The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church:
by Alice Blair Wesley
Lecture 6 of
the 2000-01 Minns series of 6
Toward a Covenanted Association of Congregations:
I want us begin this time by looking
at the mix of meanings carried these days by one little word - an adjective,
sometimes part of a compound word. What
does it mean, for example, when one church member, on coming back home, is
asked by another who stayed home, “How was SWUUSI this year?” And the response is, “It was super.”
Suppose you are asked if you know a
certain member of a UU church in
Suppose you are this year on the nominating
committee of your church and the name of a certain young woman comes up. Somebody says, “I don’t know how she has the
energy to do so much. She defines the
term, super mom.”
A few weeks ago I couldn’t go to our
church’s annual business meeting. Joe
went. When he got home, I said, “How’d
it go?” He said members of our large
church voted on five complex issues, in less than an hour. On the one secret-ballot issue, to be a
Welcoming Congregation, the majority voting for was 93%. And, except for two abstentions on another,
the yes vote on four motions was unanimous!
Before adjournment, members gave our outgoing president a long standing
ovation. In a very challenging year, she
has been a super lay officer. The
Meeting over, members were laughing and hugging all over the place. It was a super meeting of a super liberal
free church.
With reference to people, we talk
about super athletes and entertainment stars.
But we also use this same word to describe material things and other
enterprises as common as churches. A
friend eager to tell you about a recent purchase could say, “I got a super deal
on it at TomDick’nHarry’s supermarket.”
Look at all the different realities
we’re talking about here! A week-long
gathering of our religious folk; an individual; a short business meeting; a
high performance athlete or entertainer; a material thing somebody bought; and
a store. See, then. Our word super, applied to all these
realities just means - quite good or even extraordinary. But what a variety of goods! At least five quite different goods: 1) the
richly varied quality of worship services and fun and workshops at a super
SWUUSI; 2) the easy decency or wit or
unpretentious wisdom of a super guy; 3) the efficiency of a super mom or a
whole church - of people who do well, even with many competing and contrasting
demands on their time and attention; 4) the economy and practicality of a
store; or 5) the extraordinary, very striking abilities of a famous few way off
somewhere, not here where we ordinary people are. That’s quite a list of meanings for one
little word.
But now note two other meanings of
super, not present in any of these examples.
In not one was there any hint of anything supernatural, of anything
alien to or out of the range of the everyday.
Even super athletes and entertainers only manifest unusual,
extra-ordinary abilities, not abilities ordinary humans don’t have at all. I
mean, even I can shoot baskets and sing, just not as well as Michael Jordan or
Sarah Brightman.
Also, not present, in these examples,
was any hint of hierarchical control, as in this example. We might say, “Doubting Tom doesn’t believe
in us. He thinks he’s got to supervise
everything we do.” No. In all the earlier examples of typical UU
conversation, the talk was about the actions of free people, these free actions
- obviously - showing careful planning and work or certain everyday living
patterns, these actions or patterns, then, evoking, from other free people, a
spontaneously offered and glad assessment -
super.
You may know that the Latin word super means “over” or “above,” though in
our usage it hardly ever has that connotation, at all. Imagine some specialist in Latin, a few
centuries from now, taking up a study of the “old” or even “ancient” North
American Unitarian Universalist movement of the late 20th and early 21st
centuries and concluding - from the fact that we so often describe things as
super - that in this “dark” age, even enlightened UUs fell into gross superstition!
That could be the conclusion of any
student living in another era, for lack of knowing a really simple linguistic
fact of all eras: The meanings of words
change, sometimes in a relatively short time.
I remember when little corner grocery stores first began to be replaced
by supermarkets, after WWII. They seemed
to me as a kid so grand! But soon,
supermarkets were as common as corner groceries had been. And soon, we starting describing all sorts of
ordinary quite good things as super. But
anybody not living in our particular time could not know what we mean by super
without - what literary critics call - a close reading of our usage in the
context of our times.
I trust I’m making sense to you.
But, why begin a lecture titled, Toward a Covenanted Association of
Congregations, by looking at the mix of meanings among us of this one little
word?
I wanted to start this way because we
liberals can be sometimes so dense in our reading of other eras of our own free
church tradition. Actually, we derive
from a history of free churchpeople who spent their lives in constructive
opposition to unfreedom in their time - as do we in ours. But we can get so hung up on what we suppose
are the meanings of traditional words that we can’t read our own church
history. In earlier eras our people have
used different words for our super, or free and quite good. For example, our 17th century ancestors -
from whom we UUs inherited congregational governance - simply meant by “the
liberty of the gospel” - the freedom of loving good people to gather,
unsupervised, in free churches and to associate freely, without supervision, in
a community of free churches.
In our time we may say of members of
our free churches - and of others not members - they are super people. People of the very same ilk our ancestors
called “saints.” By that term they just
meant quite good people, super people.
And by their term “communion of churches” they just meant a quite good
community of free churches, or what we
name our Association of Congregations.
The meanings of words change, all the
time, though at different rates. But some realities do not change in human
history. The reality and the ways of
liberty in religiously rooted free church communities do not change. What our ancestors named the holy spirit of
Christ, we liberals name the spirit of life or love or truth. They meant by their term the same crucial
reality - of heart and mind and body - we mean by ours.
In the Cambridge Platform, our
founders took great care to make it clear, they were only talking there about
ordinary free church members and the members’ ordinary elected leaders, the
churches’ officers. They said the free
church records show that, in the whole centuries-long free church tradition,
there have been only a few unelected, extraordinary leaders: Moses, David, Jesus and the twelve
apostles. They said in our church bodies
now, we don’t have any extraordinary leaders, just ordinary. So it is with us. When we talk about super free churches - what
they called gathered saints - we’re only talking about the doings of ordinary
live bodies in our liberally religious bodies which - without any outside
supervision and at our ordinary best - are pretty darned fine.
But hold it! If the covenantal, congregational polity of
ordinary free church members and ordinary officers was the whole subject of the
Cambridge Platform, who were these unelected extraordinary leaders of ages past,
and why were they brought into the discussion?
I’ll try explaining this way. Don’t we have in our churches now some
informal leaders, our “wise old heads,” not currently elected to any office
but, so beloved and respected for their wisdom and insight, that we fairly
often - thank God! - heed their counsel, especially when we get into some
dispute? Often quietly, in the midst of
a heated and confusing argument - one of our unelected “wise old heads” rises
to say something like this: “Well, I
think we’d better not do ‘x’, or ‘y’ and ‘z’ are apt to follow. And, I think if we want ‘c’ to happen, why
we’d better first do ‘a’ and ‘b’.”
And all the members meeting say, “Oh,
yeah! Right. Of course.”
The heat and confusion blow over, and we get on with making a some
decision that we all think is quite good - super.
All healthy free churches have
unelected leaders like this. They are
our prophets, in Hebrew, the nabi. They are our informally acknowledged “wise
heads,” though not currently, or even ever, elected. Some are not even “old” but rich anyhow with
the wisdom of experience.
But every once in a very long while -
according to our founders’ reading of the free church tradition - a few
extraordinary “officers” have arisen and spoken in the midst of some historic,
long continued, heated and confusing argument. These few were not even
informally acknowledged leaders, much less elected. These few extraordinary prophets just arose
and spoke, with such transparently authentic authority that many members of the
free congregations were amazed at the simplicity of obvious truth. They said, “Well, I’ll be darned. Of course, that’s true. Why didn’t we think
of that? That’s clearly what we should
do and how.”
And what did these few, whom the
Cambridge Platform called extraordinary “officers,” have in common? Just this.
Words spoken by these few unelected prophets were so persuasive, to
great numbers of then living free churchpeople, that - three different times in
history - the free congregations changed their whole set of “bylaws,” or
decision-making pattern of governance.
They adopted new patterns of free church governance, though always -
crucially - keeping the same “substance” of any free church of any time - the
spirit of mutual love, for one another and for their mission of making their
whole society more loving and just - through their own doings of love.
So - our congregational
In Moses’ time the free congregations
broke the pattern of isolated family style churches and called themselves a
nation,
Our 17th century congregational
ancestors reclaimed key and crucial elements of the free church tradition. Sadly - for us - they did not see the
“nationalism” of their ties with the Offices and the Treasury of the
So, what is our problem - as liberal
free congregations - now? I’m not even
going to say I believe; I know with all my head and heart - we UUs are just as
loving and hungry to be faithfully loving people, just as gifted, as
intelligent, as hard working, and as good as any ordinary everyday people who
ever lived, the only kind that have ever lived in any time. Why, then, do we have so many weak churches,
churches and fellowships not thriving, not growing, not going anywhere, not
doing much? Of course, we have bright
lights, spread across the vast North American continent. And of course, the health of churches is not
a function of number, but spirit.
Always, some of our churches, large and small, have been and are -
super.
But, Friends, you can’t keep a spirited,
lively liberal church from growing unless it’s located some place where there
aren’t any people! So why do we not
have more, many more spirited, thriving liberal churches full of people? Have we lost something from our tradition, or
forgot something very important? Are we
quite good, super people doing things we don’t see as wrong, that work ill
among us, to the world’s loss?
I guess you have guessed my
answer. We’ve got the locus of authority
wrong in our Association. In our UUA we
have gradually turned many authority issues on their heads, topsy turvy. But I am also sure of this: A lot of harsh criticism of the UUA will not
help us become a thriving Association! I
dare say the great Hebrew prophets in the time of Israelite kings spent too
much time fussing and threatening extinction.
Amos, for example, fussed hard about meaningless assemblies the free
churches had every year in his time, and the smell of burnt offerings -
resources burnt up and wasted on expensive feasts and shows - with nothing to
show from these mass assemblies in the poor neighborhoods of free
churches.
Without fussing, if I can I want to
try to show you a simple vision of many covenanted congregations freely and
richly associating in neighborly ways throughout the UUA. I even hope you might say, “Let’s covenant to
do it.”
Where This
Vision of Covenanted Congregations Came From
First, I have to ask what you know
about our UUA Extension Program. In case
you don’t know much, I’ll just tell you that I was an “extension” minister
before “the program” began and after I was technically out of it. The vision I want to offer you comes from
what I learned in 20 years of working with our congregations, ranging in size
from about 40 to 250 members, 2 brand new ones and 6 a generation or two
old. In our extension ministry I learned
first hand and very personally about nearly every kind of trouble ordinary
officers and members of our liberal free churches can get into, and also about
some UUA staffpeople whom we should never appoint to positions so easily, and
secretly, abused. At least I pray there
aren’t many more kinds of free church trouble than I learned about. Here I just list the troubles I walked into
the middle of as an extension minister.
* the terrible after effects of
ministers and members who didn’t know when to keep their pants zipped and
buttoned at the waist
* naive ministers and lay officers who
didn’t know how to help our members build or re-build a healthy church
* onerous and foolish debt a series of
church boards handled very poorly
* ridiculously low pledging
* lay leaders who said they wanted to
change and grow and really didn’t, who fought, tooth and nail, once their
church started changing and growing, to keep it small
* leaking and rotting and underinsured
buildings
* a fire which destroyed a poorly
wired building
* custodians and members who never
happened onto the word clean *
prosperous non-member groups, larger in numbers than our membership, who used
our buildings for such wildly low user fees that these prosperous non-church
groups were, in fact, generously subsidized out of our churches’ small budgets
* lay members sure they could preach,
who couldn’t
* teens whose lives were in ruins from
hard drugs, two teens dead of drug use, and another in prison
* a District Executive who secretly
pledged permanently to block any UUA funds ever coming to a promising new
congregation, if the members called a certain minister that a neighboring UU
minister feared would draw off his members
* the collusion of UUMA chapter
officers with that District Executive to see that he got away with this secret
corruption of our covenantal, congregational polity
* two other UUA staffpeople who
ignored elected officers and, in stead, strengthened the hands of two
congregations’ least able, most destructive unelected leaders, thus stalling
both congregations, in trouble they had been working their way out of, for several
more years
* and more and more bad, futile stuff
like that, not exactly the sort of thing you hear about at our District
Meetings or General Assemblies as presently structured, or read about in the UU World
Hear me now, please. With all these different and difficult
problems, every congregation I served as
minister had two things in common.
First, in every single small or
mid-size Unitarian Universalist congregation stuck in trouble, I found numerous
super people, young and old, our very own liberal saints under trial. Wonderful, splendid people who keep our
covenant. They don’t run. They will not desert our slowly dying
churches. They keep trying, in the
spirit of mutual love, doing the best they can see to do, no matter how
mediocre and sad and dysfunctional things get.
Why? Because they remember better
days from the past, or they have a notion of excellence they brought from some
other liberal church, or something.
Somehow, they have a vision of the fine reality their church could
be. And so they are there, every week,
year in and year out, smiling, singing, hoping, waiting in faith. They keep our covenant alive.
And here’s the second thing all our
weak and troubled congregations have in common:
isolation. Not from the general
population; these churches are in areas thick with people. They are isolated from other Unitarian
Universalist congregations! In not a
single one of these isolated churches did the members know, or ever counsel
with, members of other nearby UU churches - within only two or three hours or
less driving distance. How far is that
today? I know people who commute two
hours, to and from work, everyday!
These congregations all got me to come
be with them - one way or another, though not all through “official” channels -
because they are all members of our Association. But not one - in my 20 years with them - ever
got any freely offered, neighborly counsel from members of any neighboring UU
congregation.
Why?
Because we UUs have forgot how to be just ordinary, quite good
neighboring congregations. We’ve forgot
what it means freely to associate among our own free churches, except through
some extra-congregational, title-and-committee-ridden District or “the UUA” -
an entity “over” us - or some affiliate organization, some of these being
“super” in the worst sense of that word, not in our ordinary everyday sense of
quite good.
If you good UUs listening have never,
as officers or members of your congregation, done anything just plain
neighborly with other UU congregations, I’m not accusing you of
dereliction. I am confessing. I’m as bad as we all are in this. In 20 years I thought of asking one ordinary
lay member of a neighboring church to come and counsel with my congregation’s
leading lay members, exactly twice. The
help these two laypeople freely gave was wonderful. Beyond that, I never thought to ask for help,
and no UU neighbors ever thought to offer it.
God help us! The wonder is not
that our “movement” is so small. The
wonder is that we are still here! Maybe
we are still here only because of our isolated saints!
Poor Patterns
We Have “Grown” in Our Formal UUA
Here I offer an analysis of how we UUs
have slid into poor governance patterns in our UUA, without really thinking
together of what we’ve been doing. Then
I’ll try to show you how our congregations could actually be transformed, in
not too long a time, naturally, simply and with far less time and expenditure
of money than we now waste with very little to show for it. We have not even grown enough to get back up
the number of members we had in our churches in 1968 - a generation ago..
In our free churches authentic
authority resides in decisions made by the members of each congregation. We're all agreed on that. Members elect each congregations' officers -
ministers and board members, ordained and lay.
But we have fallen into a very bad pattern of UUA governance. Members
elect "delegates" to District Meetings and GAs, who vote there or by
absentee ballot, to elect officers of our Association. But in most congregations most of the time,
"election" of these "delegates" is strictly pro forma. Most members either don't know about or
don't care about these "delegate" elections; so we just rubber stamp
as our "choice" whoever happens to have the time or interest or money
to go to District meetings or GAs. And
this is how we have got, in practice, a phony democracy.
What have we done? We have put authority to elect the officers
of our Association carelessly, casually into the hands of people who may or may
not have much wisdom, much understanding of covenantal congregational polity,
or even any deep involvement with our local congregations! For a long time, we have hardly considered
whether these "delegates" do or do not have these needed
qualifications for making such decisions.
So, "delegates" elected pro forma elect the UUA board and president. These latter then appoint a jillion
committees local members never heard of, and appoint staffpeople who appoint
other staffpeople who appoint other staffpeople.
So, the only power to do what counts
in our Association - design and administer programs for our congregations'
optional use - winds up in the hands of appointees appointed by appointees -
some of whom retain their offices for decades - these appointed by UUA
officers, elected by "delegates," elected only pro forma by our
congregations! UUA elections get more complicated and expensive every
go-round, even while some, who care deeply, wonder why “the UUA" puts out
programs members of congregations won’t use - or if we do, many complain
bitterly about. And we wonder why our
congregations are so uninterested in “affairs of the UUA," an entity
conceived as “on the continental level," awfully busy but, having little
to do with matters that matter on “the congregational level." Do you not frequently hear this talk of
"levels?” Three levels: Congregations on the bottom, Districts in the
middle, and highest - the continental UUA level?
This year as many as 40 Canadian
congregations may withdraw from the UUA.
Many reasons have been put out on the internet. I think by far the most cogent of them was
expressed by a Canadian minister, “Mac” Elrod.
Someone had said that if Canadian churches withdraw, they will no longer
have “input” into UUA RE programs they will still use after the proposed
separation.
Mac responded, “We have had very
little success in getting Canadian content into UUA programmes and
curricula. For the first time the UUA is
agreeing as part of the Accord [the proposed separation agreement] to relax
copyright so that Canadian substitutions can be made for American references,
[to] U.S. tax laws, quotations of the U.S. [political documents], references
affected by our differing medical and criminal justice systems, as well as a
differing racial pattern, bilingualism, and multi-culturalism.”
Sadly, our Canadian “delegates” have
been voicing for years - unheeded - complaints of UUA board/ staff
inflexibility and of programs not appropriate to their needs, not to mention
the hours at GAs spent on resolutions aimed at the U.S. Congress. But these Canadian complaints are only different
in focus, not in kind, from the same
sort of complaints concerning rigidly prescribed procedures for raising capital
funds or certain narrowly conceived - but insisted upon - adult education
materials.
But our overall picture is still
worse. UUs are quite good at organizing
out in the world around specific social issues. That’s one of our great
strengths. Thousands of our members do
responsible and super social action in these organizations. But our UUA board grants UUA affiliate status
to all kinds of independently organized groups - not congregations. Unhappily, boards and staff of these
affiliates have turned into lobbying groups who constantly work to influence
decisions of the UUA board/ staff. This
pattern is now so pervasive we seem at times more like an Association of UUA
Board/ Staff and Affiliates than an Association of Congregations!
I need to be clear here. Some of these groups do marvelous work. I
have belonged and contributed to many of them.
I was president of one for four years.
But our pattern of Association governance has gone far awry when UUA
Officers pay more attention to these affiliate boards and their staffpeople
than to elected officers of member congregations. Affiliate programs dominate General
Assemblies. The GA Planning Office will
help any affiliate group arrange for two hour-long programs each, and an
exhibition booth, to promote their projects, some of which are “miles” from
anything members at home would recognize as having to do with matters that
matter in our congregations. Our GAs
have become fairs, enormously expensive annual weeks of hoopla and
propaganda. Many District patterns are
no more helpful to our churches. All
this is the product of phony democracy disguised as a product of our
congregational life. These patterns are
every one of them inefficient, a waste of precious time and energy, and
terribly sterile, fruitless with reference to the world’s need for more
thriving liberal free churches.
How Could We
Make the UUA Better?
We could make some simple bylaw
changes and change for the better the whole character of our Association.
We list as our 1st principle, the
inherent worth and dignity of every person.
This does not mean we assume every person has grown equally in
wisdom. Question: What do we cherish as most holy in our common
life as congregations? Answer: The power
of loving and reasoning persuasion, in the midst of ongoing dialogue among
gathered members, to reveal to us what we together find to be those right and
worthy acts we ought and need and want to do, in the spirit of mutual
love. This is our theology of free
church governance This is what it means
to believe in "deeds not creeds."
This is what it means for members of a free church to be in covenant
with one another to find together and then do acts matching our dignity and
worth as free churchpeople.
So, when we elect officers in our
congregations, the issue is: Who among us has the wisdom and skill, in the
dialogue of our religious community, to help us learn together, what would be
good for us to do. In free churches the
only power we grant to leaders is - the power of persuasion
So, the 1st principle of our
Association needs to be our common faith in the inherent worth and dignity of
every free Congregation, specifically, our faith in our members' power to elect
wise officers - lay and ordained. For a
thriving Association can be based in nothing other than our faith in every
member Congregations’ capacity to be quite good, super congregations. Ordained and lay officers of our members
Congregations - elected directly, not pro
forma - are best qualified to elect officers of our UUA. We need to change our bylaws to replace
voting “delegates” with voting officers of our churches.
This change may be resisted by our
many GA and District “buffs” who have attended these meetings as delegates,
year after year. Some of these “buffs”
are wonderful, informal leaders of our congregations, not currently elected
but, beloved and respected Wise Heads, whose wisdom - thank God! - we often
heed at home. But we also have far too
many District and GA “junkies” - folks hooked on the false prestige of
"titles," organizational “insiderism” and crowds. Many of these “junkies” are seldom there in
our congregations. And currently, we get
too many UUA "leaders" from among District and GA “junkies” who think
they know, better than our Congregations, what “the UUA” should be doing. Some define “leadership" as being out
"in front" on issues our poor benighted churches just don't
"get"!
These advantages - of empowering our
Congregations’ officers to elect UUA officers - would soon follow. 1) UUA officers would have a much clearer
sense of who it is they are accountable to - officers of Congregations accountable
to members.
2)
If we had more UUA votes in fewer meetings of our lay officers currently
serving Congregations - along with our ministerial officers - we would soon
have a UUA much more effective in strengthening our churches. For our elected church officers know - from
daily experience - what our congregations really need and want the UUA to
do. Ministerial officers already have a
vote in District and GA Meetings. We
should have long ago so honored and empowered our lay officers. For our most crucial votes, every year, are
cast in Congregational Meetings, when we
elect our lay officers.
3) Locating UUA authority in the hands
of our locally elected lay Officers, would do much to clarify our understanding
of free church governance. On “the
continental level” we keep confusing the governance of free churches with the
government of a free nation, two very, very different realities. As citizens of a free nation we elect
Representatives to speak for us and to enact laws of our government, which the
government has the power legally to coerce citizens to obey. In the governance of free churches, no
"representatives" speaks for any free congregation. Congregational governance attends to a holy,
ever moving dynamic of power - the power of loving, reasoning persuasion - on
which we stake the very life of our churches.
For free churches only live by the power of the free spirit of mutual
love, working in our own free minds and hearts, with no coercion and no law
save the natural laws of human nature and of all that is holy, these laws not
enacted in by any legislature anywhere.
4) With a simple change in our bylaws
- and practice - we could make our UUA, for the first time, a covenanted
association. We could change our bylaws
to say that Membership in our Association means: Our Congregations' officers shall meet
annually for a few days to take counsel together concerning the overall life
and health of our Congregations and our common needs. Each member Congregation will every year send
to this meeting at least one elected lay officer currently serving, all other
duly elected officers being welcome and urged to attend as well. Our annual meeting will always be open to any
members of our member Congregations, but only duly elected officers shall
address the assembly or vote.
In any covenant there's got to be a
there there, or there is no covenant.
For a covenant is not just a concept in our heads, a promise merely to
"affirm" a list of principles.
A covenant is a promise to be there, with and for one another, as live
bodies in a reflecting, counseling, advising body making decisions - not on “statements of the truth” as though
we were creedal churches but - about programs we want to develop for our free
churches’ decision to use or not use.
We’d save a lot of money and time and hassle and have better church
programs, if we also made it a rule of our bylaws: We won’t undertake any common program unless
at least half our congregations agree to do so, and we’ll toss programs unless
at least half our congregations elect to use them, within three or four years.
5)
If we made this change our UUA elections would be - at once - much
simpler and less expensive. Any of our
members could urge their own elected officers, at home, to support candidates
for UUA office. But the authority to
vote would be in the hands of people vested with authentic authority by our
Congregations.
6)
We could greatly increase our congregational officers’ participation in
our common concerns as an Association if we put much more emphasis on Annual
District Meetings of officers, and agreed to meet in General Assemblies only
every four years, for election of UUA officers.
7)
We ought in our UUA and District bylaws, to prohibit any and all
affiliate organizations from meeting, on any of the days of congregational officers’
meetings, in any of the buildings used for these meetings, thus ending the
affiliates’ dominance of either District or UUA meetings.
Why Care About
a Covenanted and Healthy UUA?
Our congregations very much need to
associate, formally and informally, with
the capital A of our formal UUA and with lower case a of neighborly gatherings like SWUUSI and in new
kinds of regular neighborly gatherings of our officers and, occasionally, other
leaders. We need our elected lay and ordained officers to meet and
talk together, not for our members but, of what our congregations are trying to
do and how we might do these things better.
Why?
Because in the long run of our own life stories, we can only fulfill
missions our congregations take up when our elected leaders meet regularly -
formally to cooperate in developing the program resources we need to fulfill
our chosen missions, and also informally to learn, from one another, how to
carry out our missions well, for the world’s sake. For only we can teach each other how to
gather and build strong, liberal free churches.
Nobody else has a clue!
A New
Pattern: Many Smaller Covenanted
associations (lower case)
We need newly to think smaller, less
formally and more neighborly in areas much smaller than our continental UUA or
Districts.
What if no UU congregations were
isolated! Even those we’d have to take a
little commuter plane to visit with. (I flew to serve two churches, a year
each. Nothing to it.) Think of our extension congregations,
many with a decades-long history of
not-good patterns. To become thriving,
our lay members of these congregations need to learn a good deal.
In our current Extension Program a new
minister is dropped into the middle of a complex story that hasn’t been going
well, largely because the relational piece is missing from the small
congregation's understanding of what it means to be part of our larger movement. Members haven’t seen that our worship
services need to be quite good services for visitors looking for a good church,
not just us “old hands”; that our RE programs need to be quite good for new
members’ children who aren’t even here yet, not just our few children now, and
so on.
But, the fact that we have so many
little isolated churches means, a relational piece is also missing from the UU
churches only a couple of hours, or less, away.
Otherwise, ministers and lay officers of these churches would be there
sometimes - listening to the members and offering counsel, teaching members of
the small church, just by their presence and conversation, what it means to be
neighbors in a community of independent congregations.
Mostly, in the past and now, even our
ministers have not thought of the need of nearby congregations’ lay officers -
for companionship with other officers.
Ministerial colleagues help each other, sure. But we haven’t ever called our lay officers
into helping nearby churches.. And I
don’t mean on some darned District Committee, or even a cluster “board”!. We’d be better off without any District or UUA
Committees or boards. I’m talking about
elected congregational officers - ordained and lay - in a covenant of church
friendship with elected congregational officers, next door. And I don’t mean
only others with needs or emphases in
their programs or the same style as our own.
An informal association of neighbors - one not designed for formal
business decisions - has to include all UU congregations in one another’s
reach, or it’s not a covenant embracing healthy diversity but, another
exclusive cabal.
Suppose we began every new effort of
our Extension or New Congregation Program this way: Let’s gather lay officers and ministers
from three fairly nearby churches - with
officers of the small congregation - and talk about difficulties of getting set
- quite good, healthy patterns in a free church, and how leaders need the
counsel of UU neighbors - without “usurpation” of our independence. The officers, of all four congregations,
could work out a modest agreement to do neighboring: meet sometimes to do what
associating free churches to do - take counsel together. Lay officers of any church would learn so
much from - say - just two four-hour meetings a year with all the ministers and
lay officers of three other churches, where they live - not off at some distant
and expensive "workshop."
We say an extension congregation
enters a special relationship with "the UUA." What does that mean? Usually a "special relationship"
with one UUA staffperson, or at best two or three off and on, for three
years. What are members of the weak
church to learn from that, about relating to our community of
congregations? In my experience, very
little.
Certainly, if a small congregation
gets UUA money to support their
extension minister for three years, there should be some accountability
for concrete steps toward strength and growth.
But accountability should not be grossly complicated - lots of records,
numbers and multiple graphs.
Questions of accountability for funds
could well go something like this: Have
you counseled with the finance committee of a nearby UU Church? An RE Committee? A Committee on Ministry? Has your whole congregation attended another
UU church's Sunday service? And stayed to talk with leaders about how this
church serves visitors? Have you
borrowed another church’s adult education materials? How many participated? Have you paired with another congregation to
work for justice and mercy? How many
participated? Let accountability be for
breaking out of isolation and learning to be a healthy free church by
neighboring, through experience with other able and dedicated UUs.
Do you think I’m a crazy dreamer? Or might we learn again to be covenanted,
neighboring UU congregations? As
independent as ever, and also members of a truly covenanted community of
congregations? I think we would be super
glad if we did. For the results would be
super.
But why limit this sort of neighboring
to funded Programs? How different our
movement would be if we just dropped, from all UU schedules, our countless meetings
of panels, commissions, special projects, committees, sub-committees, ad
infinitum.. What if all our
ministers and lay officers met in groups of 3, 4, 6 area congregations for a
day - or half a day - just twice a year.
In this society a couple hour's drive is nothing if meetings are not
frequent and are significant, our agendas having to do with what concerns us,
as congregations. Helpful, interesting
meetings would require some thoughtful homework done beforehand but, not much!
Suppose each congregation’s officers
covenant always to decide themselves, a week or so before each area meeting,
which several individuals will give just three-minute responses to the
following questions about their church:
Tell us about two programs of this
current year in each of these areas of our churchlife: 1) worship, for any or
all ages; 2) how our members choose, train and support our
lay and ordained leaders; 3) education - especially of children and new
members; and 4) and what our members do in our church to work toward justice
and mercy.
Tell us about one program in each area
of your churchlife you are proud of and feel good about, and mention the
factors that make it good.
And tell about one program in each
area which is not going so well as you hoped, and mention the factors making it
not so good.
So, that's the preparation part, 8
oral reports of just 3 minutes each.
Officers think some together about what they want to say and how to say
it concisely, not in endless detail. At
the meeting, listeners are asked to note, as they listen, any questions they
want to ask about these programs or any insights or suggestions they have to
offer because they have tried something similar in their own church.
After hearing all these brief reports,
the question becomes: Which of these matters do we most want to talk about some
more? In a meeting like this the asking
for and the giving of rich counsel just flows.
For when we get free churches’ elected leaders who care about what we
are doing - talking freely, in a super format, about what works well and
doesn't, they have to be pried apart. Or
they will talk forever. Money is not on
this agenda. After church officers talk
about what we really want to do together, the question of how we raise money to
support all this comes up in a spirited and wise way, of its own accord. Our elected leaders will freely teach each
other how to raise it.
In the last half hour, then, lay and
ministerial officers together could ask if a few meetings are needed during the
next six months, not among these officers but, among other lay leaders - say -
of two Finance Committees or two RE Committees or two or three Committees on
Ministry, any of whom can also give each other super counsel, because now their
officers know the sort of help each congregation could really use.
Such neighborly meetings as this would
be altogether different from meetings some Planning Committee or workshop
leader prepares, which seldom strike our churches "where they
are." Moreover, these neighborly
meetings would not be at all like those silly meetings in which we argue over
the wording of resolutions, as though
there existed any statement, on any important matter, on which all UUs in
independent congregations can or should agree.
In super meetings of a covenanted
neighborly association, there have to be both “orderly rules” and spontaneity,
high expectations of how we proceed and plenty of flexibility for the free
spirit of mutual love to blow among us, as it will. There’s a there there in this covenant. Live bodies meet, on time every time, ready
to learn from and teach one another - with no supervision. And we’ll be able to tell when our
congregations are in such a covenant For
there will be then a super growth in the
spirit of affection and forbearance in and among our independent
congregations. And then - just down the
road a ways - solid growth in the numbers of people in our liberal free
churches. For where the spirit of mutual
love is strong, you can’t keep new members out anymore.