Info added about the Annual Pet Blessing this Saturday, September 11, at 2 PM. Bring your pet to be blessed.

Daniel Nahmod, the well-known Unity singer/songwriter, will be presenting a concert at Unity Church on Saturday, September 25, at 7 PM.

Much other information added to the Classes and Events page about upcoming classes this fall, including the Fall 7-week book program on Deepak Chopra’s book, How To Know God.

In the next month or so, you will see a significant change in the overall design and organization of our website. A new volunteer has brought her expertise at website design to our church. We’ll let you know when the changeover from the old site to the new one is set to occur.

At first, some of the pages now available on the old site will not be included in the new site, as we re-evaluate what pages are the most useful to our members and to the public. When the changeover occurs, if something you value and access frequently seems to be missing, please let us know. If there is a page you particularly value and want to be sure makes it over to the new site, drop us a line. Send your comments to webmaster@unityportland.org

During the month of May, I was unable to keep the website current with all the activities at our church. But, as of yesterday (Friday, June 11, 2010), the site has been brought up to date.

• The “Events” page now lists upcoming events that have been scheduled through September. Check out all the good stuff that is coming up!
• The “Classes” page lists upcoming classes until late autumn.
• All the audio recordings of our Sunday messages are now available for listening on the “Recorded Messages” page, which can be reached directly via this link: Sunday talks.
• The list of upcoming topics for Sunday messages has been brought up to date as well.
• The latest newsletter has been posted in PDF format: you can download it here. Also, you can view the calendar of happenings around the church for the months of June and July.

Remember that June 30 is the last day you can register at a discount for A Path to Wisdom, our week of spiritual education classes coming up August 9 to 13. The website has all the information you need to register.

The Sunday talks are being uploaded now in a timely manner; usually, the links on the Message Download page and the home page will be updated Sunday afternoon after the talk is given. Latest messages:

April 11: The Wisdom of Humility, Rev. Billie
April 4: Rising in Spirit, Rev. Lisa
March 28: The Christ Impulse, Rev. Billie
March 21: We’re Going Somewhere, Rev. E.J. Niles

The Home Page has been updated to include a link to information about A Path to Wisdom, the week of spiritual classes coming up August 9 to 13. Register early for a discount! Remember that the evening class is open to everyone on a love-offering basis.

We are continuing to post audio files of the Sunday talks for downloading. The latest is Rev. Lisa’s talk from March 14, “The Universe is Calling.”

While we try to get the talks up as soon as possible, the technical wizardry involved requires that our computers and the Internet cooperate, as well as the schedules of the volunteers who perform these tasks. So, as it was this week, it may take 2 or 3 days before last Sunday’s message appears. But it will be there!

Recent changes to the website include:

• Men of Unity meeting moved from March 20 to March 27
• A Path to Wisdom, our week-long series of six classes in spiritual education and enrichment (S.E.E.), coming at Unity of Portland in August, is now completely described on the website, beginning here. You will find a list of the six classes, with descriptions, book lists for each class so you can purchase and read the books prior to attending the classes, instructor biographies of our four great instructors, a flyer you can print to publicize the classes, and the registration form you must fill out and submit, with payment, before attending the classes.

Please note that, for the Spiral Dynamics workshop on March 20, with E.J. Niles, lunch will be served, but you must register and pay for your lunch in advance at the bookstore so that we know how many lunches will be needed.

As of Sunday, February 14, 2010, we will make an MP3 audio recording of every Sunday talk available for downloading on the Message Downloads page. The messages will usually be available within 48 hours after the service. You can listen in your browser or right-click the link (control-click on Macs) to download the linked file to save a copy on your computer. Thanks to Liah Rose, our new sound technician, for contributing her technical expertise to edit and convert the recordings for our website.

Notice the link, here and on our home page, for the information about our week-long series of classes for spiritual education and enrichment (S.E.E.), coming up in August. Read what’s available and register early to reserve a place. Rates go up after June 30.

Check out all the additions to the “Upcoming Events” on the Events Page of our website.

We’ve posted four new book reviews of books that will be used in upcoming workshops and classes. Read them, and information about our senior discount, on the bookstore page.

It’s been a month since I last posted a message to the weblog for unityportland.org. The weekly email update sent out by the office is doing an outstanding job of keeping us posted about current events, so the need for updates from this blog has been diminished.

Subscription link added
I finally got around to adding a link at the bottom of the sidebar on the home page so that new people can subscribe to this blog! It got dropped by accident when the design of the home page changed months ago. So if you know someone who’d like to subscribe, now you can tell them how to do it.

Website Team Forming
So far our team has met twice. We’ve added two new members, Sophie Drisko (who will soon be taking on the job of keeping the Events page current) and Alan Minor (who is addressing the task of, potentially, uploading an audio MP3 file of the Sunday message every week). David Jacob, our Service Ministry Coordinator, also plans to maintain the Service Ministry page. The church will be purchasing the requisite software to enable all these people to work on the website.

Daily Word on the Home Page
Daily Word‘s word of the day and affirmation for the day are now automatically appearing each day at the bottom of our home page. The box also contains a link you can click to go directly to Daily Word‘s web page to read the complete daily message.

Random Quotations
Have you tried the link on the home page for random spiritual quotations? It has quotes from Charles Fuller, Teilhard de Chardin, Meister Eckhart, the Bible, Rumi, Andrew Cohen, Eric Butterworth…the list goes on and on. Currently there are 226 different quotes in the database. I add more all the time.