outside of the day-to-day. I’m pretty sure that what Quaker writer Parker J. Palmer says about the conditions for the soul to arise applies to our sense of vision for congregational life too: “The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”
For everyone who is grappling with the hard work of sustaining our Unitarian infrastructure, I hope that as we come to the end of this summer, there can be moments of this quiet stillness, and the conditions to share what you find there with your fellow stewards.