If you’ve been in our building lately, you may have noticed the bright yellow strips on the stairs leading to the Social Room downstairs, or the new raised toilet seat with support bars on both sides in the restroom on the right, or the access buttons on the Parlor door by the piano that now function properly.
If you surmise that those are all signs that your Accessibility Team has been hard at work, you’re right! Hard at work with help from many others across USNF.
And if you attended our April 12th service in person, you know that we experimented with Zoom closed captioning on the screen in the Great Hall. Several people remarked afterwards that they loved the idea, but the captions were too small to read from most pews. Never fear! The A-Team hopes to have new, much larger screens installed in the Great Hall before we reconvene there in September.
Watch for more accessibility improvements in the coming months, and don’t hesitate to contact us at
Finally, we invite you to ask yourself how we can all welcome each other – and everyone who comes to us – more fully, whatever their abilities. That question was expanded upon in a wonderful anti-ableism workshop attended by four USNF members at First Churches in February. How do people of different abilities experience our physical space and communications? Our linguistic space – how (and whether!) we talk about disability? Our conceptual space – what our spoken and unspoken theology says about disability? And our attitudinal space – how do we treat disabled individuals? Those are questions well worth pondering.