Category Archives: Liberal religion

Some New Bedford Unitarians in 1838, part one

I’m slowly assembling biographical notes on the original pewholders of the 1838 meeting house of First Congregational Society of New Bedford (now First Unitarian Church in New Bedford). They were all white and all male (women were not allowed to own pews in 1838), and they ranged in economic status from small business owners to wealthy merchants. Within those limits, they were a fascinating cast of characters, and they were tied together by a web of business interests and kinship ties. I am interested in trying to document that web of relationships in these biographical notes. Here’s the first installment in a series of biographical notes on these pewholders.

This post is mostly a collection of random notes. Head to part two for more interesting stuff.

Continue reading →

Media consumption habits

I live in a city which is very, shall we say, traditional. Many people do not bother with computers, unless they have to use them at work. Whereas all my media consumption happens online. Here’s a conversation I had recently:

Other person: So did you watch the inaguration?

Me: Yeah, I watched it on the BBC Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads. Pause. Other person: Oh. So, um, did, you hear Obama’s speech? …obviously assuming I had not…

Me: Oh, yeah, great speech, loved it.

Yet while I spend hours each day online, I never watch broadcast television, I don’t play video games, I don’t go to movies, and I hardly ever listen to the radio. As a result, my media consumption is pretty much out of synch with the surrounding community. Another typical conversation:

Other person: So why don’t you ever print up copies of your sermons?

Me: I put nearly all my sermons up on my Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads.

Me: Um, you can get to them from the church Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads.

Me: Um, just call the church office and tell Linda which sermon you want, and she’ll mail you a copy.

Other person: OK, thanks!

Me, sotto voce: I’m such a geek.

For auld lang sayne

Today is the 250th birthday of Robert Burns, that great Scots poet. Och, we’d love to claim him as a Unitarian, but he never joined a Unitarian chapel. So we claim him as one of our spiritual ancestors: an anti-Calvinist and religious liberal not unlike some of our New England Arminians, except more anti-clerical, and a better poet. Some of Burns’s burlesques on religion are brilliantly observed, and beneath the scathing satire is a true sympathy for the common people. (I think he might have gotten along with proto-Unitarian Ebenezer Gay of Massachusetts.)

On Burns’s birthday, one is supposed to attend Burns supper. I didn’t do that: I went to a Portuguese feast instead (after all, I live in New Bedford). But the drop of Scots blood in me calls on me to include three of his poems, which you’ll find below: first, a grace to be said before meals; second, the complete poem “Auld Lang Syne”; and finally a longer poem which I would describe as a non-Calvinist religiously liberal poem on morality. Read ’em aloud, and think of Robbie Burns on this, his 250th birthday. Continue reading →

Jesus and Socrates and UU kids

I got asked to serve as the guest editor for the summer number of uu & me, the four-page insert for children that’s in each issue of UU World, the Unitarian Universalist denominational magazine. I talked the editorial board into devoting this issue to Jesus.

Jesus is a big topic, and we knew we couldn’t cover the topic comprehensively in four kid-friendly pages (and we knew that there will be future numbers of uu & me in which to cover other aspects of Jesus). So we decided to do a general introduction to Jesus, and then focus on the parables. The parables, we felt, are among the core teachings of Jesus on which we Unitarian Universalists tend to place most importance, and the parables present wonderful little moral dilemmas that can get kids thinking about Jesus’s teachings.

Jane Rzepka, the minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, is on the editorial board of uu & me. Like me, she was raised as a Unitarian Universalist, and that meant we both learned a lot about Jesus and Socrates in Sunday school. During the course of today’s editorial meetings, we both kept drawing parallels between Jesus and Socrates. For me, the parables of Jesus sound a lot like dialogues of Socrates: they raise more questions than they answer, they are ambiguous, and when you get done reading them you feel as though you’ve learned how to see the world in a new way. Which makes it hard to teach Unitarian Universalist kids about Jesus’s parables: it’s tempting to tell kids what the parables are supposed to mean, but to do so is to bypass the whole purpose of the parables.

Today’s meeting has got me thinking about the parables in a new light. Now I want to go back and re-read them all, and think about how I might present others of Jesus’s parables to school-age children.

A Universalist responsive reading

The Eternal Law of Right

It may be asked, Why do so many people still believe in an angry God?

The answer is, that some people believe what they are taught, and neither dare nor care to question its correctness.

Others believe God is literally angry. A criminal, it is said, fancies he hears the footfall of the pursuer in every unexpected sound.

Our feelings are projected upon everything around us. On this principle, to the wicked, God must seem to be angry.

We reject their fear-inspired notions, and are compelled to believe the testimony of the best thinkers and clearest seers.

We should shape our conduct, not to please or displease the immovable Calm, but to conform the eternal law of right; because in keeping this law “there is great reward.”

Adapted from Through the Shadows (Universalist Publishing House, 1885, p. 45) by Rev. Isaac Case Knowlton, minister of First Universalist Church of New Bedford.

Spend money. Help people.

Doug Muder, who is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Lay Theological Education Task Force (UULTE) wants to ask you a question about how to spend a big chunk of money. Doug writes:

I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Lay Theological Education Task Force (UULTE). We’re supposed to figure out what to do with half the money that was collected for Association Sunday — the half earmarked for “lay theological education.” I’m asking for your blog’s help in starting a discussion about what needs “lay theological education” ought to satisfy. The UULTE task force is soliciting proposals from various organizations, and I’m sure we’ll get plans for a lot of good stuff. (Curricula, new resources, online infrastructure, and so on.) But will we get the stuff that Unitarian Universalists need? If we get it, will we recognize it?

What I’m hoping to see is a lot of testimony by and discussion about individual Unitarian Universalists who find themselves at a plateau. They’re happy with Unitarian Universalism as far as it goes and as far as they understand it, but they feel a call to go deeper and they don’t know how to answer it. Maybe they’ve been trying to answer by doing more: joining committees, starting projects, and so on. But outer work at some point needs to be balanced with some inner work. And how do you do Unitarian Universalist inner work? Or how do you make the leap from being a Unitarian Universalist fellow traveler to feeling like you are really part of the UU tradition?

There are bunch of ideas to disentangle here. Some people talk about “education.” Some talk about “faith development” or “spiritual maturity” or “finding a Unitarian Universalist identity.” I encourage you not to get hung up on words and labels. Think about that person at a plateau: What does s/he need that the community could offer?

In the discussions the task force has had among ourselves, we talk a lot about the gap between the kinds of adult education you’d find at a typical Unitarian Universalist church, and the far more arduous program of a divinity school. What could we offer the person who wants to go deeper, but can’t take years out of his/her life and spend tens of thousands of dollars? That’s the “lay” part of “lay theological education.” You shouldn’t have to become a minister to find yourself as a Unitarian Universalist.

Anyway, you’d be doing me a favor — and helping the Unitarian Universalist Association get insight — if you’d raise these issues on your blog.

Thank you, Doug, for raising these issues, and asking for our responses. A fair number of my readers are not Unitarian Universalists, but I think they should feel free to comment, too.

Key demographic info. for liberal churches

Executive summary: We’re seeing the biggest birth rate since the Baby Boom. Liberal churches need to pay attention to this demographic trend, by welcoming multiethnic families with young children.

So what’s the biggest news for liberal religion in the U.S.? No, it’s not the lousy economy that’s tempting churches into cutting hours for religious educators and other staff members. No, it’s not the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president, which is already changing people’s perceptions of race and racial boundaries.

The biggest news for liberal religion in the U.S. is contained in a report released this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Here’s the relevant quotation from the report’s abstract:

“In 2006, births and fertility rates increased for most states, age groups, and race and Hispanic origin groups. A total of 4,265,555 births were registered in the United States in 2006, 3 percent more than in 2005, and the largest number of births in more than four decades.” [emphasis mine] Link to full report.

In short, 2006 saw the largest number of babies being born since 1961 — the largest number of babies being born since the Baby Boom. Some of the implications for liberal churches are obvious:

(1) Good child care: We had better have good child care in place on Sunday mornings, so that when all those toddlers born in 2006 show up, their parents see clean, safe, pleasant play areas staffed by professional, friendly child care providers.

(2) Increase DRE hours: Many liberal churches are facing budget shortfalls, and have to cut staff salaries in order to balance the budget. The obvious course of action is to cut the minister’s hours or salary, while increasing the line item for the Director of Religious Education. (I say this as a minister in a cash-strapped church, because I know the long-term solution to our immediate revenue problems involves attracting families with young children — if I want to have a job at all, I had better make sure there are lots of kids in my church.)

(3) Become a multiethnic church: The birth rates of white folks are not rising as fast as some other ethnic groups. To have access to the biggest potential pool of newcomers, liberal churches cannot be limited to being ethnic churches, e.g., it’s not going to be enough to be a white folks’ church any longer. Barack Obama’s election broke the second-to-last big racial barrier, the last one being all-white churches. To survive and thrive, white and other racially limited churches have to break that last racial barrier.

(4) Improve kid’s programming: Liberal churches need compelling religious education programs that make kids want to come to church, that help kids learn more, and (key point) that make parents believe that church is vital for their kids. I think that means going beyond limited models of Sunday school. More of my thoughts on this here, but here’s one key point: “For school-aged children, the mix of programs might include multi-generational activities (common worship experiences, social events, intergenerational choirs) along with mixed-age programs for children (workshop rotation, and special projects such as young people’s choir and plays) in addition to closely graded classes containing only one age group.”

(5) Finally, pay attention to demographics: We all know that there are condo complexes that are limited to “active adults over 55,” and some liberal churches might be able to exploit that same idea to build thriving churches of aging Baby Boomers. But my bet is the most secure demographic niche to target right now is white and non-white families with young children — that’s where the growth is, and that’s where the future of the liberal churches lies.

Links to online stories

I’m down with the flu today (it’s been there for a few days, finally caught up with me), and in between naps today I beefed up my Web page of children’s stories for worship services. There are now something like 38 of my own stories-for-all-ages, and direct links to 31 stories on the Church of the Larger Fellowship Web site, including quite a few great stories by Sophia Fahs. This has been one of the most-used pages on my Web site, and I hope this adds to the page’s usefulness.