Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation

09/01/2026

📣 TOMORROW! Join us!

👏🏾 Ready to challenge the status quo? Join us for an inspiring conversation with Dr. Meg Bartlett-Chase, s*x educator, organizer, and advocate, as we explore how comprehensive s*x education empowers communities and resists authoritarianism.

🙌🏾 Discover the latest research, policy insights, and real-world stories from the founder of Honest S*x Ed Minnesota Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how s*x ed can be a powerful tool for justice and liberation!

🔗 Register to join us: https://ow.ly/7rLM50ZHxC1

*xEdAsResistance *xualityEducation

with: Our Whole Lives, Unitarian Universalist Association

09/01/2026

We're Hiring!

Position Title: Communications Coordinator
Hours: 6-10 hrs/weekly. Schedule and hours are flexible.
Pay range: $17-19/hr.

Location: This is primarily a remote position with some occasional in-person meetings as needed within or near Grayslake, IL.

Full job posting and job description available on the PCUUC website: www.prairiecircleuuc.org

Job Summary: The Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation (PCUUC) seeks a creative content developer skilled in social media communications and the ability to work collaboratively with a range of people and personalities to serve as their Communications Coordinator. The Communications Coordinator is responsible for ensuring that PCUUC’s website and social media platforms are updated and promote current activities with an emphasis on communication outreach and expanding to new audiences. This position is a key member of the leadership team and plays an important role in the presentation of PCUUC’s public face and voice, ensuring that PCUUC’s humanist and social justice missions are well represented in our community and surrounding region. This is a new position for PCUUC so the right candidate will help define the role.

Core Functions: The Communications Coordinator will work collaboratively with the Minister, Staff, Board of Directors and designated Committees in maintaining and enhancing all means of internal and external communications, with an emphasis on developing a strong and creative social media presence and consistent images and messages across multiple platforms. This position is central in new organizational efforts to develop original digital and visual content that represents the values, principles, and activities of PCUUC to a broader audience. In addition, this position works closely with the PCUUC Board, Minister, Congregational Administrator, and the Membership Team in providing friendly and consistent communication with our congregational members and new visitors.

08/31/2026

Speaker Chaplain Dave Becker

Sunday, September 6, 2026, at 10:00am Virtual on Zoom

“Labor and Delivery”

On September 5, 1882 about 10,000 workers took unpaid leave to march in a labor union parade in protest of unfair and unsafe working conditions. This action, one of many within the 19th century labor movement, spread to other cities and by 1894 the U.S. Congress and President Grover Cleveland passed legislation to declare Labor Day a national holiday. At the heart of Labor Day and its history is an affirmation of human dignity. This Labor Day weekend, Chaplain Dave will offer reflections on the intersection between labor movement and Unitarian Universalist history, principles, and values. Join the Prairie Circle and Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregations in this shared on-line service at 10am Sunday September 6.
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Dave Becker is a Unitarian Universalist Minister and Interfaith Chaplain. He is Pastor for Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Grayslake, IL and for Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, IL.
Services held in person in the Colby Barn are also available on Zoom. To join us on Zoom, please go to the WORSHIP SERVICES tab on our website and click on the blue Zoom link.
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For Our Zoom Participants:
Please see the links below to hymnary.org, a database which contains the lyrics to most of our songs contained in our standard gray and "teal" hymnals.
Link to Gray Hymnal (For Hymns through #415)
Link to Teal Hymnal (For Hymns #1000 and up)

08/28/2026

The Woodlands returns September 6! 🌳

This monthly online spiritual community is beginning a new season of connection, care, joy, and rest for trans, non-binary, Two-Spirit, gender-expansive, inters*x, gender-blessed, and gender non-conforming people—and those who love them.

And this year, The Woodlands is growing. We’re excited to introduce Sweetgums, a new dedicated space for the partners and spouses of trans people, alongside small community groups for trans youth and adults, parents, caregivers, and families.

Rooted in Unitarian Universalist values, The Woodlands offers a space where trans lives are not up for debate or explanation, but are honored as sacred, whole, and worthy of care.

Monthly gatherings resume September 6 at 5 p.m. Eastern / 2 p.m. Pacific.

Learn more and register at the link in the comments.

08/28/2026

From Chaplain Dave:
My colleagues with the Lake County Clergy Action Network fill me with such hope. It was a privilege to join them in public witness in support of National Nurses United protest against Palantir. Following are the powerful words of Rev, Quincy Worthington:

I'm Reverend Quincy Worthington, a local pastor here, representing Arise Chicago and the Lake County Clergy Action Network.
I've dedicated my life to following a man who was in the healing profession 2,000 years ago. And one of the most important things he commanded us to do — commanded, not suggested, commanded — was to love our neighbors.
Loving our neighbors means fighting every effort to dehumanize them.
Loving our neighbors means refusing to stand by while they are abducted off our streets by masked thugs.
Loving our neighbors means protecting their privacy and their personal information — refusing to let what a person shares in order to get care become a path that leads ICE to their door.
And this isn’t a warning about something that might happen. It already is
Palantir built a tool for ICE called ELITE. It reportedly draws on data from the Department of Health and Human Services to map where people are and build files on who to come for.
Health data. Your patients' data. It’s already happening.
Loving our neighbors means refusing to reduce human beings to data points, to targets, to somebody's quarterly earnings.
And loving our neighbors means refusing to make cruelty more efficient.
That’s what Palantir does. It takes enormous amounts of information about human beings and turns that information into power — the power to identify them, to locate them, to track them, to target them, and uses it to tear them away from their families and communities.
Nurses understand better than most that personal information is sacred. No one should ever have to choose between seeking the healthcare they need and keeping their family safe.
The money in the Cook County Pension Fund was earned through healing. Through long shifts, sleepless nights, exhausted bodies, and hands placed on people in their most vulnerable moments.
The wages of healing cannot become the capital of harm.
Loving our neighbors means refusing to make another family's terror part of anyone's retirement.
The Cook County Pension Fund is holding Palantir stock. That stock was bought with deferred wages — money these nurses already earned. More than a thousand registered nurses at Cook County Health are demanding the Fund sell it, and ten thousand nurses across this county are standing behind them. We are telling the Pension Board to divest. And we aren't going to stop telling them to divest.
Because love is not something we profess. Love is revealed by what we support. By what we fund. And by what we refuse

08/28/2026

08/24/2026

Speaker Kristal Larson

Sunday, August 30 at 9:00am at the Barn

Finding Community “By The Numbers”

In part two of the “By The Numbers” series, this sermon continues and exploration the q***r journey after coming out using the Book of Numbers as a guide. The discussion begins by centering the unique challenges of being openly q***r. It explores the need for finding safety and security in close community and among allies. It concludes with examining the importance of cultural traditions in building resilience, and how that community building can extend to all people.

Kristal Larson is the Executive Director of LGBTQ+ Center Lake County, where she leads efforts to build a more inclusive, welcoming, and thriving community for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. Through visionary leadership, strategic advocacy, and deep community engagement, she works to advance equity, visibility, and opportunity for LGBTQ+ people across Lake County and beyond. A recognized changemaker and trailblazer, Kristal previously served as Clerk of Avon Township, becoming the first openly transgender elected executive branch official in Illinois and one of fewer than 100 openly transgender elected officials nationwide at the time. Her groundbreaking public service helped pave the way for greater representation in government while amplifying LGBTQ+ voices in policymaking.

Throughout her career, Kristal has played a key role in shaping and advancing legislation that strengthens protections and improves outcomes for LGBTQ+ communities across Illinois. As a sought-after speaker, educator, and inclusion expert, Kristal regularly delivers presentations on LGBTQ+ identities, equity, and best practices for creating inclusive environments. Through her work, she inspires understanding, fosters belonging, and empowers organizations to build cultures where everyone can succeed.
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Services held in person in the Colby Barn are also available on Zoom. To join us on Zoom, please go to the WORSHIP SERVICES tab on our website and click on the blue Zoom link.
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For Our Zoom Participants:
Please see the links below to hymnary.org, a database which contains the lyrics to most of our songs contained in our standard gray and "teal" hymnals.
Link to Gray Hymnal (For Hymns through #415)
Link to Teal Hymnal (For Hymns #1000 and up)

08/23/2026

The flaming chalice has important historic significance as a signal of safer spaces and assistance on the path to freedom; and for me, it is also a fiery reminder of the commitments of this faith.

Unitarian Universalism challenges me to make use of my own freedom, my own privilege, my own values and reason to understand that what I might risk on any given day is just my one small part in the possibility of human goodness and liberation that we preach and teach about in troubled times. These commitments invite every one of us to risk what we think we know about the power of love in the world for greater freedoms, greater justice... for nothing less than liberation for all.

As we explore what it means to hold love at the center of our faith, how might we bring hope home in times like these? Can we offer some aspect of our own spirits to others to help them keep going; to respond to rising hatred with mutual care?

As we come together in this freely chosen faith centered on love, let us hold fast to a spirit that never leaves us, and offer to one another and to our surrounding communities the kind of love that frees.

08/17/2026

Animal Blessing on Sunday 23 August at Nippersink Forest Preserve Shelter D with Deb Krohn

Please join us at Nippersink Forest Preserve Shelter D in Round Lake for our special service honoring the animals that enrich our lives. PCUUC member and professional educator, Deb Krohn, will bring several of her favorite amphibians and reptile friends to help share stories of how even the slimy and scaly bring joy and wonder to our world. There will be a blessing of the animals as part of the service.

All who would like their animals to be blessed are welcome to join in this ritual. If you would like to bring your special friend to this outdoor service, please make sure they are safely restrained or in secure travel containers that will keep your animal safe. As you consider whether this service is appropriate for your pet, please remember that many types of animals might be present. Feel free to bring a picture of your animal for the blessing if your animal would be better off at home, or if you would like to remember a pet that has passed away. You can also bring objects and photos to put on our “animal tribute altar” to represent any creatures that are part of our interconnected web of life or that have passed on. (Some examples are a nest, a pet’s favorite toy, a photo of a fish tank or pond).