Spiritual Vitality

I’m writing to you in my role as Endorser of Military and VA Chaplains, to encourage you to take the opportunity of Memorial Day this year to do more than light a candle or lay a wreath in memory of those who have died in service to our nation.  I believe that we as Unitarian Universalists have left out our veterans, service members and their families largely through benign neglect.  Yet our veteran population is hurting, and in need of the kind of transformational religious community we offer.  Our soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines and “coasties” (and their families) are an amazing, diverse, largely young adult population who could benefit from our brand of faith – one that by and large isn’t available behind the barbed wire.

The UUA has created a free online curriculum called the Military MinistryToolkit to help create an open and welcoming space for this population. Welcoming military members and veterans is not in conflict with advocating for peace.  In fact, deeply engaging with the moral and spiritual issues related to our collective war-making is arguably only done authentically in relationship with those who have born witness to war.  Many of our veterans have deep religious and theological questions to work through, and our open approach to religion is a potentially life-saving, heart-healing opportunity – if only we would more fully explore the culture, issues, and realities of military experience and life, and be more intentionally welcoming.

I ask you to consider attending the workshop Military Ministry: Serving Wholeness in Congregations and Beyond, Thursday 6/25/2015, 1:15PM – 2:30 PM, if you are attending General Assembly, or simply jump in and use the Toolkit in your ministry setting where possible.  If you need support, feel free to reach out directly.  You can also view a recorded webinar on utilizing the Military Toolkit.

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Sarah Lammert, Director of Ministries and Faith Development and Official Endorser

Thanks to a fruitful collaboration between Congregational Life staff and the Faith Development Office, a series of web pages about THEME BASED MINISTRY are now online at uua.org. http://www.uua.org/re/themes

Why do theme based ministry? http://www.uua.org/re/themes/why-do-theme-based-ministry

Who is Doing Theme Based Ministry? http://www.uua.org/re/themes/how-do-we-do-theme-based-ministry

Help with Theme Based Ministry http://www.uua.org/re/themes/help-theme-based-ministry

Testimonials http://www.uua.org/re/themes/congregational-examples

Share YOUR stories – we’re particularly looking for “testimonials from congregants – email themebasedministry@uua.org

Many thanks to all on the Congregational Life team: Scott Tayler, Beth Casebolt, Tera Little, Phil Lund, Kim Sweeney, Karen Bellavance-Grace, Maggie Lovins and Pat Infante and in the Faith Development Office: Jessica York and Pat Kahn.

I love to cook. For me, it’s an art form, a means of sharing my caring with others, and a meaningful spiritual discipline. My idea of a perfect vacation is traveling the BBQ competition circuit and my all-time favorite book is Supper of the Lamb by Episcopal priest and theological chef, Robert Farrar Capon. So when I read the story about Community Dinners in Seattle, my inner ‘Julia Child’ cheered.

Community Dinners is a church in five locations that has not only moved out of its four walls but completely reinvented what it means to do and be ‘church’.

Seven years ago, the Westminister Community Church, like other urban congregations, faced declining attendance and wasn’t sure about its continued survival. They reacted by digging back into their roots and asking themselves: “What would Jesus be doing with his time if he actually lived on the corner of 145th & Greenwood?” (the location of the old church.). They came to the conclusion that they, like Jesus, should be investing their time to help lift the lives of people in their surrounding community in a more meaningful way.

They wondered what might happen if they went back to a first century model and provided a welcoming, open, and free dinner table with warm food, friendship, laughter and inspiring conversation “to encourage the heart of our neighbors.”

What happened is that one dinner gathering each week in one location has now become 5 dinner gatherings each week in five different neighborhoods in the city. Attendance is growing from around 200 on a Sunday morning at the old church to nearly 1000 each week at the different dinner gatherings combined. Their goal is to host 27 different gatherings each week, one in each of Seattle’s 27 neighborhoods. The old church building is now rented to a school.

A typical dinner begins with a reading and a prayer followed by conversation during dinner and more conversation with those who stay afterwards. Local musicians often provide instrumental music during dinner and different visual artists provide color.

Continuing to ask “What would Jesus be doing with his time,” they have added a housing construction component to the food, music and art. They are now engaged in a project to build affordable housing units throughout Seattle.

Community Dinners’ website says: “We are on a mission to bring lift to Seattle neighborhoods by gathering around weekly dinner tables, talking about inspiring topics, building low-income housing, and helping people back to a meaningful and sustainable life.”

Their website also notes: “Community Dinners has changed us. We left our comfortable building and….as our neighbors have become our friends, we have found that many people in our community are struggling to find housing and employment. Our commitment is to transform the most broken pockets of our community through dinner gatherings, housing and job creation solutions.”

Community Dinners asked “What would Jesus be doing with his time” and found an answer. Is it too much for us to ask “What are we Unitarian Universalists doing with ours?”  “What would Love do?”

You may also be interested in this May 2013 article about this special congregation.

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Rev. Joan Van Becelaere faithfully serves our Association as the Central East Region Staff Lead

As a young Unitarian Universalist, I am often consigned a secret power that might one day save the church. Two women once approached me at a conference where I spoke about adapting congregations for the twenty-first century. They looked at me with deep expectancy and told me I needed to come back to their church, because there were only old people like them and they needed my ideas.

Many other young people in our movement get asked the same question: how is the church going to survive now that everything around us is changing?

The question is accompanied by a look of deep and earnest longing that stems from a deep love of our faith and points to a gut-wrenching fear that this may be the last generation in our religious movement.

It’s not that I don’t have answers to this question. Believe me, my generation and I have some pretty detailed ones. But when we focus on finding out “THE Answer” from “the RIGHT People,” we completely miss the most faithful way to address the question: “How do our churches enhance and deepen their relevance for our specific time, in our specific neighborhoods and in the lives of those we serve?”

The answer can be found in religious communities that consciously live the cycle of practice and learning and embed this cycle into the heart of their culture. The learning leads to experimentation that leads to reflection that leads to deeper learning.

Because living this cycle may feel like being in a hurricane, one useful way to keep steady and consider all the moving parts is to remember congregations need to go up, out and in. UP, OUT and IN are touchstones for movements that can build contemporarily astute, contextually adept and spiritually confident faith communities for the twenty-first century.

UP

Harmony UU, a congregation north of Cincinnati, knew their liberal message would strike a chord in their community. They also knew it was a waste of energy to put on four worship services a month for a community that could – between soccer practice, work and guests – only make an average of two services a month. They responded by creating only two services a month and repeating each service once. Imagine their relief at freeing up valuable leadership and volunteer time for the work of the church!

Harmony UU is a perfect example of what it means to go UP: learning from social trends about current phrasings of life’s eternal questions. In their case, becoming contemporarily astute meant learning what structures could provide deep and meaningful engagement about the twenty-first century question “Who can I become?” rather than the twentieth century question, “Who am I?” Congregations must go UP to get the ten thousand foot view of our social landscape so they can answer the deepest spiritual needs of our time.

OUT

Many churches would not be missed by their neighborhood if they suddenly disappeared. Not so for New Hope Community Church in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The congregation learned that one of the biggest barriers for residents in this low-income neighborhood was affordable transportation. So the congregation opened a community bike shop and provides quality, affordably priced bikes to their local community.

New Hope Community Bikes is an example of a church going OUT: learning from and then adapting to their context. Going OUT means understanding the context of those who live in your church’s neighborhood so that if your congregation suddenly disappeared, your neighbors would feel the absence.

IN 

Rev. Jen Crow detected a yearning in her congregation. Members told her, “We’ve done Building Your Own Theology and we want the next step, the one before seminary.” So she and her team put together the UU Wellspring Program, a ten-month program of deep faith formation.

Going IN means forming deep and grounded spiritual leaders. Inward movement allows members to experience the transforming power of faith grounded in our history, enlivened by our living tradition and held in the trusting hands of religious communities. Faith Formation happens most deeply in relationships of mentorship and accompaniment where we can reframe the everyday realities of our lives within Unitarian Universalist values and traditions.

Do you notice what all of these stories have in common? They require deep listening within a unique place. These congregations entered the cycle of practice with open minds, hearts and hands – a cycle of learning, not of searching for a silver bullet, a specific program or people with superpowers. Our true super power – the power that will let our faith continue to bless our world – will be found in living into the cycle of learning remembering these touchstones as we live our faith together boldly.

This article was first published in the New England Region newsletter (Feb 2015.) 

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Sean Neil-Barron is the Ministerial Intern with the New England Region of our UUA. Sean is a proclaimed covenant nerd and geeks out thinking about the ecosystem of Unitarian Universalism.

Three times per year First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City (“The 1UC in OKC” as we like to call ourselves) holds a new member welcome as part of our worship service. These welcomes usually occur early in the service, the Sunday after we hold our “Path to Membership” course—which is offered either as three weekday evenings over three weeks or a half day Saturday,

The ceremony acknowledges the covenantal bonds that connect the congregation with new members affirming their intent to stand with the members of the church and existing members acknowledging every new member changes the church. During this ceremony, we also “open” the membership book to others in the congregation who have been attending for a while and think that this is the right time for them to make a commitment.

After we have opened the book, welcomed new members and acknowledged our covenantal bonds, we do one more thing that lifts up an important part of church life. We offer the new members, and the existing members, something of a warning. “Churches are not perfect,” we tell them. “Neither are the members who fill its pews, staff its committees or work to bring to life the vision we hold in common.”

What does this mean? We tell them that, “If you hang around this church long enough, one of two things—and likely both—will happen to you. Eventually you will disappoint the church or the church will disappoint you.” I used to tell people that eventually the church would “break your heart or you will break the church’s heart” but I softened the
language at the urging of some our longer-term members—but the sentiment remains. It is entirely likely that at some point, the church will fail you or you will fail the church.

“A time may come when the church doesn’t do something that you believe is important. We may fail to act on an issue or even act in a manner opposite of what you would desire. At the same time it is possible that you won’t do something that the church asks of you or you will not do it in the way that other church members hope and expect.”

This is quite natural, we tell them, and while it is sad, it is part of being imperfect people banding together in an imperfect way to create an imperfect institution. The most important part of this message is what comes after this warning. We tell them, “It isn’t that what happened isn’t important (pardon the double negative). It is, but what is more important is what happens next. If our covenanted community stands for anything, it stands for being together, through our imperfections and working to improve our church and world with every opportunity. If we can live in this kind of community then the church we build together, new and old, is alive.”

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The Reverend Mark W. Christian serves the “1UC in OKC,” aka First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City. When asked how long he has been there, Mark answers “Somewhere between 14 and 57 years.” He returned to lead the church he grew up in back in 2001. Mark has a long list of UU leadership positions serving as a Congregational President (before going to seminary), Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association Chapter President, on the SouthWest Unitarian Universalist Conference Board (twice now), on the UUMA Exec as Secretary and as a Ministerial Settlement Representative. He takes great pride in the 1UC’s youth programming and community organizing work.