Unitarian Universalism – Page 20 – Dan Harper

Glory Days, or, Hit by a Fish

On this Sunday, we recognized a Unitarian church which, like First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, is also celebrating its three hundredth birthday this year. Thus, the readings did not relate to the sermon, but instead celebrated the birthday of All Souls Unitarian Church in Belfast, Ireland. These readings are included here:

Greetings to All Souls Belfast

Whereas All Souls Church in Belfast, Ireland, affiliated with the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland and with the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, will celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of their founding this week;

Whereas First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was established three hundred years ago this year when Rev. Samuel Hunt was settled as minister in what was then called the town of Dartmouth;

Whereas both congregations are a part of the worldwide Unitarian fellowship, sharing in the values of liberal religion;

Whereas we feel a special connection with All Souls because Maggi Kerr Peirce has been a member of both congregations;

Therefore, we do extend our warmest greetings to the congregation of All Souls Church, wishing that their congregation may thrive and continue to uphold the values of liberal religion for at least another three centuries.

Given under our hands this fourteenth day of October in the two thousand and eighth year of the common era…

[Signed by members of the Board of Trustees of First Unitarian Church in New Bedford.]

A short history of All Souls Unitarian Church in Belfast, Ireland

Read by Maggi Kerr Peirce

John Abernethy, called “the father of non-subscription”, was a prominent Irish Presbyterian minister who led many ministers and congregations out of the Synod of Ulster into a separate liberal-minded denomination, known today as the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and affiliated with the worldwide Unitarian movement.

In 1705 Abernethy founded a meeting, subsequently known as the Belfast Society, of ministers and lay people who gathered to discuss the Bible and recent theological scholarship. Members pooled their resources to buy new books and prepared papers on the latest publications. They trained themselves to engage in theological disputation and gradually began to challenge accepted religious notions of their day. A nineteenth-century Presbyterian historian described the Belfast Society as a “seed-plot of error”.

James Kirkpatrick, an Irish Presbyterian minister, was the first minister in Belfast to argue for the principles of non-subscription. He was a founding member of the Belfast Society. In common with Abernethy and others he adopted an increasingly critical attitude towards humanly formulated creeds, particularly the Westminster Confession of Faith.

In 1706 he accepted a call from the Belfast congregation as colleague to the Reverend John McBride. The Belfast congregation, which had grown rapidly, numbered more than three thousand members. At the time of Kirkpatrick’s call McBride had fled to Scotland to avoid arrest for refusing to take the oath abjuring the claims to the throne of James II’s son. McBride had suggested that the original Belfast congregation should be divided and a second meeting house built. Eventually, after complicated negotiations, the Belfast church did just that. A new meeting house was built immediately behind the first as the home of Kirkpatrick’s Second congregation. This was the beginning of unitarianism in Belfast.

[From material written by David Steers, minister of All Souls’ Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church, Belfast from 1989 to 2000.]

Sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. About half the sermon as preached was extemporaneous, and the text below is a rough reconstruction of the actual sermon. Additionally, the text below has been slightly corrected based on further historical research. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Sermon — “Richard Huff, Quiet Revolutionary”

Years ago, I was watching some stupid television show, and I saw a comedy routine in which, much to his surprise, a man got slapped in the face with a fish. I said it was a “comedy routine,” although if you think about it, getting hit in the face with a fish is not really that funny. In fact, I don’t remember anything else about that comedy routine, so it couldn’t have been very funny. But I have retained this image of a very surprised man, and since then I’ve sometimes thought that that image of getting hit in the face with a fish is a good image for the way life can surprise us in very unpleasant ways.

So I tell you this, and it occurs to me that it’s possible that when you go home, you’ll be sitting down to eat lunch and ask yourself, “Now what did Dan talk about today? Something about a fish?” — and that’s all you’ll remember about this sermon. If you remember nothing else about this sermon, please also remember this:– when life slaps you in the face with a fish, you don’t have to blame yourself. It can be tempting to blame yourself when life is hard — but please don’t. You don’t have to blame yourself when life is hard on you.

Because that’s what happens in real life sometimes. Even when everything is going astonishingly well, even when you’re doing everything right, suddenly the rules of the game can change on you. This is what has happened to many of us, financially speaking, over the past few weeks:– We thought we were doing everything right, when suddenly the stock market falls apart, retirement plans lose a third of their value, the state can’t borrow money so it makes major cuts, unemployment rises, and so on. We thought we were doing all right when this financial crisis slapped us in the face with a fish, metaphorically speaking.

As Unitarian Universalists, we already know that we have to be always ready to change and grow and transform. That’s why we don’t like creeds or doctrines:– the creed that we adopt today may strangulate growth tomorrow. Therefore, out of religious principle, we like to remain ready to change and grow and transform ourselves. And yet even with our openness to change, even with our willingness to transform ourselves to meet new realities, sometimes we too get surprised by events.

This morning, I’d like to tell you about one such event that happened here in our own church some fifty-three years ago. Back in 1954, our church seemed poised for explosive growth; but the very next year Sunday morning adult attendance began to decline rapidly, the Sunday school began to decline more slowly, and that decline continued pretty much right through the quarter century. So here’s the story:

…

Like every church, our church has always had ups and downs. In the 1920s there were years when this church had more than a hundred children and teenagers in the Sunday school each week, and more than a hundred adults sitting in the pews for the morning service, and even more adults at church for the Sunday evening vespers service (yes, we used to have a vespers service here). And there have always been times when we weren’t so successful. In the 1930s, adult attendance dropped, and the Sunday school shrank in size. Fortunately, during the 1930s, most of the membership of First Universalist Church transferred to First Unitarian, and those folks kept us from declining even further.

In 1938, when Duncan Howlett became our minister, our attendance shot up, and stayed high the entire time he was here. After Howlett left in 1946, on the surface it seemed as though our church declined in energy and numbers for a half a dozen years. But growth and change and transformation were happening underneath the surface: the old pew rental system finally disappeared; the minister was integrated back in to the governance of the church and was allowed to address the annual meeting without having to ask permission first; the Sunday school stayed strong and large; and many groups and organizations within the church remained strong and vibrant, including the Women’s Alliance, the Sewing Circle, the Murray Club organized by the old Universalists, and other groups. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, this church may have looked a little sleepy on the surface, but good healthy activity was taking place below the surface.

The society around the church was changing rapidly at this time. Even though New Bedford slowly continued to lose manufacturing jobs, the economy finally emerged from the Great Depression. After the Second World War, lots of young couples got married and had babies, and this was the beginning of the famous Baby Boom. There was a resurgence of civic engagement; that is, people were eager to become active in community groups; the 1950s were the high point of civic engagement in the twentieth century. With the rise in civic engagement, lots of people started going to church.

In the midst of all this societal growth and change and transformation, our church called a new minister, Richard Huff. He seemed exactly the right man to be minister at our church in that time. He was a former Navy chaplain, so he could relate to all the returning soldiers. After the war he became the minister at the Unitarian church in Stoneham; when he arrived there, they were a dying church, but when he left they were thriving and growing. He was a “kind man,” a man of “great charm” and a “good preacher” (here I’m quoting what people have said to me about him); he was just the right kind of personality to be the minister of this church. All these characteristics were evident when he arrived here in 1953. But I think he had another, less obvious, characteristic that perfectly suited him to be the minister of this church at that moment in time: he was the kind of man who knew that both people and churches have to constantly change and grow and transform themselves in order to continue to thrive.

When Richard Huff arrived in 1953, attendance skyrocketed. Our church had gotten up to an average attendance of 130 adults on Sundays when Duncan Howlett had been here, probably the highest attendance our church had seen for most of the twentieth century. After Howlett left, attendance dropped down to about a hundred adults, but when Richard Huff arrived attendance shot up to 167 — that is, attendance increased more than fifty percent in his first year here! And the next year, attendance remained just about as high.

The number of children in the Sunday school did not shoot up, however. On the surface, the reason appeared obvious: we didn’t have adequate space to accommodate all the children. On Sunday morning, I have been told that there were groups of children everywhere; one Sunday school class even had to meet in the balcony of the Tryworks Auditorium upstairs in the Parish House (if you’ve seen that space, it’s hard to imagine how you’d have a Sunday school class up there). So our church began to build additional Sunday school space: part of the basement was renovated in the early 1950s, and the lower basement was renovated a few years later.

But Richard Huff and a few other forward-thinking lay leaders in the church began to realize that it wouldn’t be enough to simply build more classrooms. They began to realize that if the church were going to be serious about the Sunday school, it was time to hire a paid director of religious education. However, these were the years when many Unitarian and Universalist churches were hiring their very first paid directors of religious education; many churches were looking for qualified people to fill those jobs, and there just weren’t enough qualified people to go around. Our church tried to hire one of those qualified people, but at the very last moment she decided she did not want to leave the place where she had been living. The lay leaders and the old Sunday school superintendent tried to keep things going, but Sunday school attendance slowly began to drop.

The number of adults on Sunday mornings dropped even faster. By 1958, when our church celebrated its 250th birthday, adult attendance had dropped down to just over 100 adults on a Sunday.

In the midst of all this, Richard Huff and his family were going through a serious and major family crisis, that apparently involved all of his immediate family. He resigned as minister, and apparently left the ministry for a number of years. Eventually, though, he returned to the Unitarian ministry, and wound up as the minister in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Our church’s attendance continued to decline after all this happened. The Baby Boom was slowing down, so there weren’t as many families bringing children to church. Then in the 1960s the social and economic situation in New Bedford grew more difficult, with urban riots and growing unemployment. And all across the nation, people just stopped going to church as much. The net result was that, like many Unitarian Universalist churches across the country, we kept shrinking right through the 1960s and 1970s.

…

So our church started shrinking around 1956. It would be easy for us to blame this on the changes in the society around us, the changes in New Bedford. But if it were the changes in the society around us which stopped our growth, I think the decline would have been more gradual, and I think it would have come five years later. Instead, we stopped growing so suddenly, it was as if someone smacked us in the face with a fish. I’d like to briefly explain to you what I think happened here in our church around 1956.

When Richard Huff arrived, the minister of this church was the central node through which all church communication passed. The minister was the only one who really knew everyone: the shut-ins, the staff, the people who never came to church, the children and the Sunday school teachers, as well as the people in the pews on Sunday morning. There’s even a name for this kind of church: it’s called a “pastoral-size church,” a name which tells us that the pastor, or minister, is the central communication node for the whole church. If you have a really good minister, you can take a pastoral-size church up to an average attendance of about two hundred men, women, and children; but if you get above that, one minister simply can’t manage all the communications that need to happen. Yet from 1953 through 1955, our church had an average of about two hundred and fifty people on Sunday morning: we went over that magic number of two hundred, and then we dropped right back down.

Over the past thirty years, church experts have done a lot of research on how to make the transition past an average attendance of two hundred — it can be done, but it requires a church to change the way they do just about everything. Indeed, this is the current crisis of the liberal churches. Most of our liberal churches, of whatever denomination, never get above that magic number of an average Sunday attendance of two hundred. Sometimes a really skilled minister will keep a church above that level for a few years or a couple of decades, but when that person leaves, attendance declines back down.

…

There’s a moral to this story. Of course, there’s a moral to this story, but it’s not the moral you expect. In fact, there are two morals to this story.

This first moral is very simple: If things don’t work out the way you expect, you don’t have to automatically blame yourself. Sometimes life slaps you in the face with a fish, and when that happens, it’s not your fault. When life is hard, please go easy on yourself.

The other moral of this story has to do with our church. It turns out that the evangelical Christians are having a similar problem, but in reverse. Brian McLaren, an evangelical Christian who has been working hard on church growth from the evangelical side of things, has said that the Christian “conservatives tend to be rigid theologically and promiscuous pragmatically and liberals tend to be rigid methodologically and a lot more free theologically.” In other words, the Christian conservatives stick rigidly to their doctrine and dogmas, but they’ll try all kinds of new organizational strategies; whereas us religious liberals are pretty free and open about what we believe, but we are pretty rigid when it comes to the way we do church. Then McLaren goes on to say: “Maybe we could trade.”

And that’s the other moral of the story. As religious liberals, we are already free in our thinking; we are already quiet revolutionaries in our religion. And perhaps we can now free up our organizational thinking so that we are just as free. Perhaps now we can become quiet revolutionaries in the way we do the business of the church, in the same way that we have long been quiet revolutionaries in the way we do theology.

Duncan Howlett, Quiet Revolutionary

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained more than the usual number of ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. In addition, minor factual errors have been corrected in this text. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is from an undated typescript by Duncan Howlett in the church archives. In this essay, Howlett the question of what Unitarians “believe”:

“No really satisfying answer to the question, ‘What is Unitarianism?’, is possible because of the assumptions that are implicit in the question itself. Alfred North Whitehead used to say, and I’m quoting, ‘If you cannot agree with a man’s conclusions, but cannot find anything wrong with the argument by which he reaches them, look at his premises — spoken or unspoken — admitted or unadmitted — and there you will find the answer to your question.’ I believe the difficulties we encounter [in] describing Unitarianism are found in the assumptions that we bring to the question itself….

“Our error lies in the fact that we, like the orthodox [Christians], have always taken the creed structure of Christendom for granted. We have tried to explain ourselves in terms of it and apparently it has never occurred to us to do otherwise…. [But] You don’t say anything really significant about a Unitarian when you give a summary of the theological opinions he happens to hold….”

And, later in the typescript, Howlett continues:

“Unitarians, rejecting fixed creeds and confessions of faith, hold that the task of religion is to state its first principles, constantly to test the validity of those principles in open encounter where every voice may be heard, and to be ready to restate them whenever clarity requires. The Unitarians believe that truth in religion, as in all things, lies at the end of the process of inquiring. Every possible facet of human experience must be brought to bear upon such an inquiry if any approximation of truth is to be achieved as a result of it. Unitarians believe that religious differences between men [sic] ought to be measured by their belief in this process or by their lack of it.”

The second reading comes from a sermon delivered by Howlett in 1941. A little background is necessary: In 1940, Howlett addressed the annual meeting of this congregation, the first minister of this church to be allowed to address an annual meeting for perhaps a century. In that address, Howlett had told the members of the annual meeting that he expected them to attend church on a regular basis. This apparently caused an uproar, and a year later, in this sermon, Howlett was still trying to explain himself. Characteristically, although he softened his words, he continued to strongly affirm his basic points, as we will hear in this excerpt. Howlett wrote:

“We are growing steadily in every phase of our activity. This includes the congregation. And eventually, our normal growth will carry us to the point where this church will be comfortably full. But most of us do not want to wait for that time to come. We want now to have a congregation in this church that will make possible natural growth without losses.

“…people will go to the church whose members believe in it, because they want to belong to a church of which they can be proud.

“Our church can be that church. The congregation we have here this morning is testimony to the potential power we possess. There is no reason why we should not be a great church. There is no reasons why we should not enjoy the steady growth to which we are entitled. If each of us will realize the part which he [sic] can play in the whole task, it can easily be done….

“People gravitate naturally to the church in which the members themselves believe. They want to be part of a church that is alive and growing, and that is able to command the loyalty of its adherents. The impression this church makes, its impact upon the community, depends far more upon the people than the minister. Let us be true to the greatness of this church in the past; let us realize its growing power in the present, and let us carry it to even greater things in the days to come. And having done so, our church shall become one of the greatest churches in this city and one of the largest in the denomination.”

Sermon

This morning, I propose to tell you three stories about Duncan Howlett, who was the minister of our church from 1938 to 1946. There can be no doubt that Howlett was the greatest minister this church had in the 20th C. Under his leadership, this church saw higher sustained Sunday attendance than at any other time in the past hundred years for which we have accurate records. We can include the 21st C. as well: Duncan Howlett stands head and shoulders above any minister of this congregation for over a hundred years. However, great ministers do not exist without great churches. Any story about Duncan Howlett’s ministry here must also be a story about the greatness of this congregation, so when I say I’m going to speak about Duncan Howlett, I’m also going to speak about this church.

I am calling Duncan Howlett a “quiet revolutionary.” When I call him “quiet,” I don’t mean he was quiet in the sense of being mousy, or having a soft voice, or being a shrinking violet. When I say “quiet revolutionary,” I mean he was not the sort of revolutionary who wanted a sharp break with the past, or who wanted to stir things up just for the sake of stirring things up. Howlett was a revolutionary who looked for continual ongoing change because of his deepest religious beliefs.

Howlett studied with Alfred North Whitehead, the great process theologian, and from his studies with Whitehead he learned to believe that change is inevitable. As he wrote in the first reading this morning, he believed that “the task of religion is to state its first principles, constantly to test the validity of those principles in open encounter where every voice may be heard, and to be ready to restate them whenever clarity requires.” That is to say, the world is constantly in a state of flux, and therefore the purpose of a religious community is to continually move forward. This theology of process, of continual change, was the deep religious belief that drove Duncan Howlett to be a quiet revolutionary.

I’m going to tell you three interlocking stories about Duncan Howlett, beginning with his tenure here in New Bedford, and ending with his retirement in Maine. But I had better start by giving you a brief overview of his early life:

He was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1906; and was the son of a “well-to-do-painting contractor” [profile of Howlett in Washington Post, August 27, 1983]. After graduating from Newton North High School, he went to Harvard College, graduated in 1928, went on to Harvard Law School, was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1931 and practiced law for two years. In 1933, he entered Harvard Divinity School, where he studied with Alfred North Whitehead, graduating in 1936 with honors. While in divinity school, he began serving as the minister of Second Unitarian Church in Salem. In 1935, he traveled around the world, crossing from Europe into India via the famed Khyber Pass. (1) Our own church lured him away from the Salem church in 1938, and it is in our own church that my first story about Howlett takes place.

…

When Duncan Howlett arrived here in 1938, our church was not exactly thriving. Sunday attendance had been declining since before the Great Depression — this decline took place even though most of New Bedford’s Universalists joined this church when First Universalist Church on William St. closed its doors in the 1930s. So why was attendance declining?

One problem was that this church had maintained the old pew rental system that most New England churches abolished in the early twentieth century. In the early 19th C., many people owned pews here (literally owned the pew, for there were deeds and taxes); later, families no longer owned the pews, they rented them from the church. By 1938, most pews were rented by specific families, yet some of those families never came to church. Some people rented pews here, but were members of other churches! On Sunday mornings, the ushers closed the doors to the pews that were owned by various families. If you were a newcomer, you’d walk into this church, be placed into one of the few open pew, and look around and see all these empty pews that no one sat in, and that no one was allowed to sit in. It must have been a kind of spooky experience — pews full of ghosts that you couldn’t see! — and needless to say, most newcomers never returned. (2)

Another problem lay in another old, outmoded way of doing things:– the minister was absolutely barred from taking part in the financial and business affairs of this church. Indeed, the minister was not even allowed to say anything at the annual congregational meeting. Back in the 18th C., this congregation was established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony government, and according to law, Massachusetts Bay and the town government had authority over the financial and business affairs of the congregation. Back then, Massachusetts Bay congregations consisted of two separate organizations: the society, which governed the business affairs such as the building and the salary of the minister and so on; and the church, which governed the religious affairs such as communion (yes, they had communion in those days), the church covenant, and church membership. In old Massachusetts churches, the church was governed by the minister and the deacons, while the society was governed, initially by local government, and after 1833 by a separate corporation. What happened in our congregation is that in the late 19th C., Rev. William Potter stopped communion, let the old covenant die off, and basically let the church wither away entirely; while the society remained strong.

But by the 1930s, all the other Unitarian churches that I know of had abolished or greatly restricted pew rentals and ownnership; and they combined the old functions of the church and the society, so that the business and religious aspects of the congregation were more or less integrated. But Duncan Howlett arrived at this church to find the church side of the congregation had withered away, and on top of that he wasn’t even allowed to speak in front of the annual meeting of the society.

As I have said, Howlett was a quiet revolutionary. He knew that times had changed, and were continuing to change. He got permission to address the annual meeting, and by all accounts he let them have it with both barrels. He told the members of the annual meeting that this church was more than a business venture that oversaw a historic building. He told them that it wasn’t enough to pay for a pew, and show up once a year for annual meeting. He told them that he expected every man Jack and every woman Jill of them to show up at church on a regular basis, and he told them in no uncertain terms. If you read the text of the talk he gave that annual meeting, you can see that he brought the whole of his Harvard Law training, and his Harvard Divinity School training, to bear on making his case.

Apparently, he caused quite a ruckus — I mean, a genteel sort of ruckus, for this was a genteel church back in those days. At least seventy of the lay leaders agreed with him, and they formed a “Committee of Seventy,” and they called on every one of the three hundred and fifty members of the church. These lay leaders asked people to give up their pews, and requested they come regularly to Sunday morning worship. Duncan Howlett pointed out the problem; and a group of strong, dedicated lay leaders worked with him to bring our church out of the 19th C. and into the 20th C.

Then the Second World War intervened. Howlett was in the middle of that, too — in the summer of 1939, he went to Europe to help Martha and Waitstill Sharp with their relief efforts in central Europe, and in November of 1940, he welcomed Rev. Maja Capek to New Bedford after she escaped from the Nazis, and he and this church supported her in her efforts to revive North Unitarian Church in the North End of this city. The Second World War put a temporary halt to the effort to make this church grow. And then, in 1946, the then-prestigious First Church in Boston hired Howlett away from us. (3)

So ends my first little story about Duncan Howlett. I will only remark that everything Howlett did while he was here was consistent with his theology of process, of moving continually forward in an ever-changing world.

…

Duncan Howlett stayed at First Church in Boston for a dozen years, and then All Souls Church in Washington D.C. called him. The famous A. Powell Davies had just retired as minister of All Souls. You probably haven’t heard of A. Powell Davies, but in those days he was well-known — the Washington newspapers held their Monday editions until they could get the manuscript of his Sunday sermon. All Souls was huge — something like 1500 members — and included several congressmen in its membership.

Howlett stayed at All Souls for ten years. In that decade, he was active in fighting racism. He participated in Civil Rights marches in Alabama, Mississippi, and Washington. When James Reeb, the associate minister at All Souls, was beaten to death by racist white thugs in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, Howlett took a leave of absence to write Reeb’s biography — a book which is still in print more than forty years later. In 1968, he expressed sympathy for the Black Power movement. One Washington newspaper did a poll which indicated that Howlett was one of the five most-trusted white men among the African Americans of the city.

Remember that Howlett’s religious faith was founded on his theology of process, on his belief that we must continually forward in an ever-changing world. Thus it was entirely consistent with Howlett’s religious faith when, in 1968, he resigned as minister of All Souls, saying he wanted to make way for an African American minister to take charge of that church. The Washington Post reported on Howlett’s resignation, and I’d like to read you an excerpt from the March 24, 1968, edition of that newspaper:

“The Rev. Dr. Duncan Howlett, a civil-rights leader here and a national figure in the Unitarian Universalist denomination, resigned yesterday as minister of All Souls’ Church to make way for a Negro minister.

“Unitarian Universalists, in the forefront of white liberalism, have yet to call a Negro to the pulpit of one of their churches….

“With a membership of nearly 1500, a budget of $173,000 [that’s over one million in today’s dollars], and an endowment of $1.4 million [that’s 8.2 million in today’s dollars], All Souls is one of the more vigorous churches in the denomination. Dr. Howlett has been its minister since December, 1958, when he succeeded the Rev. Dr. A. Powell Davies.

“ ‘One of the strongest motives in my stepping down,’ he said in his resignation sermon, ‘is the conviction that All Souls’ Church can and should take the lead in integrating the ministry of our Unitarian churches.’

“All Souls’ doing this, he said, ‘would be one more breakthrough for the Negro into leadership in American culture.’

“The first major church in Washington to have an integrated membership, All Souls has had a Negro director of its school of religion, and Negroes in other leadership capacities. The first integrated police boys’ club in Washington meets there.

“Dr. Howlett did not suggest a particular Negro candidate to succeed him.” (4)

Duncan Howlett saw that the world was changing, and he saw that white men like him who were in positions of leadership would have to step aside to make room for people of color to take on leadership roles. So he stepped aside. That was a quietly revolutionary act.

All Souls Church in Washington did in fact call an African American minister. It remains a big, powerful city church, with a racially integrated membership — last time I was there, it looked to me that the church was about half white, half black, and half a mix of other skin colors and racial identities. So many urban churches have seen slipping membership in the past half century, but not All Souls Church in Washington.

I like to imagine what would have happened had Howlett stayed here through the 1960s, and had resigned from this church in 1968 to make way for a person of color to become minister of this church. Would that have made an impact on the wider racial unrest that was happening in this city back then? Would this church have become even more racially integrated than it is now? I have no idea, but it’s fun to think about. (And I suspect someone else from this church has imagined the same thing, because why else would I find that Washington Post clipping about Howlett resigning upstairs in our church’s archives?)

…

Let me continue on with a third, very short story about Duncan Howlett. When he left All Souls, he retired and went on to a new project. He moved to Center Lovell, Maine, where he and his wife had purchased on old farm, and he proceeded to manage that farm as a forest. He was an early believer in the environmental movement, and he believed that a good way to maintain the natural environment was through sustainable management practices. He disapproved of the timber industry’s forestry practices, which tended to degrade the woodlands, rather than improve them; and he managed his own woodlands with sustainable management practices. Ever the organizer, in 1975 Howlett organized the Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine, to further his goal of sustainable management of forests. (5)

Moving from anti-racism to environmentalism might seem like a radical change of direction for Duncan Howlett, but I don’t see it that way. Remember that Howlett’s religious faith was founded on his theology of process, on his belief that we must continually forward in an ever-changing world. He saw that caring for the environment was going to be the next big issue that we had to face. Given his religious faith, it should be no surprise that he felt he had to address this newly emerging problem.

…

Duncan Howlett believed that the truth in religion lies in an ongoing process of inquiry. He continually tested the validity of his principles in an open process of inquiry. He saw that our church here in New Bedford had to abolish pew rentals, and he worked with lay leaders to make that happen. He saw that All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., should have an African American minister, and he provided leadership to make that happen. Then in retirement he saw that environmental problems had to be addressed, and he did what he could to promote sustainable land use practices.

He was a quiet revolutionary, someone who continually challenged the validity of his and other people’s principles. He did not run away from change, but he embraced it. He was a visionary leader who made things happen, sometimes through unorthodox means. As a quiet revolutionary, he pushed others beyond what they felt comfortable doing. And his leadership got results:

The Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine continues to promote the combined goals of protecting Maine’s woodlands resources while encouraging optimal sustainable productivity through good forestry practices. SWOAM established a public land trust in 1990, and the first girt of land they received was 300 acres of Duncan Howlett’s forest. (6)

All Souls Church remains a big, powerful, racially integrated urban church. They have continued to move forward, and they now have two ministers, one of whom is white, the other of whom is black.

And our own church thrived after Howlett left. The lay leaders modernized the way this church operated. By the early 1950s, our Sunday attendance had skyrocketed, with two worship services and a huge Sunday school. The only thing that stopped our continued growth was a systemic problem called “the pastoral to program size transition” — but that’s another story, one which I will tell in another sermon later this fall.

Even though we have not yet become a big church, we continue in the belief that we share with Duncan Howlett: that we must continually move forward in an ever-changing world. We are more racially integrated that most other Unitarian Universalist congregations — we still have a way to go before we’re fully integrated, but we are moving forward. Many of our members are involved in sustainability, and if you go to the Bioneers sustainability conference here in New Bedford October 24-26, you’ll see lots of our members there. And we have taken on issues that Howlett never dreamed of — for example, we were strong advocates for legalizing same sex marriage here in Massachusetts.

May we continue to be influenced by Duncan Howlett’s theology of process. May we continue to move ever forward in an ever-changing world.

Notes

(1) Biographical information from a typescript written by Howlett in the First Unitarian archives.
(2) Information from the second half of this paragraph from Howlett’s 1941 sermon.
(3) Information in this paragraph from documents and newspaper clippings in the church archives.
(4) “Pastor quits, opens way for Negro” by Kenneth Dole, Washington Post, 24 March, 1968, pp. A1 and A5.
(5) From a 1983 clipping in the church archive from the Washington Post.
(6) According to the SWOAM Web site, accessed 2 October 2008.

Look Ma, No Creed

Readings

The readings were extensive excerpts from a poem by Everett Hoagland titled “The Pilgrim.” This poem may be found in his book …Here…: New and Selected Poems, pp. 116-117.

Sermon

When I tell people that I belong to a Unitarian Universalist church, one of the first things they ask me is: “So what do Unitarian Universalists believe?” Every time someone says that to me, I’m not entirely sure what to say.

You see, when someone asks a Unitarian Universalist, “What do you folks believe?” — well, it’s completely the wrong question to ask. We don’t have a creed, and therefore we don’t have a certain set of beliefs we are supposed to adhere to. But here we are in New Bedford, a city dominated by the Catholic Church on the one hand, and conservative Christianity on the other hand, and those good folks all have creeds. They know what they believe. Catholic kids have to memorize the catechism. Conservative Christian kids know that they are supposed to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior (or whatever the exact phrasing is of their particular denomination). For most people in this area, religion equals belief.

Our whole country is dominated by this religious idea that religion is defined as a set of beliefs. Our neighbors want to know what we believe. Our politicians, in order to be elected, have to tell people what they believe. Our scholars, the anthropologists, write books in which they define religion as a set of beliefs. But we who are Unitarian Universalists know that religion cannot be defined merely as a set of beliefs. We know that the scholars who write books defining religion as a set of beliefs haven’t been able to escape their own cultural and religious prejudices. We Unitarian Universalists know this, because our religion is not defined by a set of beliefs. We know this, but try telling a professor of cultural anthropology that he or she is wrong; you’re not going to get very far. Try telling a politician that we don’t really care what she or he believes, and that politician will reply, You might not care but everyone else does. And then your neighbor asks you, “So what is it that you Unitarian Universalists believe?” — you know you are going to have a hard time explaining that your religion doesn’t have a creed.

Speaking from my own experience, when you try to tell your neighbor that we Unitarian Universalists don’t have a specific set of beliefs, there are five common responses that you get back. Your neighbor might tell you, “Why, that’s not a religion at all!” Your neighbor might ask you, with faint horror in their voice, “You mean you don’t believe in anything at all?” Your neighbor might ask you, again with faint horror in their voice, “You mean you can believe anything you want?” Your neighbor might say, “Well, I know you believe in something,” and then proceed to tell you exactly what it is that they think Unitarian Universalists believe in. Or — and this is the most common response in my experience — your neighbor just stares at you blankly, and then changes the subject.

So when someone asks me, “So what do you Unitarian Universalists believe?” — I find it difficult to respond. But over the years I have come up with three possible responses we Unitarian Universalists might give to that impossible question, “So what do you believe in anyway?”

(1) The first possible response you might give to that impossible question is to talk about the so-called “seven principles” excerpted from Article 2 of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association. We read those seven principles aloud together in the responsive reading. And they’re a pretty good statement of the values we Unitarian Universalists hold together. However, this can also confuse your questioner, who is liable to respond, “Well but those sound like a creed to me.” So you might have to explain to that person just what a creed is.

A creed is a statement of belief or a profession of faith that is binding upon a group of people, and those seven principles do not meet at least two parts of the definition of creed. First of all, those seven principles are not binding on any individual: in Article 2 of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, it is explicitly stated that they may not be used as any kind of creedal formula, because freedom of belief is a bedrock principle of Unitarian Universalism. Second of all, the seven principles are not a statement of belief: those seven principles don’t tell us that we have to believe certain specific things about God or the absence of God or about anything supernatural or natural : those seven principles don’t tell us to believe anything ; they ask us to affirm and promote certain values and ideals. So the seven principles are not a creed.

Unfortunately, when a couple of respectable religious educators put the seven principles into the child-friendly language which we heard in the response to today’s responsive reading, they (in a moment of weakness) used the word “belief” which has greatly confused the matter, so that too many people now think those seven principles are some kind of creed.

Even with all these explanations, if you are asked what Unitarian Universalists believe and you mention those seven principles, many people think you are telling them that we Unitarian Universalists have a creed. Therefore, when I am asked what I believe, I prefer to reduce confusion by not mentioning the seven principles right away.

(2) A second possible response you might give to the question, “What do you Unitarian Universalists believe?” is to say something like this: We don’t have a creed or a statement of beliefs at all; instead what holds us together is our covenant.

This is the most accurate answer you could possible give. But if you give that answer, you’re liable to get a response that sounds like something out of an old Bill Cosby comedy routine: “Rrrright…. What’s a ‘covenant’?” Which means you have to be prepared to be able to give a short and easy-to-understand definition of “covenant.” So what is a covenant?

In our religious tradition, a covenant is a formal voluntary agreement, made by and voluntarily agreed upon by the members of a church, an agreement which constitutes those individuals into a formal religious organization. Typically, a covenant will outline how individual members of the congregation intend to treat each other, and it outline the relation they intend to have with something that is greater than themselves. Typically, a covenant is a written document, developed by the membership of the church along with the minister (if they have a minister), voted on by the entire congregation, and often actually signed by all church members.

Now this is a wonderful answer to give when someone asks you what “you Unitarian Universalists believe anyway”: simply say that we don’t have set beliefs but we do have a covenant; then brief describe what a covenant is; and you will have given an answer that is both accurate and satisfactory.

There’s only one problem: our church doesn’t have a covenant any more. That is to say, while we do have an implicit covenant, we no longer have an explicit written covenant. We haven’t had a written covenant since William Potter’s day, and William Potter was minister of this church from 1861 to 1893. Now I know Potter has a high reputation, and look, we even have a statue of him standing over in the corner of the sanctuary. But I’m not a fan of Potter, and my main criticism and complaint about him is that he did not seem to understand covenants, or why they are so important. Potter thought he was a very advanced thinker, and he got this church to leave the American Unitarian Association and join a new religious group he helped found, the Free Religious Association. The FRA was so free that it never amounted to much of anything — rather than an organization, it would be best to call it a disorganization, and it didn’t live past Potter’s generation. Fortunately, Potter’s successor, Paul Revere Frothingham, got us back into the American Unitarian Association. Unfortunately, we never got a new covenant.

Yet although we no longer have a written covenant, over the past three years, I managed to piece together an implicit covenant. I started with the little cards that you have to sign when you become a church member; I added in a few bits from the church bylaws; then I started reading what I pieced together at the beginning of each Sunday morning worship service. When people came to me and suggested changes, I’d make the change, and start reading the changed version. It’s been a year now since anyone suggested changes, and this is what our implicit covenant now sounds like:

Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by some creed or dogma, but by our covenant: We come together in love to seek after truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives; and in the spirit of love we care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world.

However, this is not a real covenant: the members of this church have not voted on it, nor do we ask new members to sign it. So if you try to tell someone that we Unitarian Universalists don’t have set beliefs but we do have covenant, then you will have to try to explain that our church doesn’t really have a covenant but we sort of have something that might be a covenant…. by which point the person who asked you that question will be thoroughly confused.

(3) So let me give you a third possible response to the question, “What do you Unitarian Universalists believe?” You might choose to give a poetic or metaphorical answer to that question. You might answer something like this: We are like a group of spiritual pilgrims who have banded together to become companions on our spiritual journeys to,– well, we don’t quite know where our spiritual journeys are headed.

This is the answer that I am most likely to give these days. I like this answer because then I can show my questioner the image of the pilgrim in this huge mosaic here behind the pulpit. (Since this image is on a free postcard that you can pick up by the front door, and since this image is also on our church Web site, you don’t even have to be standing here in church to show this image of the pilgrim.) You can point to this image and say: — See, this is what our church is all about.

Just to make this perfectly clear, let me describe and explain this image to you:

We know that each one of us is a pilgrim on a spiritual path that is more or less difficult. While we each have to make that spiritual journey on our own, those of us who are here know that it is best if you have companions on your journey. That is what we see in this mosaic: A pilgrim walks up a steep and dangerous mountain path, a path so steep that one false step could send him plummeting into the gorge below. But behind the pilgrim we see a guardian angel, ready to extend a steadying hand if the pilgrim stumbles.

To me, that guardian angel is the embodiment of our congregation, infused with that which is highest and best in the universe. We know that people in this church can extend a helping hand to us when we need it. We know that our congregation, this band of spiritual pilgrims, can exert a steadying influence on each one of us, keeping us from stumbling or falling. This is not the stuff of high drama and excitement: — the mosaic doesn’t show the pilgrim plummeting into the depths with the angel about to perform a heroic rescue. It may be that all we need is to show up here on Sunday morning and know that there are others like us.

And at some point you reach a high point in your spiritual journey. When you reach one of those high points, those transcendent experiences that Emerson wrote about, you may get further insight into the nature of covenant and religious community; as we hear in Everett Hoagland’s poem about a pilgrim who has reached one of those high points:

. . . From here
on the mountain peak the lakes look
like the great, rainfilled foot-

prints of a god. I turn
around and see The Other’s track
merge with mine. . . .

Sometimes we experience moments when we have this incredible sense of deep interconnectedness with other people. It doesn’t matter what those other people believe; it matters only that we are connected. This gets at the essence of who we are as religious people: we are a religious people who sometimes manage to turn around and see The Other’s footprints merge with our own. Then we know, in our deepest being, that connection between all beings.

Everything else about our religious faith can follow from that. Once we experience that — once we turn around and see The Other’s footprint merge with our own footprint, then we must affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. Once we know we’re all interconnected in this way, then we have a gut-level understanding of what a covenant can be. All our deepest values spring from this sense that we are connected with one another, and connected with something greater than ourselves, which some of us might call God and some of us might call the Web of Life; and others of us will have different names and different beliefs, but they all add up to being interconnected.

In short, if someone asks you “what you Unitarian Universalists believe anyway,” you don’t even have to show that person this image of the pilgrim, you can read them Everett’s poem.

We know that when we get hurt by life — when illness or accident strikes; when we get bitter and angry at the world; when someone hurts us deliberately; when life hands us one of its disappointments — we know that when we are hurt by life, there are others around us who can exert a steadying influence on us if we let them; there are those who will offer us a helping hand if we need it. Our church is a place that allows us to be supported and guided and comforted and healed by others. We don’t have to believe in a certain set of beliefs in order for this to be true. We don’t have to be healed by some supposedly holy priest or minister — we are healed and comforted simply by showing up on Sunday morning, and knowing that there are others in our religious community, a community which hovers behind us and which can help us, if we let it, when we need help.

That’s why I am a Unitarian Universalist. That’s why I go to church. Not because I think I have to believe in something. But because every once in a while, when the going gets tough, I need to know that there is a sort of guardian angel in my life. As an independent New Englander, I probably won’t ask for help, and would refuse help if it were offered, but I do need to know that kind of help is available if I wanted it.

And then, when I get to those high points of existence, I know I will turn around, and look back at the footprints I am making as I go on my spiritual journey, and once again see that the footprints of The Other have merged with my own.