Message from The President

Dear UU Family,

Your ministers and board have been carefully monitoring the coronavirus situation in Florida and the eastern United States, and have made the difficult and painful decision to cancel our regular live church services until further notice.  We are currently researching the best way to have a ”virtual“ service — Zoom or a similar platform —and will get details to you as soon as possible.  Rev. Roberta and Rev. Marti will be regularly communicating with you as well.

In addition, Rev. Roberta and Rev. Marti will not be traveling to Jacksonville at least until mid-April.  Much of their staff supervision and other ministerial responsibilities and activities can be conducted online, and both will be available via email.  Marti lives in the Atlanta area, which has known cases of Covid-19, as does the Alexandria area, where Rev. Roberta lives.  It is not prudent for them to travel at this time.

I'm sure there will be some who think we are overreacting, but we believe it's wise to be cautious.  Roberta shared an email about the problems in New Rochelle, a suburb of NYC.  The Covid-19 outbreak there started when one person, who was not showing any symptoms, attended two events at his synagogue.  Now over 100 people are diagnosed, and likely many more are infected.  We already know of one person in Nassau County has travel-related Covid-19, and we are pretty much guaranteed that there will be more in this part of Florida.  We need to do whatever we can to protect ourselves and our church community.

I am so grateful to Marti and Roberta for their commitment to serving our congregation, and their research in to how that will work.

Thank you for your understanding.  I know we will sorely miss our contact with each other at services on Sunday mornings, but we can worship together in other, meaningful ways.

Please, all of you — take care, and stay well.

Penny Reid
Board President