Fire in Our Bones

Unity Church Unitarian ~ August 3, 2025

There’s a story, in Oxford, about the time when the Unitarians came to Oxford.  Manchester College was built in the late 19th century, and the story goes that shortly after it went up, two Oxford theology dons walked past the new, heretical, college.  “Well, it looks very Unitarian,” said one, “Cold and imposing.”  “like it will stand until Judgement day.”  Said the other.  “Yes, until judgement day.  But not a day longer.”

          What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist in the world right now, in 2025?  We have the same reputation, sometimes earned, as that story from Oxford, as the ‘frozen chosen,’ an intellectual faith movement grounded in the use of reason to understand the world, more interested in admiring a problem than fixing it.  Cold, a little aloof.  Well meaning, certainly, but not who you want at a party.  Sufficiently unorthodox not to be invited to the fun parties regardless.

          But let me tell you a story.  It’s a story that some of your have heard before.  Years ago, a young person walked into the sanctuary of First Unitarian Church of Baltimore.  He was sick, body and heart.  About to spend a year in and out of the hospital, though he did not know it yet.  Troubled by the brokenness of the world, the dissonance between his youthful optimism and the cynical, heartbreaking work he had done after college.  He wasn’t sure what he needed, but thought it probably felt like church.

          This is, you’ve probably put together, my own story.  I joined First Unitarian in Baltimore in the few months between coming home from the Peace Corps and getting a cancer diagnosis at 25.  But it is not just my story.  It is also the story of so many people who come through the door every week.  Sometimes it is dramatic, sometimes just a vague disquiet, a dis-ease of the soul.  Almost everyone who comes in does so in some kind of transitional moment of their lives.  If that was you, and you are comfortable, could you raise your hand for a moment?

          Here’s the next part of my story: in that year, when my soul was wounded and then I started chemo, outside my immediate family it was a community of Unitarian Universalists that caught me.  It wasn’t just my parents who cared for me – though they did – it was these almost strangers who I had sat in pews with for only a few months, showing up at my door with food, knitting a shawl that is in my office to this day, calling to say “hey, I didn’t see you at Church last Sunday, are you alright?  Do you need a ride this week?”  And there was balm for my soul: In the midst of what felt like impossible pain (I was in my 20s, everything was turned up to 11), I found myself singing

“We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken, we’ll build a land where the captives go free/Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning, oh we’ll build the promised land that can be.”

          When I say this faith saved my life, understand that it is not hyperbole. It is midwestern understatement. 15 years ago Unitarian Universalism bound me up and then sent me forth.

          Right now there is a lot of literature about the end of organized religion.  Some numbers:  Attendance at religious services, particularly for mainline and liberal denominations, is down nationally over the last twenty years.  Religious Education enrollment is dropping faster than adult attendance, suggesting that we aren’t brining young people and families into church.  This spring there were 86 Unitarian Universalist congregations looking for full time called or contract ministers.  23 found a minister to serve.  In a recent report to the British General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, Rory Castle Jones quoted a Unitarian minister who told him “Optimism is our scarcest resource.”

          In a moment when (I  would say) an organized liberal church is most needed, we are dwindling, institutionally.  It seems strange: one might think that a church with low formal expectations (no creed, diversity of thought) would be thriving.  But instead… optimism is our most scarce resource.

          “Do not go quiet into that dark night,” the poet writes.  “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  I want us to survive, as a movement.  I want us to survive because I would like to be able to retire in 20 years or so, sure.  And I want us to survive for the young person, broken in heart or body, who comes through that door wondering what we have to bind them up.  I want us to be like the poets, be like the prophets, compelled by the words we feel so deep we cannot keep them in. “The word of the Lord is upon me,” Jeremiah speaks, “I have fire in my bones.”

          Here’s a bit of research I think about a lot: counterintuitively, the churches that are ‘stickiest’ to new members, the churches that don’t seem to follow the broad strokes of institutional decline in the first quarter of this century, are not the ones where the barriers to entry are low.  The places where new folks are told “Yeah, come and see what you like, we don’t have anything in particular in mid for you, but take a look round and see what you like,” tend to get a lot of visitors, but not the kind of bone-deep commitment that churches need.  Instead, it is the high-friction, high demand congregations that make the most difference in their people’s lives – and by extension, tend to be ‘stickiest.’

          I am so proud to serve a church that is, in this way, sticky.  Here at Unity Church we are explicit: we have expectations of our membership.  We see the brokenness, the deep hunger and loneliness in the world and we have a prescription for it.  It goes like this:

·        Develop a spiritual practice that helps you find and keep your balance.

·        Develop the skills of small group intimacy that let you go deep quickly with strangers.

·        Let the compassion that rises from doing your work within and among (the first two pieces) lead you to bless the world.

This is the expanded version of “within, among, and beyond,” that comes up so often at this place.  Here at Unity, we expect our members to engage with their deepest selves and each other, then to go out and be in the world acting as people of faith.  The specifics (what practice, how you bless the world) are still up to each person, by the expectation, the prescription, is universal. 

Practice. Intimacy. Blessing. 

Within. Among. Beyond.

One of the advantages of churches is that we get to think in decades and centuries rather than weeks, months, and years.  So this prescription is evergreen.  In good times, practice, go deep with other people, bless the world.  In hard times?  Do the same thing.  Maybe more.  In these hard times, when I turn on the radio while driving my daughter to camp at the JCC and hear about the intentional starvation of children in Gaza? In that impossible moment, the prescription I write for myself is the same: Spiritual practice and going deep to develop compassion, and then work to bless the world.  WORK

There’s one more thing that research tells us about churches. The most common time for people to visit churches, outside of major holidays, is late summer.  This is when young families are getting ready for the school year, thinking about what their routine should be, sometimes starting new jobs.  So for the month of August, we are going to do something a little different- a series of Sunday morning worship services, based on what it means to be a member here at Unity – that three part prescription of practice, intimacy, and blessing.  At each, I’ll be preaching, but like this – we’ll save the robe and pulpit for September, and just have a conversation.  And at each, we’ll have a pick up choir meeting at 9:00 for anyone that wants to show up, learn some new music, and sing together.

There is an ask that goes along with this plan, though, and that’s this:  I know I am not the only person in this room whose life was saved or changed by finding this faith.  I know, because in the 367 days since I started here, I’ve had one on one meetings to get to know each other with well over 100 of you, and so many of you have told me your stories.  How you found meaning through music at Unity, how coming here felt like come home, how you have found in the people here lifelong friends, how Unity Church has been a place that shows up in your life on wonderful and terrible days alike.  I’ve heard about lives changed through spiritual practice, about how this place has helped some of you become activists, how getting involved with outreach through Unity gives you hope. I know your stories, they are beautiful, and good.

And I know – down in my bones know – that there are people in Saint Paul, in this metro area, who need the message we have.  And I know, just as deeply, that if we are the ‘frozen chosen,’ cut off from the world and rarely exposing ourselves, content in our cold and imposing fortresses of intellect and architecture, that optimism will continue to be scarce, and our institutions diminished.  That is not the Unitarian Universalism that I want.  I want us to know what this community has and feel compelled to share that.  Not the frozen chosen, I want fire in our bones.

So this month I want you to invite someone to Unity Church.  No, not the person you are sitting next to in the pew right now.  It could be someone you met here, who has fallen away in the last few years of transition, who you miss.  Or it might be a friend, a colleague who’s mentioned that they are having a hard time, that they are lonely.  Call that person.  Take them to lunch.  Send them the video of this service.  Tell them your story.  If you were one of the people who raised your hand earlier, remember what that felt like – what it was like to be caught by a church, and to have a place that supports you in finding meaning and belonging in the world.

And if you happen to be visiting this morning, or are watching online, welcome.  We are so glad you are here.  Church is where we practice being human together in the midst of Times Like These.  Reach out, ask questions, try out the prescription we have.  Use this place to find meaning, and then help others.  Bless the world.

May we always be that church.  Amen.

Our closing hymn is Lead With Love.

More of Who We've Always Been

Sermon begins at 50:39

Unity Church, St. Paul ~ October 20, 2024

          Lovett Weems has seen a few churches in his day.  I’ve known him as the founding director of Wesley Theological Seminary’s Lewis Center for Church Leadership, when he has spent the last twenty years.  This was theoretically his retirement gig, a distinguished posting after 18 years as president of St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, and a career before that serving Methodist churches around the country.  I knew him best as a teacher who would deliver pithy sentences, clearly developed over decades, that distilled down some piece of ministry into relatively easily remembered nuggets: “Always tell your congregation you are proud of them, especially when you are asking them to do something big.” “It is not enough to be right. The real test is not primarily our own intellectual and moral purity, the real test is effective ministry.”  “In churches, lots of people have the power to stop things.”

          While Lovett’s hallmark cards of effective ministry advice span generations of ministers and every area of church life, the theme that his books and teaching often come back to is the messy, complicated, and necessary work of discerning a vision, a next faithful step, for institutions.  There is a well-trodden path of institutional formation and stagnation: a compelling vision starts a new thing, and over the years that vision falls into maintenance, then decline.  They key to sustainability, then, is counter-intuitively not sustainable maintenance, but renewal of vision. It is hard to recruit the 18th committee chair for a project that has been ongoing for 60 years, with diminishing volunteer engagement.  It is much easier to ask ‘what new thing are we being called to do, and who will help to lead it?’

          This is not change for changes sake, however.  Lovett would also remind us, often, that the most vibrant churches do not fundamentally change who they are over the years.  Instead, those churches ask ‘what is the action we are called to take, in order to become more of who we have always been?’  Rather than becoming something wholly new, the call is to deepen identity, to find the thing that makes the institution beautiful, unique and needed in the world, and then do more of that.

          We’ve been thinking about and talking about change and tradition over the course of the last month in worship, but primarily in the context of institutions.  Of churches.  But we might also think about change and continuity in our own lives:  how do we fall into patterns of maintenance, become static and decline?  And how might we respond not through reinvention, but through a deeper understanding of who we are, to become more of who we have always been?

          We should pause here, because questions of how, or whether, we must change as individuals, when asked in a church, carry a lot of theological baggage.  “Truly, truly I say to you,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “unless one is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” “Amazing Grace,” the hymn goes, “That saved a wretch like me.” These are statements about the necessity of change, but they have implications for human nature: that humans as born require transformation, are incomplete until acted upon.

          I don’t see that.  Don’t hear that in this sermon.  Our Liberal tradition does not share Amazing Grace’s dim view of human nature, even as I love the song and the metaphor of it.  Instead we have (at worst) a neutral view of human nature: we are wonderfully made, creatures of stardust and poetry who are capable of great acts of love and horrors in equal measure.

          But saying that we are born complete is not the same as saying that we cannot, or should not, change. We grow, develop, change. We all go through seasons of life.  I recognize who I was as a teenager, as a young Peace Corps volunteer, as a minister in my first call, but as a different person.  Parenting has changed me. Ministry has changed me. I have changed both through external events that happened to and around me, and I have changed through choices I have made.  It is the same for all of us. Stasis is not a condition of life. We don’t have to be save, but biologically we are built for transformation.

          This is true of people, and true of churches.  Looking at the history of Unity, I can see the same church culture here from 1953, something essential remains.  And we have changed.  This congregation’s engagement with antiracism has changed us.  The national UU conversation about the language of reverence, using words like ‘god’ or ‘prayer’ in worship changed us.  Telling complex stories that push back against the urge to oversimplify our history changes us.  Each time we renew the ends statements, renew our vision for this place, we are choosing to lean into change.  But when we do it well, it isn’t a fundamental break from what has been before, but an evolution. “One statement,” Lovett Weems writes, “Can capture both past and present, and it can galvanize a congregation to do what they never expected to do until they realized they had no choice if they wanted to be more of what they had always been.”

          Last week was National Coming Out Day. I remember the day my sister told me she thought that she might be gay. And the day, not long after, when she told me about meeting Lindsay. And the day I got to not work at her wedding, instead standing next to her as she and Lindsay exchanged vows and rings.  Each of those days felt like a sea change, a profound shift in how my sister moves through the world.

And at each of them I’ve watched her become more of who she has always been.  When I asked her permission to talk about this in a sermon, she wrote back better than I can put it:

          “Coming Out is not one singular event.  For me it was a year or so long process from “oh, this fiction character is very hot,” to coming out to myself (and you simultaneously) and the several months of angst that entailed, to meeting the most incredible girl I’d ever set eyes on, to then coming out to the people I trusted the most, and *then* to the “public.” That whole thing was about a year long. And we still have to come out all the time when we meet people, move to a new place, start a hobby, etc.  I just came out to a couple new coworkers. And every time it’s like letting someone into a piece of who I am, and handing them that bit of trust to know the ‘true’ me.”

          Remember Lovett Weems? “The only way to preserve values over time is to be involved continually in renewal and change.”

          Coming out is a risk, and riskier to people you do not know, so a big thank you to my sister for trusting me to tell that story. And she did have one condition, based on our shared history and loves: that I admit, from this pulpit and on camera, that the Detroit Tigers did better in the playoffs than the Baltimore Orioles.  Thanks sis.  …and the Orioles are still the better baseball team.  That one was for me.

Aside from an unpleasant admission of athletic futility, what this tells me is something really important: that the work of transformation- the work of intentional change either personally or institutionally, requires self-knowledge, examination. 

We transform not to become something new, but to become more of the best version of ourselves.  The moment of change, then, is not simply in the present, but it is the bridge between the past and the future. 

In the ongoing work of change, we can find the throughline through our personal and institutional identity: the day (or days) my sister came out connects the person I knew when she was an annoying little kid sister to the person who got married and bought a house with her spouse. They are all the same person, and the moments of change deepen who that person is in the world, become more of who she has always been.

Institutionally, there is a through line at Unity from William Channing Gannett’s work with the Freedmen’s Society in the 18th century, to Arthur Foote’s work on deinstitutionalization in Minnesota, through the Eller-Issac’s commitment to anti-racism. This congregation, the institution, has held all of those ministries, using each to deepen its understanding of the linkage between spiritual practice and justice, right through Rev. KP Hong’s work developing the Double Helix model to make that connection explicit.  More of who we have always been.

Our job as churches is to change. That’s how we avoid stasis eventual stagnation. Instead we catch a vision and renew our shared ministry, not as a break with the past, but as a chapter in the story.  When we do this work as individuals, the continuity between past, present, and future is our sense of self. Churches don’t have an innate sense of self in the same way, but hold change and progress nonetheless.  “Progress is real,” Jonah Goldberg wrote recently, “yet it is not stored in our genes or souls, but in institutions and traditions.” Human nature is a-historical, it does not change from generation to generation. But what allows us to become more of who we have always been, collectively, is the institutions and rule-structures we build. (I would add the stories that we tell).

There’s a thing that happens, in every new ministry.  A new minister comes in, and it feels like a fundamental change – a break from what has happened before. A lot gets read onto new ministers and ministries.

This is my last time preaching on this theme of change this fall, and I want to end on this point: change, in the context of church, is both unavoidable, desirable, and a deepening, rather than a break. I have no interest in making Unity Church something that it is not – I don’t think there is anything fundamentally broken with the church institution or with us as people. And… Suzuki Roshe said, “Each of [us] is perfect the way [we] are, and [we] can use a little improvement.”  Not someone or something new. More of who we have always been. More of what this place has always been.

We do not need to be born again.  “You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” But neither are we static. You -we- are stories. And stories are not static things.

They change every time we tell them, becoming deeper, more complex, and telling us more about ourselves each time.  The world offers itself to our imagination, and in doing so, we deepen who we are.  May it always be so.

Transforming the World

The last of a three part series: Transforming Ourselves, Transforming the Church, Transforming the World.

Last week a delegation of twelve clergy from the Justice in Action network met with Lancaster County Attorney Pat Condon, to ask him to expand who is eligible to participate in pre-trial diversion programs. It was my turn to be the spokesperson for Justice in Action.

If you came by the church last Tuesday or Wednesday, there is a good chance you saw me huddled with Olivia Butts, the Justice in Action organizer for criminal justice reform, as we worked through exactly how we were going to phrase our asks, how we would respond to counterpoints, and how to stay focused on the issues we were bringing instead of getting dragged into a juvenile debate about tactics and the county attorney’s hurt feelings. He had, in previous conversations, told us he was offended by our tone in asking for changes.

Side note: The man supervises a staff of 40 attorneys, is the lead prosecutor in Lincoln, and has been in public office for decades. The idea that the tactics of a coalition of 24 churches trying to create a more just Lincoln is actually laughable.  But laughing is not a serious negotiating strategy, so Olivia and I spent time working through what we would say when, as predicted, he objected to our tone and tactics. This is how healthy civic engagement works, we said. Groups in the community who think there is a problem come to their elected officials to ask for changes.  That’s not objectionable, that’s democracy.

We came with four specific asks, all around the eligibility criteria for pre-trial diversion. As a brief overview: in Lancaster, if you are arrested for a misdemeanor (say, possession of Marijuana, 1 oz or less, possessing alcohol while underage, or disturbing the peace) you can apply for admission to a pre-trial diversion program. 

The programs vary, but most involve regular check ins with an officer of the court or social worker, regular drug testing, and a goal of breaking the cycle of behavior that led to the misdemeanor arrest.  When you complete the program, you do not go to trial, and often the arrest record is expunged. We know these programs work: folks who complete them are vastly less likely to get arrested again than those who go to the jail.

We asked Pat Condon to make four changes to who is eligible to participate in these programs.  Right now, if you have ever been convicted of a felony, even thirty years ago, you are permanently ineligible to ever apply for pre-trial diversion for a later misdemeanor.  We asked him to change that.  He said no.

If you have been convicted of more than two misdemeanors in the last ten years, you are ineligible to apply for pre-trial diversion.  We asked him to change that. He said no.

If, for whatever reason, you take longer than 90 days from the date of your first scheduled court date to decide whether diversion is the right step for you, you cannot apply.  We asked him to change that. He said no.

These programs cost money to participate in.  Often several hundred dollars.  Now, for me, that’s not a barrier. But if you are unemployed, or on a fixed income, that cost can be prohibitive.  We asked Pat Condon to eliminate fees for these programs, because money should not be a barrier for someone getting the help they need.  He said no.

It would be easy, walking out of that meeting, to feel discouraged.  To feel like transformation, in the county attorneys office at least, was not going to happen. But I am not discouraged.  I left that meeting angry, absolutely, but also energized for what comes next.

Before we talk about that, let’s back up a bit, and talk about what we mean when we talk about transformation in society.  Over the last two weeks we’ve talked about transformation on a personal level, and transformation in our congregation. But our vision statement ends that the Unitarian Church of Lincoln is here to transform ourselves and the world. 

This morning we sang Felix Adler’s hymn “Hail the Glorious Golden City.”  Adler wasn’t Unitarian – he was a Jewish New Yorker who founded the Ethical Culture Society, but his writing captures the goal of a lot of Unitarian activism over the last century. It is a kind of realized eschatology: a view that history has a goal that it works toward (1), that goal is here, in this world (2), and that the goal (the promised land) will be built with human hands (3). If there is a promised land, then we aren’t going to count on God transforming the world supernaturally.  We are going to build it. 

So great.  We won’t look for Royal Cities descending from on high, but build the promised land (the beloved community) right here. That’s a big goal. What is our theory of social change, at the heart of that vision? Justice in Action is grounded in a particular view of social change – one that is countercultural in some ways, but does work within existing power structures to make change. And that kind of institutionalist, incrementalist model is not without its critics.

Our reading, and the scripture it quotes, lays out the revolutionary case for social change.  Sometimes the system is so broken that there is no repairing it.  Instead we need to create a world anew. That school of thought is often pretty skeptical of organizations like Justice in Action, working to change things at the scale of diversion eligibility criteria. That transformation only happens within the context of existing frameworks, and does not fundamentally change the whole rotten system.

This is the Audre Lorde critique of organizations like Justice in Action: “…the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”  That’s a fair critique, and one many people I work with and love share. Maybe those critics are right – I cannot discount that this may be a moment that calls for changing the whole system, creating some kind of revolutionary change that fundamentally shifts the conversation.

But, if I’m honest, I am more of an institutionalist than a radical, more incrementalist than revolutionary.  When I was in my twenties, I served in the United States Peace Corps.  And one of the founding ideals of the Peace Corps is an idea from Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the agency. He said that a goal of the Peace Corps was to develop practical idealists: young people who would have the fire and commitment to make a difference in the world, but who also had the skills and tools to make that happen. Folks who would have the drive for transformation, but the ability to work within systems in order to change them. I get hung up on the revolutionary framework because I struggle to bring it from the abstract to the practical: what will this look like in practice, today in our community?

From the starting point of either practical idealism or incrementalism in our work in Lincoln, I would say 1) yes, work within the existing frameworks. Because we have them.  The County Attorney is an elected position, we have a peaceful revolutionary option on the calendar in 2026. 2) We work in the world as it is, moving it toward the world as it ought to be.  The first part is important – we work in the world as it is.  That is our starting point. 

We do not get to absent ourselves from working in the world as it is, the systems that are already in place, just because they do not meet our high moral and ethical standards.  Especially for those like me, who by unearned circumstance of birth can work in existing systems without danger, we have an obligation to show up in those systems and change them.  There are people in the jail right now, who should be in diversion programs, today. There are folks in this state who need access to medical care today. Revolution, in abstract debate, does not serve them.

But church work will serve them, and us. We said at the start of this series on transformation that churches get to work in decades, not weeks.  We get to use that! It is a superpower in organizing.  Because making a sustained moral case over time can transform the world. Organized churches may not start a revolution, but we can absolutely bury the local powers that be by the weight of our moral argument over time. In practical terms: church folks vote, and elected officials know it.

Here's what that looks like in practice:  Yes, Pat Condon said no to every single reform we asked him to make. But that one meeting last week was not the beginning of the conversation, or the last word. He’s not the only actor in the system. Justice in Action, the coalition this church is a part of, is also working with the Director of Community Corrections, who administers pretrial diversion, to make sure there is staffing in place for more folks to get help through these programs.  We’re working with the County Commissioners to line up funding for those staff positions. We are talking to Region 5 (mental health services) and officials at the jail to get them on board.  We are showing up at every Lancaster County Justice Council coordinating meeting, making it clear that expanding these programs is the consensus in the community.

As for the County Attorney? Our last ask of Mr. Condon had nothing to do with pretrial diversion criteria.  It was an ask for him to show up, on May 2, so that he could explain his position in front of 1500 churchgoing constituents at Justice in Action’s Nehemiah Assembly (there’s a sign up sheet out in the Gallery, we’re going to bring 150 Unitarians). At first he told us he would not be able to be there, because he had to take a continuing education units for professional certification.  When I pointed out that I too need CEUs, but there are lots of opportunities for that in the year, and only one of these assemblies, he said he would think about it.  I then asked him: “Mr. Condon, there are a dozen clergy members with us this morning.  They are going to go back to their congregations on Sunday. What should they tell their congregants about what your plans are?”

“I am planning to be there.”

So: Pat Condon is planning to be there on May 2, and we’re going to put some of these same questions to him.  This time not in front of 12 clergy, but in front of over a thousand people of faith who believe in second chances. This is how change happens, how the criminal justice system in Lincoln Nebraska transforms. It isn’t a wave that suddenly crashes over a dike – it is a rising tide, building over time until it is impossible to resist.

I want to close with a story you’ve heard before.  Fifteen years ago, I wrapped up my Peace Corps service and moved to Baltimore.  I would not, at that point, have described myself as a ‘practical idealist.’ I was cynical, not idealistic. I wasn’t sure if it was possible for anything to change, and while other volunteers, friends of mine, had been hurt and killed, I wasn’t sure that we had actually done much good while overseas. But around that time I joined the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore. 

And sometime that fall, I had an extraordinary experience.  We sang “We’ll Build a Land” together.  And for some reason, that song clicked.  This was a path forward: not a supernatural promised land.  Not a place without mourning. Not a place without hurt. But a promised land that can be, where those who mourn are given garlands instead of ashes. Where justice rolls down like waters, and peace like an ever-flowing stream. 

This is a thing we can commit ourselves to.  This is what we can build, one day, one meeting, one seemingly short step at a time.  Let’s sing that together.

121 We’ll Build a Land.

Transformation doesn’t happen in a day.  It doesn’t happen as quickly as we want, and it is hard work.  But we know in this place that it does happen, one day, one meeting, one dream at a time.  May it be so, and amen.

The Transient, The Permanent, and The Harpsichord

“The key to congregational leadership is disappointing your people at the rate they can sustain.” It is May 2020, and I am sitting in the guest room of our house in Lincoln, Nebraska, listening on Zoom to Lovett Weems give a lecture to the entering Doctor of Ministry cohort at Wesley Theological Seminary.

Like most congregations, the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, moved fully online in March 2020, as the novel coronavirus sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. In the space of days, everything about how we did church changed. And, in a less-important but still felt effect, all of the professional development I had planned out for 2020 was canceled in the span of weeks. At home and with (I thought) some time on my hands, I called my old seminary to ask what they were doing with their Doctor of Ministry program.  “We actually have a cohort starting online in a few weeks, and have had a bunch of people drop out.  How fast can you have your application materials in?” (As a quick side note, the Doctor of Ministry is different than a PhD. It is a D.Min. So within weeks of the pandemic shutdown, some of my more conversative clergy colleagues were proved right as the Unitarian minister in Lincoln became a… demon student).

I spent the first three years of the COVID pandemic navigating the day to day challenges of congregational life, then studying how churches change and respond to adaptive challenges.  I wanted to challenge myself, academically, but I also wanted to develop as much expertise as I could in what we were dealing with as congregations. In those years, academically and personally, I learned that there were no right answers.  Just, sometimes, the right questions to ask.

The literature on church leadership is a series of grim titles: A Failure of Nerve; Leadership on the Line; Didn’t See It Coming; Transforming Conflict: The Blessings of Congregational Turmoil and a personal favorite How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You Are Going. The subtitle of the last is “Leading in a Liminal Season.” Liminal time, when we are not what we once were but are not yet what we are becoming. Susan Beaumont wrote that book in 2019, and it turned out to be timely as most congregations launched into fully online ministry in early 2020.  Timely, but the book was not written with the pandemic in mind, but as a response to the moment organized religion finds itself in, in the first decades of the 21st century.

We are in the midst of a moment of profound change for churches. [SLIDE 1] In Gallop survey data from 2000, 70% of adults in the United States reported belonging to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Twenty years later, that number has dropped to 47%.[1] Attendance has decreased over the same time frame: [SLIDE 2] in 2000, 44% of adults reported attending church in the past seven days.  In May 2023, that has dropped to 26% attending in person, with another 5% attending church remotely.[2]

[SLIDE 3] In Unitarian Universalism, we’ve seen our membership stay more or less steady in the last twenty years, but our enrollment in Religious Education [SLIDE 4] has dropped about 40% between 2000 and 2020, then again by another 40% in the three years between 2020 and 2023.  All told, there are less than a third the number of children in our congregations as there were twenty years ago.

Our numbers here in Lincoln look similar.  Here’s our in-person attendance over the last twenty years – [SLIDE 5] the green horizontal line includes livestreaming, the orange line includes everyone who watches over the course of the week.  And here’s our RGL enrollment. [SLIDE 6] I’m intentionally putting this one up next to the national RE Enrollment over the same time frame so that you can see the similarity.  We are not an outlier.

SLIDE 6

Side note: I don’t think we do ourselves any favors if we do not look at these data with clear eyes. This is not casting blame – Unitarian Universalists, taking the UUA’s numbers, consist of about four hundredths of a percent of the US population. And we all have individual stories. So we are trying to navigate big cultural transitions that are larger than any individual or congregation. [CLOSE SLIDES]

And the story of the last 20 years of Unitarian Universalism is not a story of decline. It is a story of rapid transition in multiple areas and directions. In 2000, I was in the Youth Group at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton New York – participating in OWL, which at that point was a brand new replacement to the About Your Sexuality program. Bill Sinkford was running for UUA president, encouraging the movement to embrace a ‘vocabulary of reverence,’ to not be afraid to talk about God, blessing, prayer in worship.[3]

We have come a long way in twenty years. We’ve worked through the debate about what language we use – I hear Unitarian Universalists regularly talk about their spiritual practices, how they get in touch with the sources of meaning in their lives. OWL is no longer an experimental curriculum, but a storied tradition that has changed lives and grown to encompass a broader understanding of gender and sexuality that it had when it launched. Particularly over the last decade, we’ve struggled with the entrenched, sometimes invisible threads of bias and oppression in the world and our institutions. This year we are voting on new language that will try to articulate the values commonly held among us. We’ve figured out how to do church online, and how to become hybrid organizations, both remote and in person.

COVID accelerated the pace of change, but not the fact of it.

Back to Lovett Weems and the D.Min. program in 2020.  One of the things he told our cohort in that first class, over and over, was that change is constant in church systems.  How could it be otherwise? Churches work in the span of decades, not months, and people change over that time frame. Who is there changes. The context of the surrounding neighborhood and culture changes. In any church, something is always starting up, and something is always ending. The thing about churches, though, is that the things that end matter to someone. Profoundly.

Let me tell you a story about a harpsichord. When I started here, there was large, hand built harpsichord that lived in the corner of the sanctuary. Now, it was not used. When I knew it, it lived under a handmade cover, looking for all the world like a quilted, oddly shaped piano gathering dust in the corner of the room. The person who played it most often died a decade before I showed up in Lincoln. Because it was hand built, and (well) a harpsichord, it didn’t hold its tone well, and required an expensive specialist to come out to tune it each time it was played. This was not, in other words, a core component of the music program of the Unitarian Church of Lincoln.

But let me tell you, it took four ministers and at least three music directors almost a decade to get rid of this thing that we never used, that sat under a blanket at the front of the sanctuary every Sunday. “But it’s historic.  It’s handmade. Maybe a professional harpsichord player will join the congregation and we’ll regret losing it.”

Because the harpsichord was never just a harpsichord. It was the instrument that long time members remembered gathering around, at Christmas Eve, to sing Christmas Carols with people who are long gone. It was built, by hand, in 1966,

 by a beloved, deceased congregant, James McCabe to honor another member, Vic Seymour who died. It wasn’t just an instrument that we kept trying to donate, it was, in some way, the memory of beloveds who had built and sustained this congregation and whose names were not known to the young, new members.

All congregational leadership is change work, Lovett Weems told us.  And all change work in a congregation is grief work. It’s never just a harpsichord- it is the background of the wedding pictures of a couple who have been a part of the church for forty years.

And. If change work in churches is grief work, it is necessary work. That story ends with the fourth minister and third music director finally finding a home for the harpsichord in the community.  And yes, there is a plaque on the wall in the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, with a picture of the Harpsichord and a dedication to the builder. That story also ends with a corner of the sanctuary stocked with art supplies, toys, and kid-sized chairs for people of all ages to be present on Sunday morning during the service.

This is also what Dan Hodgkiss is writing about in the reading this morning. “The stability of a religious institution is necessary for the instability that religious transformation brings. The need to balance both sides of this paradox- the transforming power of religion and the stabilizing power of organization- makes leading congregations a unique challenge.” The power of the harpsichord’s presence (even unusual) was a felt sense of stability and continuity in the sanctuary. And… if we’re honest about those religious attendance numbers nationally, we need to balance that stability with our capacity to serve in new ways. Churches can be vital places of stability in the world, and we who show up to them every week need to think about change.

Change is necessary, because what we do matters.  The Unitarian Universalism I know is constantly welcoming, constantly drawing the circle wide.  Organized religion is one of the very few places where genuine friendship exists across different families and generations.

So just like the harpsichord was not just a harpsichord, the pile of art supplies and pipe cleaners in the Northeast corner of my congregation’s sanctuary isn’t just a stack of art supplies. It is a symbol that if you are a single parent of a gender non-conforming kid – in Nebraska- this is a place where you will be welcomed and find support and friends.

UU congregations are a place where if you are an older member whose spouse dies unexpectedly, the church is going to show up for you, making space for your loss, telling stories and delivering what my methodist grandma called Jesus Au Gratin – prayers of healing, in the form of five pound casseroles.

A Unitarian church can take a young adult, hurting in body and in spirit, and held them in care with mentors, new friends, music that speaks to their would and practices that deepen their spirit, until that young adult is healed enough to pay it forward to the next person who needs it.

Unitarian Universalist congregations are needed in the world, we don’t get to just look at the decline in religious attendance over the last twenty years and throw up our hands saying ‘oh well, I guess that’s the end.’ I know all of those stories I just told. I see them. I hear about them from colleagues at their churches. That young adult was me, a decade and a half ago. When we come together as UU congregations, we are places that allow people to find themselves and be transformed by love. And to do that, to keep doing that, we have to be willing to change. And to sit in the uncertainty of what change looks like.

Now, do not think for a moment that I’m saying that we can, or should, change what makes Unitarian Universalism unique and life-saving. The right question is not “How do we fundamentally change who we are, so that we survive as a different kind of institutional altogether?” The right question is, in the midst of this liminal season, “How do we become more of who we have always been?”

Another Lovett ism: “A church with a thriving vision is not doing something new. It is becoming more of who it has always been.”

The Unitarian Universalism I know is one that constantly invites in, that asks us to deepen our faith. The Unitarian churches that I know best show up, for each other and the community, constantly. They are clear-eyed about the challenges they face but optimistic about the possibilities. They are places of laughter and places of healing, places working to make the world just a little bit better.

We are in a liminal moment right now as congregations. Susan Beaumont described these moments this way:

During liminal seasons we stand on both sides of a threshold. We have one foot rooted in something that is not yet over, whereas the other foot is planted in a thing not yet defined, something not yet ready to begin. Our old operating structures may no longer work. Our denominational polity, our governing board and committee structures, or staffing arrangements—all were suited for conditions which have evolved.  Our strategic identities—who we are, who we serve, and what we feel called to do or become—were shaped by old experiences.  We may no longer be served well by these outdated constructs, but we aren’t certain what we need next.[4]

We aren’t certain what we need next.  There are so many questions. The numbers for Unitarian Universalism right now, and religion generally, are a little daunting. However we respond and evolve will require change, and change in churches looks and feels like loss. This is why Lovett told us that first day that managing disappointment was the most important skill we could cultivate as leaders. Change is going to happen. The challenge is if it will happen on purpose or not, and how skillful we are at navigating it.

This is the work we are called to do in 2024.  The pandemic is over, at least the part that defined us as institutions. Many of our congregations are in liminal, uncertain times, where the right thing to do is not to find the answers, but to discern the right questions.  How will we become more of who we have always been?  Liminal, uncertain times. But our times.

The Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker once preached an ordination sermon titled “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” In the almost 200 years since he preached it, the core of his theology has become a touchstone for generations of Unitarian Universalists.  There is a difference, he preached, between the outward expressions of religion that come and go in each generation- the liturgies, cultures, and theologies that shift and evolve, and the core, the essence of the thing, what he called the permanent, stays the same.

The Transient and Permanent in Christianity could, with a little editing, be an addition to the literature on leading churches through change. Because what Parker preached is essentially the lesson from Lovett Weems: things will change, whether we want them to or not. The transient will fall away. The question then, is how we do that on purpose, letting go of what is transient to hold onto what is underneath and behind it.  How do we hold onto the purpose at the heart of what we do – hearing music, communicating with each other – while not being beholden to a particular tool? To put this bluntly from the story this morning: the permanent is music. The transient is the cassette tape, the CD, the spotify account. I don’t know what technology I’m going to use to listen to music in twenty years, but I am sure I will still find transcendence in a Bach concerto.

In liminal times we are called to become more of who we have always been. That means change, yes, and change means loss and grief in congregations. But change and grief are not the only stories. We are lucky, in congregations -blessed, I can say now- that we get to work in decades rather than in months. Lovett was right, that first day in 2020 and in the days that followed, a lot of congregational leadership is figuring out how to disappoint people at the rate they care bear. But we do that not to change for changes sake, but so that in the midst of change all around us, we take hold of what does not change, and become more of who we have always been.

May it ever be so, and amen.

Our closing song is a hymn to some of the things that do not change.  Will you please rise in body or spirit and join in singing 163 For the Earth, Forever Turning.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/507692/church-attendance-lower-pre-pandemic.aspx

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/17/nyregion/religion-journal-a-heated-debate-flares-in-unitarian-universalism.html?pagewanted=all

[4] Beaumont, p. 7

Building on the Foundation of Love

Sermon on the “heritages of freedom, reason, hope, and courage” described in the UUA’s proposed Article II revisions. Sermon begins at 48:33.

The Fault, Dear Brutus

Delivered August 20, 2023, Unitarian Church of Lincoln

This reflection is in some ways the counterpoint to Thursday night, out at Antelope Park.  Who was there?  For those who weren’t, or for those that were, one of the things that we talked about was an old phrase in our tradition: Unitarians don’t stand for anything, we move forward. But the question that haunts that faith in progress in why we haven’t done it yet. If we are about progress onward and upward forever, how do we talk about the things that hold us back, externally and internally.  So this reflection is going to start in sociology, but stay with me.  We are going to finish back in humanist theology.

            A few years ago, I began attending public meetings around Lincoln as part of my job.  Which meetings varies from month to month; sometimes city council, county commission, local or state board of education. And the issues have varied, from sex education standards, to zoning and the Niskithe Prayer Camp, to advocating for funding for diversion programs in the county budget.  But what hasn’t changed, in all those meetings, is the consistent, loud, attendance by some of the angriest people I know.  It is usually the same people.  I don’t know if they recognize me, but I mostly recognize them by this point. And while the issue sometimes changes (from stolen elections to nefarious school boards corrupting the youth), they are always at the meeting alleging that some secret group of people is doing great harm to this community or country. A conspiracy.

            I remember a time in my life, not that long ago, when I thought conspiracy theories were fun, eccentric hobbies without huge consequence.  I spend a lot of time in Unitarian spaces, it will not surprise you to know I have a high comfort level with eccentricity. But sometime in the last decade, conspiracy theories have gone from being a marker of eccentricity to something that is deadly serious, with real world effects.  I’ve spoken to elected officials who think, before every public meeting, what their response will be if -when- one of these meetings turns violent.

            Conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes to the center of our cultural conversations. Election denial and anti-vaccine views are open topics of conversation for presidential candidates, and that trickles down to conversations we are having in towns, churches, and families. The Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at the University of Miami writes:

              “Conspiracy theories are not fringe ideas, tucked neatly away in the dark corners of society. They are political, economically, and socially relevant to all of us.  They are intertwined with our everyday lives in countless ways. Conspiracies theories are everywhere, and, like other ideas, they have consequences.

              When people believe conspiracy theories they may act on them. In democracies, conspiracy theories can drive majorities to make horrible decisions backed by the use of legitimate force. Conspiracy beliefs can conversely encourage abstention. Those who believe the system is rigged will be less willing to take part in it. Conspiracy theologies form the basis for some people’s medical decisions; this can be dangerous not only for them but for others as well. For a select few believers, conspiracy theories are instructions to use violence.”[1]

So this is something that we should be talking about in this congregation. And, as a personal note, this is a sermon I’ve worried about. Because, while it is easy to critique right wing conspiracies from this pulpit, this is not a left-right issue. It is a cultural issue, and one that this congregation is not separate from.  I’ve had conversations in this church on the evils of mandatory vaccines, on alien conspiracies, and the nefariousness of the NATO alliance.  In the broader Unitarian Universalist world, I’ve seen some of these theories becoming jumping off points to blatant anti-semitism, the ur-conspiracy theory that is so often at the root of all the others.

            If we are going to respond, as individuals and as a community, we need to understand why these theories are so enticing, and how we can respond effectively.

            We know what doesn’t work very well: actually correcting the underlying facts.  I went to two county commission meetings last month.  In the first, officials from the election commission came to the meeting, explaining in careful, measured detail how elections work, and why we can be confident in them.  In the second, the same conspiracies were spouted, unchanged. The information from the Election Commission simply did not land.

            So the problem of conspiracy theories is not a lack of knowledge.  The problem is in the capacity to distinguish the truth from fiction, the signal from the noise, the pearl from the [manure].

            Let’s back up. We need to understand, first, why conspiracies are so attractive.  By conspiracy here, I mean what Joe Forrest describes as “a well-organized effort initiated by an elite group of powerful men and women secretly working toward a singular goal or vision that often involves collaboration between government agencies and the media.”[2]

            There are, naturally, some shades of grey in this definition.  There is absolutely shady stuff that happens in the world. McCarthyism, the Tuskegee experiments, the collaboration between RT and the Russian government are all events that could fit Forrest’s definition, and are well documented historical realities.

            But one piece that is almost always also present in conspiracy thinking is some kind of component of secret knowledge on the part of the theorist. That I have secret knowledge of what they are doing. This sense of unreality, that the world we see is not the world as it is, is the crux of a lot of current conspiracy theories, and what I worry about.  What is the leap from “The United States Public Health Service did some terrible things in Tuskeegee between 1932-1972” to “The ‘plandemic’ is an opportunity for ‘them’ to microchip our kids?” Here’s my best guess:

            In The Death of Experience, Tom Nichols writes:

Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity. These are awful choices, and even thinking about them can induce the kind of existential despair that leads a character in the nineteenth-century classic The Brothers Karamazov to make a famous declaration about tragedy: “If the suffering of children of to make up the sum of the sufferings necessary to buy truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.

The only way out of this dilemma is to imagine a world in which our troubles are the fault of power people who had it within their power to avert such misery.  In such a world, a loved one’s incurable disease is not a natural event: it is the result of some larger malfeasance by industry of government… Whatever it is, somebody is at fault, because otherwise we’re left blaming only God, pure chance, or ourselves.[3]

            We are pattern-making creatures. The main character in Ada Twist scientist is precocious, but she’s asking very human questions:

Why does it tick and why does it tock?

Why don’t we call it a granddaughter clock?

Why are there pointy things stuck to a rose?

Why are there hairs up inside your nose?

She started with Why and then What? How? And When?

By bedtime she came back to Why? Once again.

She drifted to sleep as her dazed parents smiled

At the curious thoughts of their curious child

Who wanted to know what the world was about.

They kissed her and whispered, “You’ll figure it out.”

            Humans evolved in circumstances where the first person to notice a pattern had an evolutionary advantage.  If you noticed that leopards usually hung out around trees that look like that, or that boiling water made you sick less often, you were more likely to pass on your genes.  We are naturally disposed to curiosity and pattern finding.  And when we can’t find a pattern, often we create one.

            But when those traits were developed, humans lived in small bands or villages of a few dozen people, at most.  The limits of what to be curious about were pretty sharp: maybe 100 square miles, and a few hundred people who passed stories orally. In that context, I suspect, the dilemma that Tom Nichols writes about “Whatever it is, something is at fault” give rise to religion.

            Now though, there are many ways of making sense out of the senseless.  Religion is absolutely still one of them. Religion (at least mine) does come with some built-in accountability, which we’ll come back to.

            One of religions strengths is in community, in having a group of people that share an answer, or at least an approach, to life. In 2023, finding that community outside of established religion is easy. There is so much information available now that finding like-minded people is easy.  And communities of like-minded people quickly become self-reinforcing, with language and cultural norms that distinguish between those ‘in’ and ‘out.’ For instance, let’s do an experiment: “Root beer and chili dogs.”  If you were a member of a particular group of Star Trek fans online, that is an instantly recognizable meme that references, in five words, an in-joke that would take at least half an hour to explain. But for the 180,000 members of that particular group, it’s a way to recognize each other.

            This is the great strength of social media: it lowers the bar of connection and community based on shared interests (say, irreverent Star-trek based humor). And the great danger of social media is that it lowers the bar of connection and community based on shared interests. It is a tragic bargain.

            Because the same algorithms that make it easier to connect with folks you share a worldview with also reinforce what you are already looking at, giving you a distorted view of reality. The more time you spend on a particular interest or community (say, Star Trek Shitposting), the more content you see from that group, and the less from others. 

And, here’s the kicker, often the recommendations the algorithm gives you are even more dedicated communities of the same tenor.  Pretty soon that is all your are seeing online is reinforcement of the worldview you started exploring, while everyone in the world of atoms seems to be sleepwalking.  How infuriating that they do not see what you do, and how special it feels to be one of the chosen with special knowledge. If this sounds familiar, another way to frame this dynamic is as a leaderless cult, set up (intentionally or not) to break outside relationships. The collateral damage of conspiracy theories is not just to society in the abstract, but loved one who are put in the position of seeing the world fundamentally differently from those they are in relationships with.

            So how do we respond?  Now that we’ve spent 2000 words admiring this problem, what do we actually do?  As a reminder here, it is easy to say that this is not our problem, that it is all other people.  It is not.  I’ve been in UU spaces and heard about microchips, global cabals, and antisemitism. The call is coming from inside our own house – as well as every other house on the street.

               First, we need to respond with humility. It’s not just that it is more complicated than ‘us’ and ‘them,’ it is that the dynamics that give rise to conspiracy theories – pattern making, curiosity, worry about the state of the world- are dynamics that we all participate in.  And, unless you are wholly cut off from media in 2023, you are not separate from the algorithmic sorting that happens.  We should respond in humility as well, because there is a lot that we do not know, and if anyone had the magic answer for the increasing role of conspiracy thinking in our broader culture we probably would have heard it by now.

            Second, when we do respond directly, it needs to be with honesty, compassion, and grounded in relationship. It is sometimes impossible to do all three: I can respond honestly and with compassion to the election deniers attending the county commission, but not in relationship.  They don’t want it, and I don’t have the energy or desire to force a relationship there.  But it is different for friends of mine who have gone down rabbit holes on the internet.  There, curiosity comes first, but also a candid conversation about what I don’t agree with, and an affirmation of relationship. Here’s what I mean by that: I imagine there are some folks in this congregation who are pretty unhappy with me right now, and with this topic, presented in this way.

If you are one of those people, please know that, while this has been on my mind the last few years, it in no way diminishes my respect and affection for you. I would love to keep this conversation going, if you want to let’s find time to sit down and talk, even if it is to share our view with each other without an expectation that anyone is going to be convinced.

            Last, we need to respond to conspiracy theories with intellectual rigor. Part of the problem of modern conspiracy theories is the enormous availability of information without corresponding expertise in how to interpret that information.  Here’s what I mean by that: Google is not graduate school.  And despite the number of articles I’ve read about EV tech, and how batteries work, I am not a materials scientist.  I am a preacher, not an engineer. I can be clear about the things I have expertise in (leading churches, liberal theology, pastoral care, nonprofit budgeting, community organizing) while also having clarity about the many things I’m interested in but not an expert (music, physics, mid-century American poetry, the Bhagavat Gita). Intellectual rigor is tied to humility: one of the gifts of academia is understanding how much time and effort goes into becoming an expert on one little area, which then allows you to both better understand the breadth of human knowledge, and appreciate the depth of experience true experts bring to their subject.

            And, even if I’m not an expert, I can bring intellectual rigor to a subject.  We know how to do this, we list it out, right there is a central principle of Unitarian Universalism: we are all asked to participate in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Free, meaning that there are no boundaries around our exploration, but responsible, meaning that we bring our tools with us.  Ada Twist’s tools: direct experience.  Testing hypothesis. If something doesn’t make sense, throw out the hypothesis and try again. Ask questions, listen to your parents, figure it out. This is the accountability that separates religion from conspiracy: the most important question we ask ourselves and each other in that place is “how’s that working out for you?”

            In May 2020, at the height of COVID-related conspiracy theories around church closures, the Christian theologian and social activist DL Mayfield wrote:

“People believe conspiracy theories because it is psychologically easier to believe a singular and unlikely narrative rather than engage in a hard and complicated reality where your own long-term participation is needed.”[4]

This is the key to the whole thing.  The people protesting an election from three years ago at the county commission aren’t there (only) because of hate.  They aren’t even there because they think they are going the change things. They are there because it is easier to believe a simple, if unlikely, thing, presented by a source of authority, that to have to muddle through a hard and complicated reality where nobody is really in charge and despite lots of people doing their best, bad things still happen. It is so much easier to blame a shadowy “them” than to admit that we contributed to these problems, we might be a part of the solution, but it is hard and there is no guarantee of success.

That is a hard sell.  But it is right in our humanist wheelhouse to say that together, the world is understandable (even if we don’t fully understand it yet). That we figure it out together, in community and conversation with each other, because none of us, no group of us, has the whole truth that is hidden from the rest. And that documented, replicable hypothesis can chance the world.  This Unitarian blend of humility that any individual knows the whole picture and optimism for what humanity can comprehend and achieve is the answer. 

The humanist tradition in Unitarian Universalism says that the world is complex, but not opaque. This community that we build together give each of us the space to be your authentic self, and tether us together. In sharing that journey, we can start to see and appreciate the world’s complexity.  May it ever be, and amen.

[1] Joseph Uscinski. “Down the Rabbit Hole” in Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 1.

[2] Joe Forrest, “Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories,” Instrument of Mercy, May 7, 2020 <https://instrumentofmercy.com/2020/05/07/why-your-christian-friends-and-family-members-are-so-easily-fooled-by-conspiracy-theories/>

[3] Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ~ Chapter 3 <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Death_of_Expertise>

[4] https://www.instagram.com/p/B_5ASfUJszu

Showing Up is Inconvenient

Delivered on Stewardship Sunday, October 7, 2022, Unitarian Church of Lincoln

            I miss weekends.  For the first year, or thereabouts, of the pandemic, we I recorded my sermons for our online services here at the church, on Thursday afternoon.  This meant two important things for my day to day life: 

1)     I could not procrastinate until Saturday night to write a sermon.

2)     I had weekends off.

I started seminary ten years ago.  And for that decade, Sunday has generally been a work day.  No staying up late on Saturday night, and no quiet family time on Sunday morning.  It’s a hard schedule, but it’s not a surprising one when you start working for a church.  But for a year there, I recorded my pieces for worship on Thursday, had Friday to do light administrative work, and then had Saturday and Sunday with my family.  And we loved it.  For most of that year, we’d sleep in a bit on Sunday morning, then eventually get the family down to the living room, usually still in Pjs.  And we’d watch the YouTube service, starting with the delightful music youtube cued up every week.  Ailish might not remember this now, but we have video of her grooving to Silent Partner’s Space Walk (yes, that song has a name).  And then, most Sundays we’d make waffles.

I told that story in my Oral History recording a few weeks ago.  Mine is not the only story like this:  I’ve heard plenty of members talking about how, as rough as the pandemic was, it is nice to attend church on the couch.  It was nice to have those weekends – youtube’s hold music and the smell of waffles are always going to conjure up good memories for me.

Because going to church is inconvenient.  There is little tangible reward for doing so, and in 2022, it is not a societal expectation.  In the 1950s, when All Souls Church of Lincoln (Unitarian) was thinking about building a church at 6300 A Street, 76% of Americans told a Gallup poll that they belonged to a church.  As late as 1999, that number was 70%.  It is now 47.

In 2019, 33% of Americans told Pew Research that they attended church weekly [Note: every minister in the country thinks that number is high when self-reported].  In the latest batch of data, published this summer after the pandemic, that number had dropped to 28%.  Now, that doesn’t sound like much, 33 to 28, but think of it this way:  One in five people who said they attended church weekly before the pandemic are no longer.  Some of those people are now going to church once a month.  Some have stopped coming all together.

Last week I spent three days in Kansas City, at the annual Leadership Institute hosted by the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. This year the hosts polled all the clergy and lay leaders in attendance, asking them to share where their churches are at now, compared to where they were in 2019.  The results were sobering.  75% of churches have decreased in attendance.  Those decreases ranged from 10-50%, with the average church down about a third in attendance.  The two words clergy, lay staff, and volunteer leaders were most likely to use to describe how they were feeling were exhausted, and hopeful. That last piece was the subject of lots of conversation.

And this is largely what we are seeing at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln.  In 2019, we averaged 160 people on Sunday morning.  Now, we’re at around 80 in person, with another 35 or so online most weeks – down about 30%, which puts us right at the average.  And that combination of hopeful and exhausted?  That tracks.

There are Sunday mornings when I roll over, look at Stacie, and say “I really don’t want to go to work this morning.  Is it too late to be an accountant?”  Church is inconvenient.  But then I show up.

I show up, because that’s something I have learned from this church. 

​We are people 
of open minds,
loving hearts,
and helping hands,
who show up

Don’t tell this to the search committee, but I really puzzled over this church’s mission statement when I was interviewing.  Show up to do what? I kept asking.  To what end?  What is the goal of showing up, and shouldn’t that be the mission, and showing up a tool?  Showing up tends to be inconvenient, so why is the action and not the goal put at the center?

Part of that is straightforward to answer: to what end?  “To transform ourselves and the world,” it’s right there in the vision statement we read every Sunday morning.  But the link, I’m increasingly convinced, is that the method is the meaning.  The process of showing up is the transformation.  We don’t show up in order to transform ourselves and the world.  The actions of showing up is itself transformational. We show up in community to be about the work of transformation, and because we need each other – often it is not more complicated than that.

A buddy of mine has been going through a rough patch recently.  A combination of professional and personal setbacks all came at once, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I can best help.  He finally put out a simple ask: does anyone want to work out with me in the morning?  Exercise helps a routine, which helps everything else.  Now, I’m not Rev. Sinclair with my friends: I don’t do professional hospital visits or have a discretionary fund. 

By I can show up at my friend’s door, five mornings a week at a set time, with a gym bag and music.  Transformation is inconvenient.  It doesn’t happen in one big mountaintop moment, it comes from months of consistently showing up, morning after morning.  And church is a lot like this.  Some days we have to show up.  Even (especially!) when it is inconvenient.

I’ve spent most of the last month listening to and transcribing the oral histories that you have been recording.  There is so much there that I want to share with the congregation – so far 63 members and friends have recorded twelve and a half hours of audio, or about 250 pages of transcript.  We’ll talk more about what I’ve heard listening to those next month, but for now, here’s BJ Wheeler and Amy Miller, talking about why it is important to her to show up in this community:

[name omitted]: (27:09)
what is something you learned about yourself during pandemic?

[name omitted]: (27:17)
I think I learned that if I get out of the habit of socializing, it can be hard to start it back up. And so if I went for four or five days without really talking to someone like say in the cold weather, and so when people aren't out while I'm walking the dog or say, I skipped one church service, cuz I don't know, I just don't feel like it, it would get harder and harder to then make myself do the next thing. And so I think what I learned is being in contact with people and being in relationship, you gotta work that muscle and not let it get flabby because I could have just turned very much into a hermit and not, not gone back out into the world.

[name omitted]: (24:14)
BJ, you mentioned the UU Connects. We were actually in the same small group together. So I had an open circle before the pandemic and then I was part of the UU Connects. And so that meant that I had at least twice, sometimes three times a week, there'd be church service by zoom. There'd be my UU Connects group. They'd be my open circle group. And it sometimes right before the meeting, I'd think, oh, well I don't really have anything to say. And you know, I'm not in a hundred percent feeling happy and chipper. Maybe I shouldn't inflict my bad mood on people, but then I'd go. And it was such a good antidote to just being in my own head space. So the small, as well as the larger community activities through zoom, were a lifesaver.

Showing up, even when inconvenient, is good for us.  And we need each other in this place.  Another member, talking about the experience of seeing folks drift away over the course of the last few years reflected, “…the YouTube services helped me feel connected. Even though I couldn't see the people that were also listening in, they made me feel like this place was still here. Later on, when the coffee hour was less attended and people were finding other ways or moving on, I was afraid that this church was, would kind of wither away, and that my place in the community here would go with it, that this place might not exist.”

Okay, so now it’s time for the hard sell: This place, this community, exists because our members and friends show up continually.  They do not want this place to wither away, they push themselves to show up, even when they aren’t 100% happy and chipper.  They give of their time, their talents, and funding.  Yes, this is the sermon on the amount, we are going to talk about money and giving.

It is so hard to talk about money, or to ask for it.  Stacie is running for office this election cycle and I can tell from experience in that world, all of campaigning is hard: the door knocking in summer heat, the endless series of events supporting other candidates, the juggle of parenting, working, and having this all-consuming hobby.  But nothing, nothing is as hard as asking people you care about and respect for money.  Society does not teach us to have these conversations well.  Rather than a straightforward conversation about “this is what these things cost, how will we pay for them,” we often come at the question obliquely, assuming that someone, somewhere, somehow, will hear there’s a need and step up.  Maybe they will.  But let’s talk out loud about this:

Last year our congregational budget, how much it costs to keep this church operating, was $479,000.  $424,000, or 88.5% of that, came from member pledges and donations.  88.5%

·       We have ____ pledge units – individuals, or families that pledge together. 

·       Pledges in this church range from $1 to $15,000.

·       Our average pledge is $1400, our median pledge unit gave $900.

·       We have some big donors in this church.  Fully half our pledge income, over $200,000 last year, came from less than thirty families.  The average age of folks in that category is over 70.

We have a big lift this year in the budget.  After several years of pandemic where we have worked hard to keep the church budget at the same level, this year we’re starting to see the costs of significant inflation.  In addition, this year I’ve asked the board to work to raise our lay staff salaries to the UUA’s midpoint recommendations. 

This is where they were five years ago, when I started, but our budget has not kept pace with the increased cost of wages over those years.  We put those increases off during the pandemic, focusing on holding steady financially while so much else was uncertain. 

At the leadership conference last night, Adam Hamilton encouraged us not to compare ourselves to the churches we were in 2019.  The new baseline is now, he argued, not 2019.  If we keep telling the story of a 30% drop in attendance, we will drive ourselves a little mad.  I’m also just not interested in telling a story of a church in decline.  I don’t think that’s who we are in Lincoln. I think we, this church, are the people who show up when it’s inconvenient, and through doing that transform ourselves and the world.

Pledging in inconvenient.  It’s counter cultural.  You aren’t going to get better service from the church if you increase your pledge this year.  The thirty families that contribute half our budget are not treated differently than folks who pledge $1 – that’s not how we do things here.  But if you do pledge, if you do give more this year, you’ll be showing up in the aftermath of one of the strangest periods of this churches long history. And in doing that, you’ll be ensuring that this place of transformation will be vital for the next 25 years.

Amen.

Following Niskíthe

Delivered Sunday, August 7, 2022 at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln.

            Something curious happened last May.  It was a bruising spring in my life.  You’ve heard this story, I think, and in any case it’s not an unusual story: both Stacie and I had a health crisis in our respective families, Stacie was rehearsing and performing at the Lincoln Community Playhouse, My professional life was more exciting the usual, trying to close out the congregational year and a term as president of the Faith Coalition.  We had houseguests (plural), as Stacie’s family came to see her perform and the church’s community minister visited for a series of programs.  And on top of all that, somehow, I was in class, remotely, for my Doctorate.  So for the first time that I can honestly remember, I dropped an academic class. 

Yes, this is something that can happen.  It’s not a habit for me – you do what you sign up for.  And it did complicate my schedule in the D.Min program a little bit.  But in a moment when there were too many balls in the air to keep track of, that felt like the thing that I could let go of, to bring some balance to my schedule and get through the end of the month.

So it was surprising, to me and just about everyone around me, when three days after dropping that class I found myself walking down the Billy Wolf trail, carrying a 15 foot teepee pole, marching across the city in solidarity with the Niskithe prayer camp.  The question, that Stacie asked a few times, is “Why?”

Some quick review about Niskithe:  Kevin Abourezk spoke her two weeks ago about the work of the Niskithe Prayer Camp, and if you didn’t get a chance to see that, go back in our Youtube channel and watch it. I have at best a supporting role in this story, Kevin lives at the center of it.  Briefly: this spring the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln sold some land near Wilderness Park to a developer, Manzito, who proposes to build a large housing development on it.  This development required approval by the city, which happened in April.  Importantly: the development is located on Snell Hill, right across the street from the oldest and most used Sweat Lodge in Lancaster County.  The native community did not feel they had been heard, that this development will impact their ability to practice their ceremonies, and that the City, Diocese, and Mayor’s Office had not included them appropriately in the approval process. 

Overnight, in the hours after the city council decision to approve the development, a group of activists set up six teepees on Snell Hill, occupying the land to get folks to pay attention to what was happening.  Eventually, after three weeks of occupation, the group decided that the best way forward was to take the camp off the hill, to walk (carrying a teepee) from the location near Wilderness Park, to the City County Building, to the State Capital, and then to the Catholic Diocesan headquarters – praying, at each location, and erecting the teepee they carried.  This was the action I joined, but why?

There’s a few reasons, ranging from the theoretical and national to the practical and highly personal.  Starting from the big picture and working down:

It’s no mystery at this point that over the last decade Unitarian Universalism has put countering white supremacy and other forms of oppression at the heart of who we are as a faith.  This congregation has been participating in the Beloved Conversation program for two years, out on the side of our building there is a rainbow banner and a banner that declares that Black Lives Matter. But a part of this work that we maybe haven’t talked about as much, until this summer, is the Unitarian Universalist Association’s work on indigenous rights and repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery.  Here’s a responsive resolution from the 2012 General Assembly (Responsive Resolutions are guiding documents for the association, giving direction to the UUA board and staff, and calling on individual congregations to do the same):

WHEREAS the UUA Board of Trustees has submitted to the member congregations a report explaining the Doctrine of Discovery and why the Board believes it to be contrary to Unitarian Universalist Principles.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that we, the delegates of the 2012 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery as a relic of colonialism, feudalism, and religious, cultural, and racial biases having no place in the modern day treatment of indigenous peoples;…

            This work grew, and reached the point, just a few years ago, where it was intended to be the focus of a full General Assembly – in 2020, within months of the 400th anniversary of the English landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts, we were to gather in Providence Rhode Island, and complicate that legacy. 

Now – we clearly did not meet in Rhode Island in June 2020, and the online GA was as much about resilience in the face of COVID.  But we still passed a resolution:

We, the delegates of the 2020 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, call upon the Unitarian Universalist Association and its member congregations to:

Continue to gather in solidarity with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, Standing Rock nation, and all Indigenous peoples struggling to preserve their lands, waters, peoples, sacred sites, and sovereignty;

Continue to push for release of Indigenous Water Protectors from prisons, end public policies that criminalize resistance to extractive colonialism, and adopt a vision of prison abolition;

Work nationally, statewide, and locally on public policy that is decolonizing – such as establishing Indigenous Peoples Day, including Indigenous peoples’ histories in public education curricula, and eliminating racist monuments, flags, and mascots;

Work to stop and reverse ecological harm in genuine collaboration with and taking leadership from communities most consistently and harshly impacted by extractive exploitation of land, water, air, and all beings;

Research, identify, and acknowledge the Indigenous peoples historically and/or currently connected with the land occupied by congregations, and find ways to act in solidarity with or even partner with those Indigenous peoples; and

Examine practices relative to Indigenous peoples, particularly the narratives regarding UU origins and US holidays including Thanksgiving.

So, it’s important to say that my work with Niskithe, and this congregation’s work over this whole summer, are not some out there, complicated, unusual thing in our tradition.  It is instead an expression of the tradition that we are a part of, and proclaim here every Sunday.

But theology and resolutions are not enough to get anyone to march. There’s a famous story, among our clergy, about the 1965 civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.  The history of the UUA and race has a lot of times where we fell short, but this is one of the places where we are (I think) justified in being a little proud of how we showed up as a denomination.  Something like 250 UU ministers and lay people showed up in Selma, within two days of the call going out.  Ten percent of serving UU clergy dropped everything to head to Alabama.  A few years ago, Mark Morrison Reed, one of the foremost historians of the Black UU Experience, tried to explain why. 

And one of the things he hit on was relationship.  Many of the clergy that showed up on short notice in Selma had also been at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  They knew, if by proximity if not personally, the leaders of the Civil Rights campaign.  So when Martin Luther King sent a telegram on March 8, 1965, “[calling] on clergy of all faiths representative of every part of the country, to join me for a ministers’ march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March 9.” Unitarians and Universalists showed up.  The relationship that existed before March 8 was necessary for the fast response on March 9.

This is also how I felt when I saw the call from the Niskithe Prayer Camp to join them in walking across Lincoln.  First: the Prayer Camp was in my neighborhood.  I probably bike past that section of Wilderness Park at least once a week over the summer. Second: We know these people.  Last fall Judy Hart introduced me to Kevin Abourezk over coffee at the Mill.  Renee San Succi has been a friend of this congregation for years.  This is not an unknown movement, these are people we know, whose lives and welfare are tied up in our own.

The relationship, and the commitments the UUA has made were enough to get me to support the work of the prayer camp, but that still doesn’t quite answer this question of why.  Why in the midst of month where I was stretched as thin as I have every been, take a full day to participate in this protest?

When Kevin was here three weeks ago, he mentioned that everyone at the Prayer Camp came away from it changed in some way – that everyone there carries the experience with them, and had transformative experiences on Snell Hill.  Most of those are not my story to tell.  But one is. 

In late April, I was working through a day with a long to do list.  And one of the things on the list was to visit the new prayer camp near wilderness park, express my support, and then get home to start writing a sermon.  I thought it was going to be a ten minute visit – I had (and still have) my calendar during the week down to fifteen minute increments.  But when I arrived there, I was welcomed into the circle they had formed around the fire, and informed by Renee that we were about to start ceremonial time – that this was not a time to check watches, get up, or talk.  Just to be present, to slow down, and to have this time in prayer.

That was also the week that my grandmother entered hospice.  And, you know how things get.  I thought I was processing that well.  I had talked to my family, helped to find appropriate medical supports in East Lansing, consoled my sister.  But I had not, until that moment on Snell Hill, slowed down enough to recognize my own grief.  My own sadness that this person that I have loved my whole life was about to be one of my ancestors – present in heart and story, but no longer at the other end of a phone call.  I wept, for the first time since her diagnosis, because there was time to.  It was, for me, unexpectedly holy time.

So by the time the call went out to march, a few weeks later, it was not a question of whether or not I would participate.  These were my neighbors, my relations, who my tradition asks me to support, and who I have shared sacred time with.  FDR, during World War 2, said of the Lend Lease Act, “When your neighbors house is burning you don’t haggle over the price of the hose.”  When our neighbors need help, we don’t stop long enough to think about what we are doing – we act.

Here's the interesting part of this morning for me.  I’m fifteen minutes into this sermon, and I have not mentioned our Summer Indigenous Programming series directly yet.

For the last six weeks at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, we have been engaging with this pretty straightforward question with wide-ranging causes and effects:  Should the Unitarian Church of Lincoln have a formal land acknowledgment, stating that we gather on stolen land, that this place was not always called Lincoln, Nebraska, and that the community the land was stolen from is still here?  Over six weeks we’ve had indigenous activists from Lincoln and the UUA speak here, historians and members, screen movies and visited art exhibits, attended the Pow wow at the Indian Center, all building up to this question in August: what should our Land Acknowledgement be?

It's important to say, and to keep saying, that this work came out of the congregation, not from me.  It’s happened entirely in parallel with my participation with Niskithe.  Until recently I was not preaching as part of this series.  It’s important to say, because I am so proud to be a part of this community.  We talk all the time in my professional circles about “Shared Ministry” as this big goal that we are all working towards, but I do not know a better example of that than this summer.  To serve a congregation that engages the hard conversations with nuance, and then shows up, again and again, is just immensely gratifying for me.

But more than just pride, this summer series is also an opportunity, and a challenge.  Our mission and vision are clear:  We are here to transform ourselves and the world, and we do that by showing up.

 How do we get to the point where we show up?  Where we see our neighbors house on fire and go sprinting out the door to help before we even realize we are awake?

Response is grounded in relationship.  This was Mark Morrison Reed’s lesson about Selma.  We run out the door when we know that it is our neighbor.  We share meals, jokes, stories about our kids, and when there is a need we show up to help out.  This is implicitly the work that we are doing as a congregation this summer.  Kevin, Kia, Renee, Mike, Tyler this afternoon – these aren’t anonymous activists in our community, these are our friends, our relations, and we know them as such.

Response is grounded in tradition and spirit.  This is what Unitarian Universalism is called to do.  We are called to solidarity, called to the work of decolonization. And even as we show up, we’re doing this work among ourselves, constantly asking where we can do better, where we can find solid ground for our spirits in the midst of the work.

And finally, response is grounded in response.  That sounds like a tautology, but it is also a Nike slogan: Just do it.  Do the thing. That’s the last lesson of the day.  Because by the time you’re marching, somewhere between the State Capital and the Diocese, it is to late to back out of the response.  Once you leave your front door, heading to your neighbor’s house with hose in hand, the commitment carries you forward.  Even if we do it imperfectly, even if we need regular correction, it is easier to keep moving toward our aspirations than to drop back and out.

The Land Acknowledgement is like this.  We aren’t going to get it right or perfect the first time.  But it is not meant to be a perfect paragraph that we mount on the wall and then admire it’s artistry – it is meant to be a hook, pulling us forward through the work, calling us to show up, to tend to relationships, to do the thing. 

Over the next two weeks we’ll have opportunities for you to gather after the worship service to be a part of writing the land acknowledgement we are going to start using this fall.  It is the culmination of this summer series, but it is also the beginning of the next chapter – where we deepen the relationships we’ve formed this summer, and continue working in solidarity to bring a more just and peaceful world.

And, relationship in all things.  This morning’s worship service is over, but I’m not going to extinguish the chalice.  We are going to sing one more song, then take a five minute break to reset our AV equipment and attend to the needs of biology.  After than we’ll regather in this space to hear from Taylor Keen, bio

Our last hymn is 168, One More Step.