Foreword

Right at the start I may as well just blurt out two facts, which must stand awkwardly together in reference to a third. (1) For a very long time now we liberals have bad-mouthed—even demonized—our spiritual ancestors, the Puritans who founded our oldest Unitarian Universalist churches in New England. (2) I have come to love these 17th-century ancestors of ours, to respect them greatly, and to feel profoundly indebted to them for the precious heritage of congregational polity, the theological and religious roots of which we have too long ignored. (3) I hope to persuade you that we UUs urgently need to reclaim and freshly adapt for our time the radically covenantal doctrine of the free church with which our UU history on the North American continent began in the 1600s.

That last is the challenge I’ve taken up. I’m out to contest old prejudices against our past, to provoke a critical and constructive review of some of our present practices, and to call for a forward-looking re-formation that Unitarian Universalist congregations might fulfill our great promise. Printed here are the six Minns Lectures I delivered in the church year 2000–01, on the theme of the covenant of the free church, its past and present history, theology and governance. Scattered throughout, you will find various pieces of an explanation of why I took up such a sprawling, multi-faceted topic. I hope it will suffice here to say I believe we human beings can’t appreciate, understand deeply or defend what we take for granted. We have long so taken congregational polity for granted that we haven’t even tried for a long time to think carefully together about our organization. We have not so much chosen as drifted into contradictory and inappropriate institutional practices. These practices have made us, and are keeping us, weak and small. Finally, I propose some changes I believe can lead to stronger liberal churches, richly meaningful to many more people.

The Minns Lectureship was endowed in the 1940s by a member of First and Second Church in Boston. Members of the Minns Committee come from both First and Second and King’s Chapel. Each year the Committee chooses one “Unitarian minister in good standing” to deliver six lectures. Over the decades many of our finest ministers have given the Minns Lectures.

I am humbly grateful to every one of the following people: The Rev. Richard Henry and my husband Joe Wesley overcame my reluctance and insisted that I submit a proposal to the Minns Committee. Members of the Minns Committee, chaired at the time by the Rev. Diane Arkawa, invited me to add my name to a distinguished list of predecessors. The ministers and members of the four of our churches and the administrative staff of a university where the 2000–01 Minns Lectures were given all extended wonderfully cordial hospitality—at the First Church and Parish in Dedham and First Parish in Brookline, MA; Seattle University and the University Unitarian Church in Seattle, WA; and All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, OK. The Rev. Ken Oliff urged and saw through the Lectures’ publication on Meadville/ Lombard’s online Journal of Liberal Religion. The Rev. Dr. Bill Murry, president of Meadville/Lombard Theological School, and his fine staff have seen this text into print under the aegis of the Meadville/Lombard Press.

There were certainly some scholars in my audiences, but my intention was to address our laity, people of enormous intelligence and dedication, but whose life work is not church history or liberal doctrine. So I dispensed altogether with the scholarly apparatus of footnotes. Some citations are noted in the text. A reading list is appended.

I have wanted the printed text to retain as much as possible the flavor of oral delivery. The italics in the print indicate some of the oral stress I added when I read the text aloud to live audiences. <<OK as edited?>> Those who heard the lectures in person and the nearly 500 people who asked for and have received copies via e-mail will find few changes beyond the correction of typos and some very occasional shortening by a few words here and there.

If you like to know something of an author before you read, here are a few pertinent facts about this one. I am a graduate of the University of Louisville. I began studies for our ministry at age 36. At that time I had long been an active lay UU and a schoolteacher. I was also mother of two and wife of a rising, often-transferred young engineering manager. From 1973 to 1977 I was a special (non-credit) student at Meadville/Lombard, and I also took courses yielding 30 graduate credits at Lamar University in Beaumont, TX. For twenty years I served congregations in Texas, Maryland and New Jersey, most often as an extension or new congregation minister. The fact of my life that I am proudest of—apart from my family—is that all eight of the congregations I served are still today larger and stronger than they were when I joined them, in no small measure because of the ministry that members and I were able to do together.

Over the years I served on or chaired numerous District, Summer Institute and UUMA committees and boards. I many times addressed and/or led workshops at summer institutes and the Mountain’s leadership training school. I was for four years president of UU Advance and founded First Days Record , a journal for UU ministers. Published articles of mine have appeared in First Days Record, the Register/Leader, the World, the Journal of the Liberal Ministry, Kairos, the UU Christian and UUMA Essays. I published two editions of one other book, in 1987 and 1988, Myths of Time and History: A Unitarian Universalist Theology, which was used in quite a few church study groups. I retired in 1996. Currently, my husband and I live in both Allentown, PA and Bellevue, WA to be near our four fine grandsons. In both places I help to edit the online Dictionary of UU Biography, a project of the UU Historical Society, headed up by the Rev. Peter Hughes.

I don’t expect at all that you will agree with everything you read here, or that the changes I urge will be all or soon adopted. I do hope the understanding and vision of the free church described here might serve as a yeasty leavening of the lively, potent liberal churches ours yet may be.

Allentown, PA

March 14, 2002