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.