Stone Temple News

For the fifth time, the City of Quincy LGBTQ+ Commission joins with QPride, PFlag of Greater Boston (Quincy Support), and Quincy Interfaith Network to kick-off Pride Month with a flag raising and reveal ceremony on the front portico of United First Parish Church. The annual event celebrates a month of recognizing and lifting up the City’s LGBTQ+ community. This year’s event will be held at 6:00pm on Sunday, May 31st.

As in our custom, speakers will include Jim Petosa, Chair of the Commission, John McDonald and Nina Liang, members of the Commission, along with Richard Ashe, Chair of Quincy’s QPride. Blessings and Invocations will be delivered by a broad representation of the Quincy Interfaith Council and performances will include music from the Quincy Choral Society.

This year, we will be bestowing our 2026 Flagraiser Awards to three representatives of Quincy’s civil service community.  These leaders will be honored for their service and care of the Quincy LGBTQ+ community. Names will be announced one week before the event.

Please join the celebration. This year’s gathering is particularly important, so come and show your support and alliance with our community! For information, feel free to contact Jim Petosa at jimjamespeto@aol.com.

-Jim Petosa, Chair of the Quincy LGBTQ+ Commission and UFPC Member 

The UFPC Board of Governors would like to invite you to a special workshop on Capital Campaign Readiness to be held Saturday, June 13th from 10:00am-12:00pm in the Parish Hall, with Brunch provided. This workshop will be led by Stewardship Consultant, Rev. Lydia Ferrante-Roseberry, who will help us prepare for a possible capital campaign to maintain and upgrade our historic building. A core focus of her visit will be on identifying recommended next steps and practical information to help us successfully achieve our goals. Rev. Lydia will meet with the board and staff on Friday evening, June 12th. We will also be scheduling time for meetings with our UFPC program committees, Prison Book Program, and History & Visitors Program. 

Rev. Lydia would like to learn about our congregation prior to her visit and has provided this link to a survey for you to complete: Next Steps Process Survey - UFPC. All information will be kept confidential, and only aggregate information and comments without names will be presented. On Sunday, June 14th, following our worship service, Rev. Lydia will present her initial observations and recommendations to our congregation. She will follow up with a final presentation and recommendations to our board by Zoom. 

For a little background, we initially announced our intention for a capital campaign at our May 2025 annual meeting. For helpful advice, we contacted our New England Region Representative, Art Nava, who recommended Stewardship for Us which is a collective of consultants specializing in Unitarian Universalist congregations. Rev. Rebecca, Jackie, and Marie-Louise met with Rev. Lydia on February 26th, and followed up with an informational meeting with the board and a vote at our March meeting. 

We are looking forward to beginning this journey with our congregation and welcome your thoughts!

-Marie-Louise Jackson-Miller, UFPC President 

If you got a chance to read my previous article, then you’ll know that in addition to my own monthly class, Spirit Circle holds regular art classes with Max, earth care with Jon, and meditation and movement with Paula. Hopefully, we’ll be able to give a bit more of a picture of each in future editions of this newsletter! But in this one, I wanted to give a snapshot of our Unitarian Universalist-focused circle, which I’m leading this year.

This year, we have been focusing on learning more about the UU values: interdependence, pluralism, justice, transformation, generosity, and equity - with love at the center. To explore these values, I’m trying out something a little different – a values-themed superhero escape room I have been writing throughout the year, which our Spirit Circle participants have been gamely playtesting. With their input and some editing, I hope to send it out in the world so that other RE programs can try it, too!

When they enter the classroom each month, our Spirit Circle kids become superhero sidekicks at the Covenant superhero headquarters in Townsville. But suddenly, the power goes off, and a news report lets us know that our superhero mentors, the members of the Covenant, have been captured by a team of supervillains! It is now up to the sidekicks to restore the headquarters and rescue the Covenant! In each subsequent session, the sidekicks begin by talking about that month’s value (the hero) and its opposite (the villain) and then solve a series of puzzles to rescue the hero from a themed lair (aka the dining room).

To solve these puzzles, participants can use their own cooperative puzzle-solving skills, but they can also creatively make use of a power they’ve chosen for their character to have during that session, including time control, ice powers, future vision, telekinesis, teleportation, ghost powers, and electronic powers. A few puzzles have definitely been creatively solved this way over the course of the year! We have two more superheroes to rescue (Equity and Transformation), but I have no doubt that the trusty sidekicks will prevail.

-Elizabeth Foster, Director of Religious Education and Family Ministry 

Excerpt from Bill Westland's history vignette from Patriots Day 2026:

"April 20th, the day after Patriots Day, was the day of the running of the Boston Marathon and the start of the Massachusetts Public School vacation week. As you all know, this was also a holiday here in Massachusetts and the day that we opened our 2026 tour season as well. We first started giving tours of the Church and the Presidential Crypts back in 1976, the Bicentennial Year of the United States, and except for one year during the pandemic have never missed a year. It doesn’t seem possible, but this is our 50th year of being open for tours, and this will be my 40th year of being involved in the Visitor Program..."

Continue reading under the History Vignettes tab on our website!

-Bill Westland, Church Historian