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We know from studies of contemporary religious affiliation that upwards of 500,000 US Americans consider themselves Unitarian Universalists, of whom some two-thirds have no formal affiliation with a UU congregation. It raises very interesting questions for those of us who are affiliated. Do these folks want to belong to a UU church but haven’t found a welcome there? Is there a way our congregations could be serving their spiritual needs, regardless of whether they become members in the way we currently define membership? Should we within congregations join forces with these folks outside them in our social justice work? It’s hard to know the answers to these questions without knowing why they consider themselves UU and why they’re not members of a congregation. Tandi Rogers, who works on growth issues for the Unitarian Universalist Association, has created a survey to try to learn a little more.
If you identify as “Unitarian,” “Universalist,” or “UU,” but you don’t belong to or regularly attend a UU congregation, I hope you’ll have your voice included in this 13-question survey of “Free Range UUs” (LOL). You also might be a good candidate for this survey if you describe yourself as “spiritual but not religious.”
Poet Everett Hoagland will be speaking in the service tomorrow morning. Usually our two services are the same, but he’s going to share two different poem cycles, one at 9:30 and one at 11. We have great music that fits his themes of the cosmic journey and homecoming, and I get to enjoy the service from the vantage point of Worship Associate. Our Worship Associates give a 3-5 minute reflection. I was brought up with poetry as one of our family’s religions, with our household gods bearing names like Shakespeare and Frost, and it’s been fun to reflect on how that has affected my religious and ethical life. I’m really looking forward to seeing and hearing this poet in person.
I proposed a course called “Preaching on the Edge” to Starr King School for the Ministry for next year or later, with this 100-word description:
Great preaching takes risks and emboldens the listeners to do the same. When we go out onto the edge of our experience, our words can be more alive and authentic. When we meet the listeners on the forward edge of their experience, our words have more power to transform them. As we observe and practice different approaches to creating and delivering sermons, we will explore: spiritual practices, ministerial roles, use of the body and voice, interaction with other elements of worship, how to walk the line of appropriate risk, and responding to political, pastoral, and spiritual matters.
Few courses are accepted each year, so I don’t know when I’ll get to teach it, but I keep thinking about the ideas and assignments, and refining the syllabus. It encapsulates so much of where my preaching has been heading in the last few years. In fact, things have shifted so much that when I first proposed a course to SKSM, four years ago, no way would I have offered a course of this description, or any preaching class. I wasn’t taking, or asking, the kinds of risks then that I do now. I’m braver. When I first thought of this course, I conceived of it as “Preaching Without a Net,” but that isn’t quite right. There is a net. Finding yours is part of being a better preacher, or taking any of the brave, scary steps that life might demand.
What do you think, givers of sermons and listeners to sermons? Does your experience of the great ones match the description I’ve given?
photo by Dave Pape, released to the public domain
A colleague comes out about her other life, in grand style.
You definitely want to see this.
I love that Dawn pursues a passion outside ministry, which can be so consuming. I love that she shared it so exuberantly with her congregation, I love that they got the connection with their own beauty and power, and I love that she got the media to come and cover this service! “Liv Fearless” is right!
The Gleaners. Millet created a scandal by portraying a conventional Biblical theme of Ruth in the fields as a picture of actual poverty
I’m busy uploading a course for the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) that starts Wednesday. Darcey Laine and I taught a version of it several years ago when we were colleagues in Palo Alto, and now we’re teaching it online.
It’s interesting to revisit this with my new awareness of modern slavery. The Bible’s view of slavery is complex, to put it mildly. I have been looking for the source of a quote I remember from somewhere, of an American slave saying of the church services he had to attend on the plantation, “I don’t know why they need all those pages for the Bible, when it only has one verse, ‘Slaves, obey thy masters.'”
I’m looking forward to some good discussions with thoughtful people about work and sabbath, wealth and inheritance, fair lending, what responsibilities we have to others, what a just economic system would look like . . . (If you’re interested, you can register here–no need to be a member of the CLF or a UU.)
When asked what objections she had to the institution of marriage, Gloria Steinem is said to have replied, “None. I just don’t want to live in an institution.”
In church parlance, I’m an institutionalist, meaning I believe it’s important to sustain the structures that make it possible to do the real work of the church. But that doesn’t mean the church has to be An Institution. A church becomes An Institution when it focuses so intently on its buildings, its long-established programs, etc., that it thinks those are the real work of the church. It forgets for long stretches at a time the purpose for which all those institutional structures were created.
One of the buzzwords I hear in my travels around the UU Growth Lab and blogosphere is “missional.” Some of the most interesting, passionate, grounded Unitarian Universalists I know want us to be a more “missional church.” I’m constitutionally suspicious of buzzwords, and one of the things I do when I’m trying to get under a buzzword to any truth that may lie beneath is to ask, “What questions guide a person who is [buzzword]?” In other words, if you’re doing church in a missional way, what question or questions guide your decisions?
It seems to me that the central question one asks in a missional church is: what does our religion call us to do in the world?
And then you answer by going and doing it. From there it follows that the task of the church is to inspire and equip people to carry out the mission. Institution-building is a key part of the process, but only as a means to realizing the mission. I must be a missional church person, because this is the question I want to be asking and answering daily.
Here’s one (non-UU) minister’s statement of what his church will look like when it’s made the missional shift.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure I want to say that the shift he describes here didn’t work. Why it didn’t is of more interest to church-planters; for people like me who serve a church that’s been around for 60-plus years, the challenge is not to “start it the way you dream it” but to make a change that will stick. That is a complex question (more on it soon), but the answer starts with the question I posed above: ask what our religion calls us to do in the world. Keep asking. Do it. Do it some more. Ask “Was that really it?” Repeat. Deepen.
To see one way UUs can put the missional question at the center of a ministry, read about Ron Robinson’s ministry in (to! with!) Turley, Oklahoma.
Here’s what greeted me on my return from study leave:
UUCPA Main Hall walkways with 12,000-watt solar array
Or would have done if I could fly. Actually, I saw them from ground level, and lifted the photo from this article.
A lot of people at our church worked very hard and gave very generously to make this happen. I hope it means that everyone who comes onto the congregation’s campus will immediately know that we respect the earth, its creatures, and those who will come after us.
An essay of mine, titled “Beyond Either/Or,” appears in a book just published by Skinner House Press and edited by Susan A. Gore and Keith Kron, Coming Out in Faith: Voices of LGBTQ Unitarian Universalists. It’s a beautiful little volume, with diverse and fascinating voices represented in the fifteen essays, and I highly recommend it.
In my essay, something happened along the twisting path of editing and revising. The published version appears to be, not my final draft altered by the usual edits that every author must grin and bear (and often benefit from!), but a reversion to an earlier draft that was still floating around in someone’s hard drive, as earlier drafts do. It’s a shame, since I found the editors’ comments on my later draft extremely insightful and I knew they were improving my piece. The final version, however, didn’t incorporate these (though I’ve heard from readers that it’s good as is). Here, as best as I can recreate it, is the final version that I believe all three of us intended to appear in print.
A vibrant young adult group at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta has launched a national outreach. I really like their self-description as an “incubator group,” a model they recommend for all young adult groups: focusing on building community before adding programming; vigilant about avoiding the cliquishness that repels newcomers; accepting of the ebbs and flows of attendance, ideas, and leadership; and regarding its mission as helping its folks get comfortable with the congregation. They go into detail about “incubator groups” here. It’s a model that applies very well to all kinds of small groups in congregations.
It looks like the 2030s group in Atlanta has decided to be an incubator group for Unitarian Universalism as a whole. Love it!
ETA: In a blog entry made today on the 2030s National site, Tim Atkins advises against using “Young Adult” as the name of one’s group. Like him, I’m used to YA meaning 18-35-year-olds, because that’s what it means in UU parlance, but even in UU circles it is confusing. It’s been my observation that our teenagers refer to themselves as young adults (for the same reason Tim observes: that’s their section in the library/bookstore), and presumably 18-35-year-olds also continue to associate the term with people much younger. So please read “20s and 30s” for “young adult” above.
Sermons in Stones 
Preventing child abuse
October 17, 2011 in religious education, social commentary | Leave a comment
A BBC story reports that the US has the worst rate of death from child abuse or neglect of any industrialized nation, with 1,770 kids killed in 2009. (A recent Congressional hearing estimates that the real numbers are even higher.)
So how do these other nations differ from us? By and large, they have lower poverty rates, lower crime and imprisonment rates, universal health care, better family-leave and child-care policies, better pre-school options, and much better networks of help for families with children.
Another thing we learn when we compare ourselves to the countries that are doing much better is that they have markedly lower rates of teen pregnancy. Very young people with unplanned children, unstable relationships, a curtailed education and therefore low earning potential, and lots of contempt from their community* are at an elevated risk of killing their kids. This paper compares measures of US teens’ sexual health (rates of pregnancy, abortion, STDs, HIV) with the teens of Germany, France and the Netherlands–you must click, just to see how much higher our teen pregnancy rate is than these countries’–and concludes that we would do well to adopt their approach of “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” regarding teenage sexuality.
That sounds a lot like the sexuality education program we offer at church, Our Whole Lives. OWL was developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, but you don’t have to be UU or UCC, or religious in any way, to enroll your kid, and–speaking for my own congregation–we won’t pressure you to join our church or ask you to donate money. It’s part of our ministry to the community. (It’s also not only for teens; there are developmentally-appropriate versions for K-2, 4-6, and adults of various ages, too.)
I know we save lives through this program when we teach young people that it’s okay to be gay, that it’s not okay for your partner to mistreat you or for you to mistreat your partner, and that sex is supposed to be safe (as well as fun, loving, and pleasurable), but I hadn’t thought about the impact on the next generation. I have no doubt that if every teenager in the US received a comparable education, we’d see a huge drop in those child death numbers within ten years.
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*A babysitter of ours, then 17, said that she got lots of dirty looks when she and Munchkin were out alone, such as on their happy trips to the playground. Apparently we had all too many neighbors who (a) had never heard of babysitters, (b) disapproved of teen moms, even one who was taking excellent care of the child, and (c) thought they ought to express that disapproval. Did they imagine that that was somehow helpful?
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