Category Archives: Religious education

Great stories for UU kids (and adults)

I recently found The Baldwin Project, a Web site dedicated to publishing children’s literature which has entered the public domain. As you may know, in the United States the rights of copyright holders end after 75 years (assuming the copyright holder does not renew the copyright in his or her lifetime), and after that time copyright-protected material enters the public domain. While I have just begun to explore the Baldwin Project Web site, I already found Ellen C. Babbit’s retellings of the Jataka Tales.

The Jataka Tales, as you may know, are more than 500 stories that tell about earlier incarnations of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, the Enlightened One. I’ve been using some of these stories in church school sessions. After telling the children a little about what Buddhists believe about reincarnation, I tell them that each story is like a puzzle — their job is to figure out which of the characters in the story is the Buddha in an earlier incarnation, and why. Then I read the story, and we talk about whom we each think the Buddha is. On Sunday, this prompted a good discussion with one of the 3rd/4th grade groups. We figured out one story, but when we came to “The Woodpecker, Turtle, and Deer,” we couldn’t come to agreement (read the story yourself, and you’ll see why!).

The children learned some more about Buddhism, and more importantly they learned a little bit about how to make moral judgements which may not have one best answer. What could be better in a Unitarian Universalist church school than to run up against a puzzle story where there is no one best answer? You can learn more about the Baldwin Project at:

http://www.mainlesson.com/main/displayarticle.php?article=mission

Memorizing bylaws?

For those of us who do religious education and church administration, this is the time of year when we’re deep into planning for the coming church year. As a result, I’ve been reviewing lots of church school curriculum books so I can make some recommendations to the Lifespan Religious Education Committee. And one small thing has begun to bug me.

I’ve noticed that a number of Unitarian Universalist church school curriculum books spend a lot of time on the “seven principles.” For example, Free To Believe, a newish curriculum book for second graders, has this sample dialogue:

“Do you remember our third principle? (Show the third principle page from the ‘What Do We Believe?’ coloring book. Have the children say the third principle together: ‘We believe that we should accept each other and learn together..’)…”

Notice that what the children are asked to repeat is actually a watered-down version of the seven principles, that ultimately means something rather different than the original. Other church school programs are worse, and even try to get children to memorize the seven principles.

As always, I think this is basically misguided. The “seven principles” are a fairly short section of a much longer section of the UUA bylaws, Article II, the “Principles and Purposes.” But if you read the entire section, the really interesting stuff comes after the “seven principles” — I’m particularly fond of this subsection of the complete “Principles and Purposes”:

“The Association declares and affirms its special responsibility, and that of its member congregations and organizations, to promote the full participation of persons in all of its and their activities and in the full range of human endeavor without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, age, language, citizenship status, economic status, or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.”

That’s the kind of thing I want children to know about our church. I want them to know that they are actually expected to change their behavior because of their faith. But do I want them to memorize it, as if it’s a kind of holy scripture? Well, no, I really don’t.

Long-time DRE Ginny Steel used to say that it’s good to ask children to memorize things — they’re already memorizingdialog from TV showsand bits of video games, so we should get them to memorize more important things. I have asked children to memorize short poems by Unitarian poet William Carlos Williams (some of the kids I knew in Lexington, Mass., still remember “This Is Just To Say”). Occasionally, I’ve had older children memorize bits from various sacred texts — the Hebrew Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Christian scriptures.

Here in our church, we definitely want children to memorize our covenant (but never in some watered-down version) and the words to the song of praise and the doxology. This way, children can participate more easily in the first part of the worship service, even if they’re not yet fluent readers.

But memorize or discuss excerpts from the UUA bylaws? That’s pretty low on my list of priorities for children. And if I did ask them to memorize such material, I would have them memorize the original text if I did it at all. And if I had them memorize anything from the UUA bylaws, I would have them memorize the following section of the principles and purposes first:

“Nothing herein shall be deemed to infringe upon the individual freedom of belief which is inherent in the Universalist and Unitarian heritages or to conflict with any statement of purpose, covenant, or bond of union used by any congregation unless such is used as a creedal test.”

Good Friday for kids

Sometimes adults are curious to know what happens in church school. Here’s a summary of a recent church school session I led.

Lindsay Bates, the parish minister here in the Geneva church, does a Tenebrae service every year. I did a concurrent program for kids on Good Friday. The theology I used is pretty similar to that expressed by Carole Fontaine in a lecture on human rights at General Assembly in 2002: “I like Jesus. He’s my guy. The fact that he’s executed on trumped-up political charges — I mean, he’s the Stephen Biko of the first century. We can work with this!”

We had five children, ages 5 through 11, show up — a good turnout considering that the Tenebrae service was from 8:00 p.m. to just after nine, past many kids’ bedtimes.

The kids and I went off to Pioneer House, along with Yuri, one of the regular child care providers. We built very tall block towers for a while, and then it was time for the story of Good Friday.

My main learning objective was that these UU kids would know what “Good Friday” means. They had all heard Craig’s story of Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem in last Sunday’s worship service, so we went from there. I used excerpts from Sophia Fahs’s Jesus, the Carpenter’s Son, pp. 127-131. I gave them the story of Jesus challenging the commercialization of the Temple, framing this as a tale of a religious challenge to the politicized Temple hierarchy. We looked at pictures of the Temple at Jerusalem from UCLA’s Urban Simulation Team, to get a sense of the scale of action Jesus was involved in. Then I briefly told how Jesus was betrayed to the Roman military police by one of his followers, and then executed on what we now call “Good Friday.” I did not go into details of the means of execution — not with a five year old and a six year old present.

One girl made the obvious comment: “‘Good Friday’! — but it wasn’t good at all, they should’ve called it “Bad Friday.'” Needless to say, we also discussed (at an age-appropriate level) the inherent ambiguity of the story and the attendant difficulties of understanding it fully. The kids were also fascinated by the idea that live animals were sacrificed in the Temple at Jerusalem in Jesus’s day, and we spent a little time discussing this alien notion.

We ended by sharing a snack of cinnamon grahams and apple juice, and then everyone helped clean up.

Spring equinox blues

Transcendentalist that I am, I suppose I should be writing a paean to the season, on this the first full day of spring. But I’m feeling crankier than usual today. I was reading the most recent issue of Christian Century at lunch today, and found more disturbing facts about child care. What really bugged me was hearing about the study that showed (no surprise) that very young children need good to excellent day care, yet only about 8% of day care centers qualify as good to excellent.

More annoying is the fact that Unitarian Universalist congregations are not setting a good example when it comes to child care. We’re all feminists, right? We all support the “7 Principles,” which grew out of the Women and Religion movement, right? One thing I learned from feminist theology — caring for our children cannot be dismissed as “mere women’s work” and therefore unimportant — instead, caring for and nurturing children must be at the center of what we do as human beings. Yet we are all too willing to pay our child care workers less than high school kids get for babysitting.

So let me throw down the gauntlet here. I believe that if Unitarian Universalist congregations truly valued child care, we would consistently pay our child care workers a starting wage of $20 an hour, going up to $30 an hour for experienced workers. (And spare me your budget woes — since most child care workers in our congregations work only 2 to 4 hours a week, this is really a small amount of money). We would pay them to get infant and child CPR training annually, and we would pay for additional in-service training opportunities at least twice a year.

I’d go further than that — all business meetings should provide child care, especially Board meetings and annual congregational meetings. Not to provide child care at such meetings effectively disenfranchises parents with babies and younger children. Which clearly violates our democratic principles.

Funny thing about providing decent child care. Most studies of church growth say that having excellent child care during worship services is one of the keys to congregational growth. When parents, and parents-to-be, first arrive they check out the nursery and the child care workers, and these parents make up a large percentage of newcomers. Want to keep your congregation small? — simply provide inadequate child care by poorly paid workers in a dingy room — and even people without babies will be turned off by your selfish attitude towards those without power. If you wonder why Unitarian Universalism isn’t growing, I contend part of the reason is the way we treat babies and their parents.

One last small rant-and-rave, and I’ll climb down off my soap box. One way you can find out how a congregation really feels about “the inherent worth and dignity of all persons” is to watch how the congregation treats persons who can’t advocate for themselves, people who don’t have any power or money — people like babies. Watch how your congregation treats babies, and you’ll know if your people walk the walk, or if they just talk the talk.

OK, done now. Spring is here — woo, hoo! Maybe the longer days will make me less cranky.

Who should do theology?

Got a message from jfield of Left Coast Unitarian about doing Unitarian Universalist theology. He, too, thinks it is important, but in thinking about going and getting a degree in theology he finds himself less than enthusiastic.

Getting a doctorate isn’t the only way to do theology, I contend. I believe the person who had the most influence on Unitarian Universalist theology in the past century was… Sophia Fahs. Her excellent series of church school curriculum books helped to shape a theology of naturalistic theism that was also receptive to humanism. I was in church school a little past the height of the Sophia Fahs curriculum, but when I look at her books now, it’s clear how her curriculum books shaped me. Jesus the Carpenter’s Son helped me think of Jesus as a fully human political and religious thinker. The Church across the Street shaped my understanding of how I should relate to other faith traditions. Martin and Judy (which my mother taught when she taught Sunday school in the 50’s) has me seeing religion growing out of everyday experiences.

I might put Kenneth Patton second to Sophia Fahs in terms of theological influence. Patton was a humanist who believed in the power of symbols and liturgy. He developed exciting new ways of doing worship services without needing a reference to God, Goddess, C’thulhu, or whatever. You could argue that his experimentation with high-church humanism laid the groundwork for contemporary UU theology. His use of American folk tunes for hymns has, I believe, profoundly shaped the way we conceive of worship — after Kenneth Patton, we have to go beyond music composed by “dead white men” in the high Western tradition. If we would pay more attention, I think we’d see that Patton opened us to amazing possibilities in multiculturalism (even if his personal approach had a whiff of colonialism).

Oh, and forget trying to base theology on the “Seven Principles.” While Christian theologians do tend to ground their theology in interpretations of their sacred texts, the “Seven Principles” are excerpts from the UUA’s bylaws, and — alas — lack the poetry and human depth of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. The “Seven Principles” function fairly well as a profession of faith (thought I still prefer the old Universalist Winchester Profession for sheer poetry, even though I pretty much disagree with it) — but the “SevenPrinciples” are definitely not theology.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if one of the things keeping Unitarian Universalists from doing theology in our local congregations is that we make the false assumption that the “Seven Principles” are sufficient. They aren’t. They say “what,” but not “why” or “how” or “when.”

To answer the question in the title: Yes, Virginia, you should be doing theology, too.

In the church, overnight

We’re here at the church for an OWL retreat, 17 youth in 7th and 8th grades, and four of us adults spending the night (another two adults will come in tomorrow). Worship went a little late tonight. We met in the sanctuary, lit all the candles in the wall sconces, and a candelabra up front — our little church is beautiful in candlelight. We did a lot of singing in the worship service tonight, and it sounded wonderful in that space. It was a good worship service mostly because this is such a good group of youth, particularly kind and supportive of each other.

You always wind up feeling sleep deprived after one of these overnight church retreats. But this is also the kind of thing that really builds church community — and I’m not just talking about building community in youth groups. We Unitarian Universalists should have more overnight retreats for adults. You don’t really know someone until you’ve talked to them about spirituality at 2 in the morning.

It’s official: changes in UU ministry

We all knew it was coming, but it’s official now. At their December, 2004, meeting, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) voted that beginning in September, 2005, they would no longer require candidates for the ministry to concentrate in one of three “tracks” or categories of ministry. In the recent past, new Unitarian Universalist ministers declared a specialty in parish ministry, ministry of religious education, or community ministry. The MFC is the body that credentials new ministers by requiring minimum standards for study and knowledge (including a master of divinity degree), minimum standards of psychological health and flexibility, practical experience including a ministry internship and a chaplaincy internship, and face-to-face interviews.

In the real world, the tracks have been blurred for some time. Parish ministers have been taking positions as ministers of religious education, and ministers of religious education have been taking positions as parish ministers, and similarly with community ministers. My feeling has been that the tracks just meant more paperwork for us ministers — and there really hasn’t been all that much difference between the tracks.

There’s a downside to this decision. Both community ministers and ministers of religious education have worked to expand our understanding of Unitarian Universalist ministry — especially our community ministers, who have taken UU ministry far beyond the bounds of local congregations, out into the wider community through social justice work, community organizing, chaplaincy, etc. I hope that continues.

But on the plus side, I think search committees will feel less restricted. This gets us away from that stark choice — parish minister, or minister of religious education. Now search committees should be open to looking for someone with a mixed set of skills — a preaching minister with lots of experience with children, or an associate minister who would oversee religious education, and have expertise in pastoral counseling for all ages, and so on.

As our church here in Geneva begins to look for a permanent second minister, the MFC’s decision comes as good news. My sense is that the congregation would prefer a second minister who has primary responsiblity for religious education, and who spends a lot of time on worship and administration, and helps Lindsay with pastoral care — in other words, would prefer a sort of mixed minister, with expertise in both parish ministry and the ministry of religious education.

From the March issue of the Pioneer

Excerpts from my latest UUSG newsletter column

This month, I thought I’d offer some random thoughts and observations that have been accumulating in my files.

— The National Institute for Health recently released infant mortality rates for this country for 2002, and for the first time in 60 years, infant mortality rates have risen. I find this a matter of some concern.

— In announcements in the Sunday morning worship services, I said Lindsay and I are ready to implement intergenerational worship every week if that is the pleasure of the congregation. The response to this suggestion ranged widely. A few people, including both parents and empty-nesters, said they’d like to give it a try. A few people said they’d rather leave UUSG than have regular intergenerational worship. Other responses ranged between these two extremes. (To give a wider perspective — one or two Unitarian Universalist congregations already have fully intergenerational worship services, while a handful of others have decided to actively discourage families with children from participating in their congregations at all.)

— I continue to be fascinated by the way this congregation refers to children and teenagers. The preferred word here at UUSG for these people seems to be “students.” Members of the congregation who are under 18 years old are referred to as “student members” in the UUSG bylaws. I have even heard two and three year olds referred to as students. I remain uncertain how to understand what it means to name people in terms of one limited role they may play. Personally, I prefer the term “young people” as it helps me remember these are persons who have inherent worth and dignity.