By Lauren Jewett
The first edition of the first Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education curriculum was published in the year 2000, which means Our Whole Lives is about to have a milestone birthday, celebrating 25 years in 2025! To celebrate this amazing milestone – 25 years of Our Whole Lives – the OWL Advisory Committee (on which I serve) and other UCC folx passionate about Our Whole Lives have been working hard to mark this amazing milestone, with a resolution at Synod, and a goal of having 25 Our Whole Lives facilitator trainings hosted by UCC-affiliated groups in 2025.
Our hope is that having this goal will help us increase the number of UCC hosted Our Whole Lives trainings in 2025, and allow the United Church of Christ as a denomination to recommit to the work and importance of this life-saving comprehensive sexuality education curriculum, and affirm that information about sexuality is helpful, not harmful. The Our Whole Lives program is even more important in such a time as this, when there are increased attacks on our LGBTQIA+ siblings, hundreds of anti-trans bills that have been proposed in legislative bodies across the country in the past few years, and increased threats against reproductive freedom. As faith leaders and engaged members of our ministry settings, there is a place for all of us to work towards more justice, inclusivity, self-worth, sexual health, and self-responsibility in our relationships to ourselves and one-another.
We also hope that offering more UCC-affiliated trainings will thus equip our communities and congregations with more UCC-affiliated OWL Facilitators and with the further hope that some host sites will be willing to host trainings more often and more regularly, making it more accessible for those interested in becoming facilitators of the Our Whole Lives curriculum to get trained locally, and easier for local churches and ministry settings in each conference to begin offering or re-starting Our Whole Lives programs. Here in the NCNC, we are working on a Facilitator training for the Grades K-1 / 4-6 in mid-March (details to be announced soon!) and a second facilitator training for the Grades 7-9/10-12 Curriculum later in the year.
If you our your ministry context have been curious about Our Whole Lives and interested in what is required to make a program a reality, I will be offering an informational virtual meeting in early 2025 to introduce you to the Our Whole Lives program, if you’re new to it, and answer questions about how to get folx in your congregations trained as Facilitators and recommendations for how to begin a program, if you are already familiar and want to begin offering it in your ministry setting or neighborhood. Watch the Upwellings newsletter for sign-up information.
So glad to see this! Will this training be available for both clergy and laity?