Celebrating 75 Years of Liberal Religion in Charlottesville

This is the text of the reflection I offered at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Sunday, April 29, 2018.   This service was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the formal founding of the congregation.

                                              

Looking Back; Looking Forward

It was the early 1940s, and a woman named Carrie Baker moved to Charlottesville from Montclair, NJ.  In a letter to a friend she said that she liked her new home well enough, except for one small thing – there was no Unitarian church here.  That wasn’t going to be a hurdle for too long, though, because she’d decided to try to start one!

She reached out to the Rev. John MacKinnon, who was then serving the Unitarian congregation in Richmond, and to Rev. Dale DeWitt, who was Regional Director for the American Unitarian Association and Executive Secretary of the Middle Atlantic States Council of Unitarian Churches.  She asked them both what they thought of her idea about planting a new congregation here and they were both immediately … skeptical.  Neither thought that a place as small as Charlottesville was at that time would be able to sustain a congregation; both advised that she move forward – since move forward she was obviously of a mind to do – with … caution.  Even so, Dale DeWitt spent some time while on a visit in the area doing research in the local library and talking with folks at the Chamber of Commerce.  After this additional fact finding, he realized that … he hadn’t been cautious enough!  Yet as a history of our congregation prepared at the office of the Middle Atlantic States Council of Unitarian Churches noted, “He found Mrs. Baker, however, not at all responsive to caution but eager to see what could be done.”

One thing that could be done immediately was to look for other like-minded souls, and so Ms. Baker placed a classified ad in The Daily Progress.  It’s the one on the cover of your Orders of Service: 

14 words.  14 words!  Only two of them more than one syllable!  14 little words, 4 lines of text (if you count the contact information she gave), and here we are 75 years later.  The congregation Connie Baker was being discouraged from trying to create, which professional church folks had told her didn’t have much of a chance of getting started, is still here three-quarters of a century later!  We have over 400 formal members, and another – what? 50? 75? – people who have not officially “signed the book,” yet who also call this place their spiritual home.

February 28^th was the actual anniversary of the charting signing that officially launched this church 75 years ago, and we were going to hold a celebration that night, but circumstances forced us to postpone.  In the service we did hold to address those circumstances, though, I said these words:

“Carrie Baker was not easily discouraged, and throughout the 75 years of our existence this congregation has shown time and time again that we are not “easily discouraged” either.  It hasn’t always been smooth sailing – there have been times when events in the wider world or right here in the congregation have caused real uneasiness and distress; times when the ordained minister or the lay leadership were taking the congregation in a direction not everyone wanted to go; times when support (financial and otherwise) dropped off precipitously; times when even beloved members felt the need to break off their connection to this place and these people; times when we have disappointed one another, hurt one another, damaged one another – and it seemed that the fabric of the community was being damaged, too … perhaps beyond repair.  Yet in looking back over the history of this congregation, it is clear that while we no doubt have been discouraged more than a few times, we have yet to be so discouraged as to truly give up on one another.”

The story of where we are right now as a congregation is just a chapter in a story that began long before most of us got here, and which I have every faith will continue long after all of us are gone.

Over the past year I have had the great pleasure of being able to pour over documents and memorabilia from a stash of congregational history that our un-official church historian Sally Taylor thought should be kept safe, yet still easily accessible.  She saw fit to deposit them in the office you so kindly share with your ordained ministers, and that made it easy for me to spend hours sitting on the floor, looking through file folders and photo albums – some meticulous and some with a more “thrown together” look.  I have gazed on photos of members past, read newspaper articles, annual reports, histories, and even some of the sermons of my predecessors in this pulpit. 

One of my favorites was the first settled Minister to serve this congregation, the Rev. Malcolm Sutherland.  On the 40th anniversary of his installation he was invited back to preach.  The sermon he delivered that day was not entirely a recitation of congregational history, although he did include a few choice stories from our earliest years.  I’m quoting him, because you might not believe them if you only had my word for it!

“Frank Hoffer [one of the founding members] used to drive down Market Street on Sunday mornings and stop in front of students waiting for the bus to take them to their respective churches.  He would offer to take them in his car – then he would drive them, not to their church but to ours!”

It seems that our congregation has felonious roots!

***

In talking about the purchase of choir robes, even though the Church was meeting in the ballroom of the Monticello Hotel, he said, “Now choir robes may seem to you an unnecessary formality, but our choir robes made it possible for at least one soprano to sing even though she was dressed in her leather clothes and eight months pregnant.  [She and her husband lived in Richmond], and the only way for them to get to our church services was to ride together […] on his motorcycle!”

***

On a more serious note he remembered, “perhaps the most difficult moment between us was immediately after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision of ’54 outlawing the separate but equal doctrine as unconstitutional, when I joined a small interracial gathering of young people to have a square dance in this church to celebrate the Court’s decision.  Now mind you, there was no advanced publicity.  They did not have a photographer or the press.  There was no thought of public attention because we were not demonstrating.  We were simply rejoicing.  But news of this event, after the fact, put quite a strain on the congregation’s relationship with the minister.” He’s talking about himself, of course.  He goes on to say, “But do not judge them too harshly.  That was nearly thirty years ago and it is an altogether different world today.  Besides, way back then, and this should make you proud, we were the only white-owned building in Charlottesville where that dance could have taken place.

We were, in those days, the only public building in Charlottesville that permitted integrated meetings.  We were also one of the few white congregations that refused to take part in the strategy of “massive resistance,” in which white congregations held formal classes in their buildings for white children so that they could continue to receive their education even though the city schools had all been closed in order to avoid having to integrate.  It was no doubt for these reasons that on August 13, 1956, representatives of the White Supremacist group “the Seaboard White Citizen’s Council” burned a cross on our property.  (That’s 62 years ago almost to the day of this summer’s “Unite the Right” debacle.)

Here are a few more factoids from our rather impressive history:

• ·       Gregory Swanson, the first African American to be admitted to UVA, apparently attended our church during the time he lived on the grounds, and is remembered by family as saying he’d made friends here;
• ·       It took roughly six years after moving into this building to get pews in the sanctuary, as well as to complete the parlor, kitchen, office, and minister’s study;
• ·       The African American opera singer Emma Jefferson Morris made her debut here in our sanctuary, before going on to sing at Carnegie Hall;
• ·       The Rev. Roy Jones — whose daughter Chris is a member here today — wrapped the church in black crepe in response to the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches, and engendered a petition to have his ministry ended because of how uncomfortable many congregants were feeling due to his strong focus on racial justice, which some felt was too all-consuming and too radical. (For what it’s worth, he stayed another four years.)
• ·       There was a time when pledge payments fell so far behind, that we had to borrow money for operating expenses (including salaries and our mortgage), yet within a couple of years the Board voted to make a $25,000 — interest free! — loan to the just-forming Charlottesville Housing Foundation, to support its work building housing for low-income families;
• ·       The radical Catholic peace activist, Fr. Phillip Berrigan, spoke at a Sunday service in 1976, and ten years later Elizabeth Kübler-Ross spoke from our pulpit … so when Jesse Jackson spoke here he wasn’t our first nationally known guest preacher!

I could easily go on, and over the course of this year, as we continue to celebrate this milestone, we’ll be finding all sorts of ways to tell these stories.

In his first sermon in this then-new sanctuary, Malcom Sutherland identified nine characteristics of a church that would be worthy of this building (he’d begun by noting that the building is not the church, but, rather, the people who gather in and around it).  He said we should be:

• ·       Beautiful. 
• ·       Strong. 
• ·       Significant. 
• ·       Confident. 
• ·       Courageous. 
• ·       Fearless 
• ·       Devoted. 
• ·       Sacrificing. 
• ·       And fueled by faith — an unshakable faith in the promise of the “free mind” — which implies a belief in the inherent goodness of people — and a deep and abiding faith in ourselves and in one another. 

Those are certainly all qualities that Carrie and Charles Baker, Floyd House, John Varga, Mary MacNeill, John and Betty Beck, and the other founding members possessed.  How else could they have faced the odds that were against them to plant what we now harvest?  And looking back over our three-quarters-of-a-century history it is clear that these are qualities which have indeed marked our ever-evolving community.  They were tested, to be sure.  They were tested time and again.  And it definitely was not always clear at the time that they would triumph.  Yet they always did. 

I’m here to tell you this morning that despite the detours we have taken, we have always remained true to the vision that gave us birth.  And I am here to tell you, too, that even though we may feel conflicted today, that we may worry about our future, that we may fear that our disagreements are too great to be survived … I am here this morning to tell you that this isn’t the first time our congregation has felt this way, and that we, like they, will find our way through this.  Malcolm Sutherland said, “Let no obstacles yet to be overcome, and as we grow stronger the obstacles will become greater, let no obstacles yet to be overcome ever wipe away the spirit of confidence which has marked the early years of this church.”  They never have, and, my friends, I have a firm faith that they never will.

Twenty-three years ago, during my ordination, the incomparable preacher (and person) the Rev. Jane Rzepka asked in her sermon what held us together as Unitarian Universalists, given that we don’t share a common creed. Her answer for our movement is, I think, an answer for our congregation as well.

She referred to a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the book of Amos, in which the character of God asks, as part of a litany of questions, “Can two walk together unless they be agreed?”  That’s the way the King James Version puts it. More modern translations say, “Can two walk together unless they have made an appointment?,” or, even more plainly, “Can two walk together unless they have agreed to?”

That, Jane said all those years ago, is what holds us Unitarian Universalists together — that we have agreed to walk together. Some would say that there’s not a whole lot else that we all agree on, but that, at least, we should. Our faith tradition is based on our mutual commitment to walk together — not to walk away if people disagree with us (even if it’s our clergy or lay leaders); not to walk away if our feelings have gotten hurt; not to walk away if we think the church is going in the wrong direction; not to walk away when it might be more convenient or comfortable to do so.  What holds us together — what will hold us together no matter what obstacles we might face (and remember, “as we grow stronger the obstacles will become greater”) — what always has, and always will, hold us together is our continuing commitment to walking together.

75 years ago, a woman placed a classified ad, consisting of four words, in an edition of The Daily Progress.  75 years later, we are here as proof that the experts were wrong and that she was right – Charlottesville could support a Unitarian congregation.  Even more, we’ve proved time and time again that Charlottesville needs a Unitarian Universalist congregation.  As we rightly celebrate our past, let us equally commit ourselves to our future, so that there will be a Unitarian Universalist congregation here, alive and vibrant, 75 years from now, and so that they will have as much reason to celebrate their ancestors as we have to celebrate ours

 During the service we said together two responsive readings that were spoken by our religious ancestors.  The first was recited just before the sermon, the second served as our Parting Words.

A Responsive Litany (from the service celebrating the ground-breaking this building)

To love justice and strive for the right; to ease suffering and assist the weak; to forget wrongs and remember benefits:

Congregational Response:  We commit our hearts and hands this day.

To seek the truth; to rebuke falsehood and rumor; to defend liberty and cultivate freedom’s lofty aims; to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms; to share the promise of our day alike with friend and friendless; to make a happy home, a wholesome community, a neighborly world:

Congregational Response:  We commit our hearts and hands this day.

To cherish the beautiful in art, in nature, in personality; to cultivate the mind and share its discoveries; to be familiar with the mighty thoughts genius has expressed; to know the noble deeds of ages past:

Congregational Response:  We commit our hearts and hands this day.

To show forth courage and cheerfulness; to enrich life and make others happy; to reflect the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words; to discard error and destroy prejudice; to receive new truth with gladness:

Congregational Response:  We commit our hearts and hands this day.

To sustain hope and broaden vision; to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night; to do the best that can be done:

Congregational Response:  We commit our hearts and hands this day.

To nobel live, a simple faith, an open heart and hand – these are the lovely litanies which all [people] understand.  These are the firm-knit bonds of grace, though hidden from view, which bind in sacred [kinship] all [of humanity] the whole world through.  [To these ends:]

Congregational Response:  We commit our hearts and hands this day.

An Act of Dedication  (from the service of dedication for the building)

To every worth purpose and noble ideal; to every high aspiration and ever beautiful thought:

Congregational Response:  We dedicate this house.

To all who have dreamed majestically and wrought mightily; to all who have served their vision faithfully and have wrested freedom from tyranny, wisdom from ignorance, and righteousness from evil:

Congregational Response:  We dedicate this house.

To the ministry of all people; to the laughter and song of little children; to the search and service of youth; to the wisdom and stability of adults; to those who through a long life have borne witness to that abiding love which overcomes all evil:

Congregational Response:  We dedicate this house.

As a fountain of strength for the week; as a source of reassurance for the despairing; as a place of rest for the weary; and a well-spring of courage for those who are afraid:

Congregational Response:  We dedicate this house.

As a place of worship where in peaceful reflection and earnest prayer we can consider the things of worth and heart the still small voice within; where cries can be faced, decisions made, and battles won:

Congregational Response:  We dedicate this house.

To the Source of all our being, the Light of all our light, the Truth behind our wisdom:

Congregational Response:  We dedicate this house.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Lessons From (and for ) the Circus of Life

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 19th, 2017, at the congregation I serve, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  This is the version from the 11:15 service, which was slightly edited from the one given at 9:15.

As I said earlier, this month we’re looking at “risk,” which is something we have to deal with every day, whether we’re conscious of it or not.  There are the big risks of course – telling someone you love them, or that you no longer do.  Leaving the security of the job you have, to find a job that you’ll love.  Going deep with someone, revealing who you really are.  Committing to changing who you are because it’s not who you want to be.  Giving up an advantage because you know it isn’t right. Showing up in solidarity with people who are marginalized, oppressed, vulnerable, even though that might put you at risk for the same. 

Yet even if we aren’t doing any of these kinds of things, we’re dealing with risk all the time.  If I walk down a set of stairs there’s the risk I could fall.  If I drive down the street there’s the risk of being in an accident.  If I decide to eat some pizza that was left out overnight, or drink some milk that’s a little past its “Use By” date …

Those who are newer to TJMC may not know that before I entered the ordained ministry I was a performer – a juggler, magician, clown, escape artist, fire eater …  None of these is without a certain amount of risk; some of them are flat-out Risky with a capital “R.”  And over the years – I started performing when I was about 11 – I’ve learned a lot more than just the skills I was practicing.  I have come to see that the circus arts offer metaphors for ways we can live our lives more richly and fully.  I believe that the things you can learn as a juggler-magician-clown-escape artist-fire eater are lessons that can apply to our lives.

How often have you felt as though you’re balancing on a tightrope, where a wrong step this way or a wrong step that way could spell disaster? 

You might think that the logical thing to do, the safe thing to do, would be look down at your feet to make sure that you put each one in just the right place … but you’d be wrong.  In fact, doing that actually makes it virtually impossible to maintain your balance.  Instead, the tightrope walker lifts their gaze and focuses on the end of the rope.  And perhaps counter intuitively, it’s that forward gaze that makes all the difference.

Now … I’m not a tightrope walker, but I am a juggler, and Cypress just read a great piece about some of the lessons you can learn from that art.  I’ll add one more.   A lot of us feel at times that we’ve got “too many balls in the air.”  I can’t tell you how many check-ins, in how many committee meetings, at least one person has said something like this, or in how many personal conversations it comes up.  But one of the things you learn when you’re juggling is that although it seems like there’s too much going on, the truth is that there’s always only one thing happening at a time.  You’re catching a ball, or you’re throwing a ball.  Catching a ball or throwing a ball.  That’s it, and that’s true if you’re juggling three balls, or the world record of 11.  

But I’ve been building up to something here.  Of all of the odd skills I’ve picked up in my pursuit of sacred play, nothing is more risky than fire eating.  First … well … there’s the fire.  And then there’s the beard.  And then there’s the fire again.

My teacher was a woman named Margie Brown – Rev. Margie Brown, actually, because she was an ordained United Methodist minister.  She learned to eat fire from a man named Ken Feit – Father Ken Feit, to be precise, because he was a Catholic priest.  Now … you might not think that fire eating is the kind of thing that clergy folk would do, but according to Maggie, Ken once made the insightful observation that every religious tradition we know anything about has used fire as a symbol of the sacred.  And every religious tradition we know anything about has some form of communal experience of eating.  So, Ken said, it’s only natural to bring the two together in religious fire eating.  [He also said that the way to learn to eat fire is to sit for an hour in a darkened room, staring into the flame of a candle.  Then ... eat a habanero pepper, and you’re all set.]

Margie was a nationally known storyteller.  But when a conference or other big event wanted to hire her for that, she had condition – they had to give her a place where she could teach fire eating.  I can’t imagine how many people she taught over the years and, through her teaching and her presence, influenced.  But talking about fire eating is like talking about a recipe.  It’s good as far as it goes, but the thing itself is better.  So …

Why was Margie so committed to teaching fire eating?  Why do I love to do it so much?  Well … for one thing … you gotta admit that it’s pretty cool.  But there’s a lesson in it, too.  A pretty important one.

At the end of her workshops Margie would tell her students that she didn’t really care if they ever ate fire again.  What she wanted us to take away from the experience was the memory, the experience of having come face-to-face with something scary, something dangerous, and that rather than running from it we moved in closer.  We didn’t push it away, we pulled it towards us.  There was a risk in doing so, of course, but when we did – with full conviction and commitment – we saw that scary, dangerous thing transformed into something beautiful and awe inspiring.

I haven’t always had the courage to do it, to take that risk.  But I’ve never forgotten the lesson, nor the ones I’ve learned from magicians, jugglers, tightrope walkers, elephant wranglers, ring masters, escape artists, clowns, and fire eaters.


Pax tecum,

RevWik

Your Story ...

In Kurt Vonnegut's book Breakfast of Champions there is a scene near the end in which he, Vonnegut, puts himself into the story and has a conversation with one of his most famous recurring characters, Kilgore Trout.  It's not often that the author of a book is a character in the on-going story of the book she or he is writing at that moment.  More often than not the author "speaks" through one or more of the characters, or is present in a story about her or his own past.  But the present presence of the author?  An author who explicitly and self-consciously rewrites the action of the book because of the action of the book?  Well, that's a little unusual.  Maybe only Vonnegut could pull that off.

I've recently been listening to a CD of Dr. Brené Brown.  She's the social scientist whose TED talk on vulnerability took the internet by storm.  In the material I'm listening to she's talking about shame -- what it is and how to become more "shame resilient."  She's saying a lot of fascinating things, and this morning this phrase jumped out at me:

"When you own your story you get to write the ending."

Let that sink in for a minute.  Let that sink in for a minute and see both if that makes sense, and whether or not you're living like that.

I'm not.  At least, not a lot of the time.  A lot of the time -- maybe even most of the time -- I live as if I'm a character in a story and things are happening to me.  The choices I make seem almost inevitable or, at least, severely limited by the circumstances around me.  "I would do this, if only that were different ..."  "If only this situation changed I could do ..."  Sound at all familiar?

And yet, when I meet with people for Pastoral Counseling I am clear that they are not bound by a story

someone/something else is composing.  I often say to people that the events of their lives are like chapters in a book, and a book that's part of an ongoing series.  This particular thing that they are dealing with is not the end of the story -- the end of a chapter, perhaps; the end of one of the books, maybe; but the story goes on and we have no idea how it will end up.  There are lots of times that things look pretty grim for Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen, but the next chapter, or the next book, can make things look very different.

And so ... "when you own your story you get to write the ending."  We are more like Vonnegut than Trout.  To me, that's good news.

So it goes ...

RevWik

You Can't Go Home Again

Okay. 

<Deep Breath>

I figure that if I'm going to write about the highlights, the successes, that I need to be equally open about the setbacks and heartaches.  A one dimensional picture is hardly useful in trying to describe a three dimensional world, and nothing is as easy as it sounds when you only describe the times when it's easy.

<Deep Breath>

Over the past couple of weeks I've been struggling.  My reasons are personal and specific, but they'd be recognizable to anyone who's ever read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, or ever attended any kind of 12 Step meeting, or known anyone with addiction issues.  Really they'd be recognizable to anyone who's ever done any kind of deep spiritual exploration and discovered anything important about how the human mind and heart work when operating under the control of the small-s "self" rather than the large-s "Self."

The reasons aren't that important; the results, on the other hand, are.  I ate some junk food.  Actually, I ate a lot of junk food.  Had some McDonald's for lunch one day.  Then Burger King for breakfast the next.  I wolfed down a couple of jumbo hot dogs.  Consumed some pizza.  Some fried chicken.  I even ate a breakfast of hash, home fries, biscuits and gravy, and sausage -- both links and patties.  In other words, I stepped off of the path of my new way of eating and resumed old habits that have been causing me harm.

The good news -- and I do like to try to find the good news -- is that Thomas Wolfe was right . . . you can't go home again.  After clearing up my system and establishing new patterns as I've been doing for the past several months I found that I couldn't return to my old ways of eating.

I could, of course.  Obviously I could, because I did.  What I mean is that I discovered in a newly clear way that it's really no longer an option for me.  What had not that long ago been accepted parts of my life were no longer acceptable:

 

~ My brain essentially shut down. The "brain fog" was so dense that my short term memory was shot and my ability to think ahead was nearly non-existent. I couldn't make connections, and struggled to put words together in any kind of coherent way.

~ And all I wanted to do was sleep. Not only was my brain filled with fog -- or, more accurately, smog -- but my body was weighed down. My arms and legs felt heavy, leaden. It was all I could do to get myself out of a chair. And my sleep was not restorative in the least -- I woke up each morning even more tired than I'd gone to bed the night before.

~ My sinuses began to fill up, and my whole body began to itch -- especially my scalp and my back, but my arms and legs, too. My chronic athlete's foot condition raged again. I started feeling hot in cold rooms, and cool in hot ones. I began to sweat again, easily and profusely.

~ And in case it's not intuitively obvious, my depression came back with a vengence. Negative self-talk regained the ascendency.

And all this after just a few days of eating junk again!  Admittedly, I ate a fair amount of junk during those few days, but there was a time when I ate fast-food for at least two out of three meals most days and easily downed a 2-liter bottle of coke and a whole pizza without giving it a second thought.

If I had any doubt that the way I was eating was harming me, and that the changes I'd been making were helping, the response of my body and brain to this last binge removed it.  The cause-and-effect is so incredibly clear.  And having had something of a break from these mental and physical symptoms, having experience another way, I find that I cannot stomach (excuse the pun) the thought of letting myself go backwards. 

And, so, the juicer is back in service again.  And I'm discovering (again) how good it feels to think and move and really live.  I'm reminding myself, and being reminded, of the addage:  There is no such thing as junk food.  There is food and there is junk.  And while I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I'll never slip like this again -- in fact, I can say with more than a little certainty that it's likely that I will! -- I do now know that I will never again make my home in this unhealthy place.

In Gassho,

RevWik

The Member-less Church, part two

So . . . I'm playing with this idea of "doing away with membership" in the church.  Let me be clear, though, before going on -- I am only talking about doing away with "membership" as a conceptual category.  I'm not suggesting that we somehow stop caring about whether or not people feel connected to the church, or have a sense of belonging.  I'm not even suggesting that we stop counting folks and trying to keep track of the "size" of the church.  I'm really only talking about how we think about things; the conceptual categories we use to identify and organize things.

That said, I promised on Monday to write today about some of the hurdles that would have to be overcome to move forward with this idea.  (On Friday I'll write about some of what I think would be the positives that would come from doing so.)  Whenever/wherever I've talked or written about this idea, the majority of the responses include one or more of the following objections.  Here's my attempt to address them:

The Unitarian Universalist Association assesses each congregation on a per-member basis when figuring out its "fair share" contribution to the work of the wider movement.  Seriously?  This is the reason that we should have the conceptual concept of "members" in our congregations?  Because the UUA uses this number as the basis of their formual for assesing "fair share" contributions?

How many congregations today play with their membership numbers in order to keep their APF -- that's Annual Program Fund -- contribution affordable?  (More than you'd imagine!)  And how many congregations that are trying to keep accurate records aren't able to pay the full APF amount?  (A lot!)  In essence, that means that they're not paying on a per-member basis anyway!

It has been suggested in the past -- in multiple venues -- that the UUA should move to a percentage-of-budget based formula for figuring APF contributions.  Suppose we asked all congregations to pay 4% of the budget to the UUA as their annual offering.  (Note, as an aside, that I've avoided calling these "dues."  They're not, really, or shouldn't be.  Just as our individual congregant's pledges aren't "dues."  But all of this is another post, I think.)  Or, to be more accurate, what if we asked congregations to figure out what percentage their current APF contribution is of their total budget and then they pay that from now on?  The UUA would still get its funds and we wouldn't be stuck with this "membership" category just so that it's easy on the institution.

Without "membership" even more people would slip throught he cracks than already do!  Again, seriously?  That seems like such an empty arguement.  If we agree that with the concept of membership we lose track of people and others drift away on their own, why do we assume that it'd be any different (better or worse?) without such a concept?  As has been noted elsewhere, in every congregation there are long-time participants who are not "members," and "members" who in no real way participate.  This arguement seems to me to suggest that we should be focusing our attention on "members" -- whether or not they participate -- because it's the "membership" category that matters most.

What if -- and I'm just throwing this out here -- it is the very concept of "members" and "non-members" that leads the institution to allow folks to fall through the cracks?  What if some new way of assessing a person's involvement with the congregation -- and vice versa -- is needed?

How would we know how successful we are?  I've never heard it put exactly this way, I'll admit, but I have heard it wondered how we would measure our growth if we do away with "membership."  I'll say again -- I'm not against keeping track of things, but "membership" is an extremely inefficient category to use for measuring things.  (Note the common experience mentioned above.)  Many congregations are moving to counting attendance at worship.  Some are discovering ways of measuring all involvement in all programs.  Doesn't this seem a more dynamic -- and accurate -- way of measuring the health and vitality of a congregation?

Congregations are legal entities and, so, must be able to show membership to retain their status.  Okay.  I'll buy this.  But I wonder what the minimum requirements are.  Would it be possible, for instance, to so-write your bylaws that anyone who is an officer of the church is, for legal purposes, a "member"?  The category -- which I maintain is truly problematic for a number of reasons I'll get to on Friday -- would be retained purely for legal reasons.  I'd imagine that each congregation would have to look into its own state's requirements, but I'm willing to bet that this seems like more a hurdle than it really is.

If we did away with membership, anyone could vote!  Well, yes.  That's true.  And I suppose that in some situations that might be problematic.  But I'd wager that in the vast majority of congregations the vast majority of the time it wouldn't matter at all.  Except, perhaps, it might increase the percentage of active participants in the community who are also involved in deciding matters related to that community.  Think of it, as it is today, in most of our congregations, only "members" can vote.  And how many of them turn out?  In most of our congregations it's a shamefully low percentage.  And then there are all those people who are active in the congregation but who, for one reason or another, have chosen not to "sign the membership book."  These folks are held inelegible to vote.  Why hold them back?  Really.  (Other than the fact that it's always been this way!) 

I mentioned in Monday's post a congregant in one of the churches I served who had been so deeply embedded in the life of the congregation that the vote for him to be President was unanimous and enthusiastic.  But he'd never joined the church as a "member"!  So he became a "member" for the duration of his term and, then, recinded his "membership" when his term was over.  And before and after this time he was not allowed to vote in congregational meetings while a great many people who had far, far less involvement with the congregation were, technically, permitted to do so.  Does this situation make any sense?

Membership is a reflection of an individual's commitment to the church.  Of all of the reasons I've heard that "we can't do away with membership" this is the only one that isn't instituionally based.  (Think about that for a minute.  Let it sink in.)  I have, myself, used this idea when talking to people about membership.  I've used the analogy of the difference between getting married and "just" living together -- it's an outward and visible symbol of that commitment, and one shared within the context of a community.  I get all that.  But is it the only way to show such commitment?  It is, certainly, the one with which we're most familiar, but as a ritual, as a symbol, does it really do what we think it's doing?  Again, if one can be an active participant in the community and not be a "member" and be a "member" with actively participating, what does "membership" actually mean?  (As opposed to what we think it means or say to one another that it means.)

Some of the Christian traditions use adult baptism as a way of marking a person's movement into deeper commitment and identity.  (Membership is recognized as merely an institutional necessity.)  What if we added adult naming ceremonies -- or some other ritual -- as a way of celebrating someone who wants to say "this is my community"?

I'm sure some of you can come up with other objections to the idea of "doing away with 'membership'," and some can come up with other responses to the objections I've explored here.  Please.  Let's get a conversation started.  I'll be back Friday.

In Gassho,

RevWik