Tell about a mistake you've made in ministry and what you learned from this.
(00:06):
All right. So when I was first in Lincoln, one of the things that I knew was going to be part of my ministry in Lincoln was interfaith dialogue. This has been an important part of what I had learned about how Unitarian churches are. When I was in Baltimore and prior to coming to Lincoln, I had gone to get trained through the Gamal organization as a community organizer. So I came here with that hunger, and in my first year here, I was invited to be on the board of the Faith Coalition of Lancaster County. This is at that point, the major interfaith group working in Lincoln and Lancaster County. After a year or two on the board, I was invited to be the president of that organization.
(01:02)
So both on the board and as president, I pushed pretty hard for the Faith Coalition to be more of an activist organization than it had been or really wanted to be. There were some pretty bitter debates on that board, particularly in the summer of 2020, as to how much of a public position we should take. Because the Faith Coalition incorporates a really broad group of religious institutions in Lincoln, not all of which share unit Universalist understanding of social justice, and not all of them share Unitarian Universalism's ability to speak directly to public officials. We'll put it that way.
(01:57)
And so what became obvious after a couple of years of that is that what I was doing was I was trying to push this institution to be something that it really wasn't. That this was a really effective educational organization, that it did real meaningful work on intercultural competence and dialogue, figuring out how we pray together. If you have a contingent that includes Unitarians, Eastern Orthodox Muslim communities, Jewish communities, some of which have been in Lincoln for 150 years, and some of which are grounded in recent immigrant groups than just that education of saying How will we pray together is really important. But what I was trying to do is push it to be do community organizing to be a justice organization.
(02:59):
So eventually when my term as president was up, I said, I'm not going to serve another term. And I shifted to help found Justice in action. It's a congregation based community organizing effort with about 24 congregations, and we regularly turn out hundreds if not thousands of people to work on issues of justice in Lincoln and Lancaster County. In some ways, that's a smaller group than the Faith Coalition. It has fewer faith organizations represented, but it is a much more active group because it's organizing around particular issues. So the mistake here was in trying to make the Faith Coalition something that it was not, the mistake is not focusing on justice. That's pretty core to Unitarian Universalism, but the mistake was not understanding what the right lever to pull at the right time was because we could have launched that community based community organizing effort years earlier, but we didn't, in part because I was trying to push the Faith Coalition, good learning, good thing that I carry forward with me and not a mistake that I'll repeat. I'll find new mistakes to make next time. I.