Director of Religious Education

Our first corn harvest! Three Sisters Garden update

07/24/2025

Wildflower member Brandy Nichols displays our first harvest of corn this year from our Faith Garden (a community garden shared by Faith Presbyterian Church, Wildflower Church, and our community friends and neighbors).

Brandy Nichols holds a string of corn in the husks in the Wildflower Community Room

The corn is the first crop from our Three Sisters garden plot (which consists of corn, beans, and pumpkins or squash), which was planted in partnership with Central Texas Cherokee Township’s Three Sisters Program.

Gratitude to all the gardeners, including youth and children of Wildflower, who have planted, watered, and tended our crops, together. We are also especially grateful to CTCT’s Doug Martin, for his generosity in sharing gardening knowledge and Cherokee heirloom seeds with our community.

The corn is currently being dried and will later be ground into flour during a food sovereignty workshop which will be planned at a later date in the fall.

The Wildflower Library Refresh

Gratitude post for Wildflower youth Tulio for volunteer a few weeks of his summer for a refresh of our library. He spent a few weeks cleaning our community room bookshelves, cataloging books into an online database, moving some of archival materials into storage, and starting to reorganize the collection.

This is such a helpful project, which will help our our staff, worship team, CYRE, ARE, and others find more easily find some of the resources we have. (It’ll also help us to make the collection more accessible to members in the future.)

Our database isn’t complete yet, and we still have some organizing to do, but you can have a sneak peak: https://www.librarycat.org/lib/WildflowerChurch

Thanks, Tulio, for living out our Shared UU Value of generosity. What a great gift of time and talent.

If anyone wants to help continue the good work started, please let us know.

Blessing of the Backpacks

08/26/2024

We had a lovely Blessing of the Backpacks to kick off our new school year — and the fall generally! Everyone left with a “Powered By Love” tag since love is the driving force behind all of our newly adopted values (Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, & Generosity). The purpose of this tradition is to help remind us that we bring our UU values and Wildflower’s love with us wherever we go.

Here’s an excerpt of the blessing:

Even when you are away from Wildflower, you carry the heart of Unitarian Universalism with you wherever you go.

We bless these charms that will accompany you on your journey.

We bless these charms in the name of Love. May you always remember that you are loved here at Wildflower May you remember to love yourself and to love each other.

May you keep love at the center of all you do.

These charms are to remind you of the support of this community. Transforming can be hard – when times are hard, hold this charm and remember that you can rely on this church and rely on our shared values.

You bring our values with you wherever you go.

Your bag might not look any different or feel any different, but the next time you use your bag I hope you will remember that we’ve added our blessings. And as you pack your bag with all the tools you need each day, think about the blessings you bring with you from your church community. Blessed Be.

Recognizing our Community’s Milestones

05/21/2024

Milestone Sunday, May 19, 2024 recognizing the milestones of both our Wildflower church community, and the milestones of our 2024 Wildflower HS Scholarship recipients (open to graduating seniors of Travis ECHS).

Milestone Sunday, May 19th, 11:45 am

05/02/2024

Congratulations on your achievements! From infants to adults, we want to celebrate you! Our Milestone Sunday Service will be held Sunday, May 19th, 2024, at 11:45 am.

Please let us know about important milestones for which we should recognize you or someone else.

We want to celebrate your graduations, moving up ceremonies, retirements, awards, and more. Please submit this form by Sunday, May 12, 2024.

(Note: During this service we will also recognize our three Travis ECHS scholarship recipients!)

All-ages Easter Fun

04/01/2024

We had a great time learning about Easter’s pagan and Christian roots and decorating cake-shaped cookies yesterday! Our all-ages event culminated with a new type of Easter Egg Hunt. Instead of searching for eggs filled with candy, our young Wildflowers hunted for dog and cat toys the congregation donated and assembled them to go to Austin Pets Alive.

It was a great way to weave themes of generosity into our celebration. It was also heartwarming to see the youth interacting so kindly with the younger children.