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Posts from the ‘Community’ Category

Jan 31

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Letting Go of Outcomes

I’ve been incredibly excited to see the conversation developing around the UUA’s “Congregations and Beyond” initiative.  If nothing else, it has started a really important conversation.  Checkout the Facebook conversation. There have been dozens of blog posts and twitter conversations about it.  Follow the Twitter hashtag #congbeyond.

Joanna Crawford summarizes the responses well in her latest blog:

  • “My Social Media peeps: after years of shouting from the rooftops about the very real community and relationship that happens via blogs, FB, Twitter, etc., they’re excited to see others are realizing it.
  •  My Boots on the Ground Parish Ministers: wonder if any of this is relevant to their churches and have concern that this will take away from the help they desperately need.
  • Theology Wonks: want more emphasis on the “there, there.” What is the root of what connects us? What are those “core values”?
  • Polity Wonks: want to know if this is a step toward being an association of members rather than an association of congregations, and if so, will this dilute/change our congregational polity?
  • One question I’ve heard from almost all groups is a desire for clarification, to know what the end goal is.”

I’ve heard this same desire for clear goals expressed everywhere.  And I would like to caution us that this is actually the worst place to start. Read more

Jan 20

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A Vow and A Vision

Peter Morales (President of the UUA) has just posted a new statement, “Congregations and Beyond” that contains both a vision and a vow.

Our polity is founded upon a congregational structure, and our theology and ideology is much larger than that.  The core question for me at this time is “who does Unitarian Universalism serve?” Is it just our members? Is it those who share our values? Or is it the larger community with which we hope to serve through our values? Read more

Dec 21

Accountability and Responsibility

In one of my last posts I wrote about the need to let go of an insistence upon having to enforce ”accountability and responsibility” in religious expression.  This seems a constant theme of mine these days, but it cannot let me go.

For me this derives from a hyper-awareness of the abuses of spiritual language of the recent past.  Ministers convinced that they were responsible to no one but themselves taking sexual advantage of vulnerable, hurting parishioners come to mind.  People who want to take advantage of the church to pursue their own spiritual quest but who don’t want to give anything in return is another constant theme.  Those who do not wish to be in community because they don’t wish to have anything about them challenged is another category. Read more

Dec 15

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“Whence suns and stars derive their orbits”

When the Western Unitarian Conference adopted their statement of purpose in 1886 they affirmed this:

“We worship One-in-All – that life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the should of [hu]man its Ought, — that Light which lighteth every [person] that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the [children] of God, — that Love with which our souls commune.”

Think about how radical this must have sounded in 1886.  For the Western Unitarians they were making their break from a Christ-centered movement into something they felt reflected the new frontiers of American exploration (without remembering that Native Americans had already explored this “frontier”).  For them this was as much spiritual as geographic.  They wanted their religious life to be as expansive as the galaxy of sun and stars. Read more

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