Unity Candidating Q&A 7: Policy Governance

What is your experience with Policy Governance?

(00:06):
So the Unitarian Church of Lincoln is not a policy governance congregation. It was, they actually shifted away from policy governance as their primary governance model about a year before I started in Lincoln. So I know policy governance primarily on paper, and I really appreciate the clarity it brings, right? To have clarity around who is responsible for within what boundaries is counterintuitively a source of real freedom for somebody working in church leadership. It's a thing that has been a central part of governance for a lot of Unitarian Universalist churches over the last 10 or 15 years that I've been active. So I know it through that. I also read Laura Park's book and have spent time studying the model, and I'm really looking forward to being on a team that knows the system well. I'm a relatively quick study and somebody deeply interested in governance systems, and so I'm excited at the opportunity to work within a system that has as well developed an understanding of governance as Unity does.

Unity Candidating Q&A 6: Mistakes

Tell about a mistake you've made in ministry and what you learned from this.

(00:06):
All right. So when I was first in Lincoln, one of the things that I knew was going to be part of my ministry in Lincoln was interfaith dialogue. This has been an important part of what I had learned about how Unitarian churches are. When I was in Baltimore and prior to coming to Lincoln, I had gone to get trained through the Gamal organization as a community organizer. So I came here with that hunger, and in my first year here, I was invited to be on the board of the Faith Coalition of Lancaster County. This is at that point, the major interfaith group working in Lincoln and Lancaster County. After a year or two on the board, I was invited to be the president of that organization.

(01:02)
So both on the board and as president, I pushed pretty hard for the Faith Coalition to be more of an activist organization than it had been or really wanted to be. There were some pretty bitter debates on that board, particularly in the summer of 2020, as to how much of a public position we should take. Because the Faith Coalition incorporates a really broad group of religious institutions in Lincoln, not all of which share unit Universalist understanding of social justice, and not all of them share Unitarian Universalism's ability to speak directly to public officials. We'll put it that way.

(01:57)
And so what became obvious after a couple of years of that is that what I was doing was I was trying to push this institution to be something that it really wasn't. That this was a really effective educational organization, that it did real meaningful work on intercultural competence and dialogue, figuring out how we pray together. If you have a contingent that includes Unitarians, Eastern Orthodox Muslim communities, Jewish communities, some of which have been in Lincoln for 150 years, and some of which are grounded in recent immigrant groups than just that education of saying How will we pray together is really important. But what I was trying to do is push it to be do community organizing to be a justice organization.

(02:59):
So eventually when my term as president was up, I said, I'm not going to serve another term. And I shifted to help found Justice in action. It's a congregation based community organizing effort with about 24 congregations, and we regularly turn out hundreds if not thousands of people to work on issues of justice in Lincoln and Lancaster County. In some ways, that's a smaller group than the Faith Coalition. It has fewer faith organizations represented, but it is a much more active group because it's organizing around particular issues. So the mistake here was in trying to make the Faith Coalition something that it was not, the mistake is not focusing on justice. That's pretty core to Unitarian Universalism, but the mistake was not understanding what the right lever to pull at the right time was because we could have launched that community based community organizing effort years earlier, but we didn't, in part because I was trying to push the Faith Coalition, good learning, good thing that I carry forward with me and not a mistake that I'll repeat. I'll find new mistakes to make next time. I.

Unity Candidating Q&A 5: Reading

What are you reading these days?

Speaker 1 (00:06):

Well, in addition to rereading Laura Park's book on policy governance in advance of Candidating at Unity Church Unitarian, in a week and a half, I'm reading for fun, Marilyn Robinson's book on reading. Genesis Robinson wrote Gilead, which is one of my favorite novels of all times, and one of my favorite descriptions of ministry, and she recently published a book on reading the book of Genesis, a nonfiction book on Genesis, and she approaches Genesis not quite as a subject for academic research, not quite a devotional scripture, but as a piece of literature with themes, characters embodied theology. I don't actually agree with as much of her as I thought I would. Her theological position is not quite what I thought it was, but it's a fun read with a really sparkling author.

Unity Candidating Q&A 4: Change

How have you seen change happen in a congregation? What is the role of a minister in that change?

So my first year in Lincoln delegation from the congregation made an appointment to talk to me in my office, and they sat down and they told me that they wanted us to add a land acknowledgement to both our website and the worship services, and I said no. That first year because we did not have a relationship with the community, that the land acknowledgement was acknowledging that relationship didn't exist yet. That was back in probably 2018, 2019, somewhere in there.

I've preached on it a bunch over the years, and in the first years I was here, one of the things that I spent the most time on was building relationships with other congregations, with activists in Lincoln with the Indian Center, which is one of our community centers here in town. That was mostly work that I did on my own, but throughout it I was clear with the congregation through preaching and monthly reports to the board and annual reports to the congregation that that was work that I was doing, that that was work that I saw as a priority to build up those relationships and work that I thought was important for the congregation as a whole to do too. So fast forward to the summer of 2022, the spring of 20 22, 2 things happen at the same time. The first is that we had a major disagreement, fight, controversy, however you frame that around a potential development the city of Lincoln approved that would be right across the street from one of the only sweat lodges in city limits down near Wilderness Park. I got involved with that fight as part of the group of people that I had formed relationships with and was at protests and marches and demonstrations for that at the same time.

But independent of that and that this is the important part, that this happened independently, a similar group of three or four people came to talk to me in my office, but this time they said, okay, we want to do a land acknowledgement, but we've formed these relationships and here's how we want to build on them. We want to do an eight week series over the summer where we do worship for eight consecutive weeks and one congregational activity every single week, a workshop, a movie, an event in town, all building on this idea of our institutional relationship with the native community here in Lincoln. And so we did that. We spent an entire summer on it, and after that summer, the congregation in Lincoln became one of the hosting institutions for annual visits from the Otto Missouri delegation. This is the folks on whose land we live.

A few of our members are on the advisory council that's building that relationship between the Otto Missouri tribe and the city of Lincoln. We're putting in grant applications here to expand that. That's how change happens by establishing those relationships and then following up on them when the moment is right. That's subtle work, right? Because in some ways, in that case, leading change looked from the outside, like saying no, that no was a way of saying not yet. And because of that, not yet. The change isn't just a thing that the minister imposes, but something that the whole congregation owns.

Unity Candidating Q&A 3: Seminary

A question that I get a lot: why did you go to a Christian seminary? What has that choice meant for your ministry?

(00:05):

This is a great question. Part of the story that I told yesterday about choosing to go to seminary when I was sick was a conversation that I had with Reverend David Olson. He was the senior minister of the first Unitarian Church of Baltimore, where I was a member as I was choosing to go into seminary. And what he told me was this, if you are a recent Unitarian Universalist convert, if you've come to this faith as an adult, he said, you should absolutely go to one of our identity seminaries. You should go to Meadville Lombard, you should go to Star King. You should get grounded in this tradition that you are going to serve, hopefully for the rest of your career. On the other hand, he said, if you're grounded in Unitarian universalism, if you've grown up in the tradition, go elsewhere, particularly a Christian seminary, because you're going to need to be able to move in those interfaith spaces in your career and going to a Christian seminary will allow you to do that.

(01:11)
Now, I started going to a Unitarian church when I was 14, the congregation in Binghamton, New York. And at that point in my life, I had been a part of three Unitarian congregations well over a decade, and so I followed that second path. Now, David Olson, not entirely coincidentally, was also the minister who pushed me to see community organizing as a key part of ministry. The thing that I took away from a lot of my interactions with him was the necessity of grounding Unitarian Universalist ministry in a relationship with the communities around us. And that looks like being in relationship with Christian clergy. So you have to learn how to do that well.

(02:01)
The other more prosaic reason for going to Wesley Theological Seminary is that I didn't want to move. I was living in Baltimore. I hadn't gotten married yet, but I was about to, and I didn't want to move to Chicago or Berkeley, but I really fell in love with Wesley while I was there. Wesley Theological Seminary is a progressive Methodist seminary with big contingents from the United Methodists, African Methodist, Episcopal churches, and Korean Methodist churches, and going to school there, I had a different experience and understanding of diversity than exists sometimes in UU spaces. Wesley is a tremendously diverse place, and one of the ways that hangs together is that it depends on a shared sense of call among all of its

(02:58):

all of its students. So I had to get very clear very quickly on being able to articulate my sense of call as a Unitarian Universalist in a predominantly Methodist context. That served me really well in Wesley in ministry since. The other thing that I really loved at Wesley and why I went back there for a doctorate actually, was the relentless focus that that school has on congregational life. So every single class, the driving question is, how will this work in a congregation? How do we actually do this thing? Not as an academic question, but as a question of lived experience in a church. That's really been the grounding for a lot of my ministry sense.

Unity Candidating Q&A 2: Call

Describe your call to ministry. What life events have led you to this moment?

Rough Transcript:

So In about 2002 or 2003, I asked the minister at the Unitarian Universalist congregation of Binghamton, New York about what it looks like to go into ministry. I was 18 years old and had preached the coming of age sermon that year, and it's what I thought I wanted to do. I’m from a family of Methodist ministers and academics, so in some ways this felt like asking about going into the family business, but back 20 years ago or so, Reverend Taylor told me to try something else first. So I went to college for pre-law and then ended up a religion major, and then I went to Peace Corps and decided not to do seminary. I came back to the Shriver Peace Worker program in Baltimore more and had decided once again that I would not go to seminary and become a minister. Then I got really sick. I had Hodgkin's lymphoma in my early to mid twenties, and while I was sick, while I was in the hospital, I had what felt at the time, like an epiphany that I had one life. I didn't get to choose how long it was going to be, but I did get to choose with what I was going to do with it.

I am very lucky that right around then I also met my now wife and had the support to spend several years changing career paths. That was almost 15 years ago that that story ends. It's been quite a ride since then. I count myself lucky pretty much every day that I found my way into this calling.

Unity Candidating Q&A: Intro

Hello everyone! Over the next week and a half, I’ll be posting daily videos, at 9:00 AM, answering some common questions that have already come up, in advance of candidating week (April 14-21).

I have been having some trouble with my transcription software this afternoon, but we will get transcripts up and running some time in the next day or two.

See you soon,

Oscar

Have questions to add? Fill out the form from the search team at shorturl.at/IUX08l, or by pointing your phone at this QR code:

Rough Transcript:

Hi, I am the Reverend Dr. Oscar Sinclair. I've been invited to be the candidate for Senior Minister at Unity Church Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the next week and a half leading up to candidate week, I'm going to try and record and post some common questions drawing on material from my ministerial record that the search team has been working with, and the idea is that these will be short videos, two, maybe five minutes at most.

We're not going to cover everything in the next 10 days, but hopefully we'll get to some of the big questions that come up for a lot of different people. The search teams also put together a form to solicit questions and feedback in advance of Candidating week. That's also a way for me to see what questions are coming up in the congregation and to make sure that we address them. You can access that form through the QR code here or through the link that we're attaching to this video. I'm going to try and post one of these a day.

I'm recording most of them in a single setting, so you'll see that my tie doesn't change, but I look forward to getting these posted and to meeting you all in about a week and a half.

Compassion and Community

An article published in the Lincoln Journal Star, April 3, 2024

For more than a year the Lancaster County Jail has exceeded capacity. To deal with the crisis, the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners made the decision to allocate over $1 million of taxpayer money to house individuals in jails outside of our jurisdiction.

While this decision may seem pragmatic on the surface, it fails to address the underlying systemic issues and the moral imperative at hand. These individuals are not mere statistics or cases to be managed; they are our neighbors, friends and family members, deserving of compassion and a chance at redemption.

For the past year and a half, driven by our values of compassion and justice, the faith communities of Justice In Action have been passionately seeking solutions rooted in systemic change.

Through diligent research and collaboration, we’ve educated ourselves about the adult diversion and problem-solving programs administered by the county. These programs offer a beacon of hope, saving taxpayer money and diverting individuals away from incarceration and towards community-based support systems.

By fostering connections with essential pillars of stability such as family, work and faith communities, these programs not only promote rehabilitation but also significantly reduce recidivism rates — meaning people who complete these programs are far less likely to be re-arrested and return to the system compared to people who remain in jail for similar offenses.

The county’s recent approval of a proposal to evaluate and provide recommendations for addressing the jail overcrowding issue is a step in the right direction. Yet, from our perspective, true progress demands more than just bureaucratic evaluations — it demands a reckoning with the moral implications of our actions.

In January, the Lancaster County Attorney’s office issued revised criteria for entry into diversion and problem-solving programs. We were hopeful that after numerous conversations with the county attorney where we shared our support for these programs, that we would see changes that would expand eligibility for entry, especially for our Black and Indigenous neighbors of color, who are drastically overrepresented in our jail but underrepresented in diversion and problem-solving programs. Unfortunately, we found that the eligibility criteria were relatively the same, without consideration for increased access to these programs.

Fifteen Justice in Action clergy recently engaged in dialogue with Lancaster County Attorney Pat Condon to advocate for changes to these guidelines. Our faith traditions teach us that justice is a moral imperative and that it demands the dismantling of barriers that perpetuate inequality.

We firmly believe in the power of grace and community to transform lives and build a stronger, more inclusive society. Lancaster County is fortunate to have nationally recognized diversion and problem-solving programs that offer individuals rehabilitation in a way that improves public safety. Therefore, we call upon our county attorney and other officials to reconsider the eligibility criteria for these programs in a way that is equitable and ensures that they will be accessible to larger numbers of people.

By investing in rehabilitation over incarceration, we not only uphold the dignity of our neighbors but also cultivate a more compassionate and just community for all.

Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair is at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln. Rev. Kirstie Jeanette Engel is at Lincoln First United Methodist Church. This piece was signed by 20 other member of Lincoln's faith community. They are:

Rev. David R. Stock, St. David’s Episcopal Church

Rev. Doyle Burbank-Williams, New Visions United Methodist Church

Rev. Steven R. Mitchell, Vine Congregational UCC

Pastor Trever Rook, Neighbors Church

Father Robert Magoola, St. Mark’s on the Campus Episcopal Church

Rev. Katherine Ebling-Frazier, ConnectioN Point

Rev. Thomas Dummermuth, Eastridge Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. Melodie Jones Pointon, Eastridge Presbyterian Church

Rev. Mandy Barkhaus, Horizons Community Church

Rev. Kristie Bohac, Bethlehem Lutheran Church of Davey

Rev. Tobi White, Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

Rev. Susan Smith, Antelope Park Church of the Brethren

Rev. Amy Slater, South Gate United Methodist Church

Pastor Helen Paus, New Hope United Methodist Church, Prairie Home United Methodist Church

Rev. Liz Kocher, The Lutheran Center, Nebraska Lutheran Campus Ministries–University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Rev. Dr. Sue Coller, First Presbyterian Church

Rev. H. Eduardo Bousson, General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church

Ed Ostlund, St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. Dr. Jeff Slater, Trinity United Methodist Church of Lincoln

Rev. Maddi Baugous, University Minister, Nebraska Wesleyan University