Category Archives: Liberal religion

The importance of membership

How important is the size of a congregation’s membership? Here’s Kennon Callahan’s response:

“Regrettably, in many of the churches in our country there is a preoccupation with membership. A simple illustration will suffice: Two ministers meet at a conference. The one minister is in the process of moving to a new pastorate. The other minister, in an almost automatic way, asks, ‘How many members does your new church have?’ The more important question would be, ‘How many people is your new church serving in mission?'” (Kennon Callahan, Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, 1st ed., Jossey-Bass, 1983, pp. 2-3.) And what does Callahan mean by “mission”? He defines it thus: “…in doing effective mission, the local congregation focuses on both individual as well as institutional hurts and hopes.”

Of course it’s more complicated, and more nuanced, than these bald statements would imply. For the complex, nuanced version, you’ll have to read the first chapter of Callahan’s book yourself.

Some criteria for seriously innovative worship

A friend of mine who’s headed towards liberal ministry told me that she hopes to do more innovative worship when she finally gets into a local congregation. I would tend to agree with that feeling. But over the years, I’ve seen many attempts at innovative worship either founder on the rocks of reality, or drift into blandness and puerility. Perhaps it is possible to chart out a better course.

Here is my attempt at listing some of the criteria we might use when creating seriously innovative worship — in a liberal religious context:

Criterion 1 — Seriously innovative worship has to encompass multiple theological stances. Circle worship is too often grounded either in a limited Neopagan theological stance (e.g., in Starhawk’s Wiccanism), or in a limited liberal Christian stance (e.g., in Letty Russell’s “church in the round”). Like conventional liberal religious worship, seriously innovative worship will work well with humanism, liberation theologies, contemporary liberal Christianity, Neopaganism, feminist theology, etc.

Criterion 2 — Seriously innovative worship must be scalable. A big problem with many circle worship and alt.worship approaches is that they work best for small groups (under a hundred people). If we’re going to be seriously innovative, we’re not going to limit ourselves to a certain size of worship service.

Criterion 3 — Seriously innovative worship cannot require additional worship planning time. Both paid clergy and volunteer worship leaders tend to have inelastic schedules that cannot accommodate even another two hours of worship preparation a week. Seriously innovative worship will be practical, and fit in real world time constraints.

Criterion 4 — Seriously innovative worship should be radically inclusive, allowing first-time visitors to participate fully. Seriously innovative worship, in the best tradition of liberal religion, will invite everyone to participate: children may stay for the whole service if they choose; all elements of the service are understandable; all may participate in communion (traditional communion, flower communion) or similar rituals when offered; there are no bits that only worship leaders see and hear because everyone can see and hear everything; and so on.

Criterion 4 — Seriously innovative worship should always have something for the person who has come that day in sadness or sorrow, or joy, looking for a place and a community to support them in sadness or joy. Seriously innovative worship will support us through real human hurts and hopes.

Criterion 5 — Seriously innovative worship for liberal religion cannot discard intellectual content. A defining characteristic of religious liberals is that we are thinkers; while we probably want to encourage more feeling in worship, that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of thinking. We will come out of seriously innovative worship with something to think about for the rest of the week.

Criterion 6 — Seriously innovative worship for liberal religion will remain connected with the historical roots of liberal religious worship. All innovation requires a deep understanding of, and feel for, an existing tradition. Seriously innovative worship won’t be widely adopted unless it grows out of a common experience most religious liberals share, bringing new life and energy to our existing tradition.

The next step is to take these six criteria, and start applying them to our current attempts at innovative worship….

How we treat volunteers

“If you treat an expert like a novice, you’ll fail.” — This is how Seth Godin ended yesterday’s blog post about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. If you’re not familiar with the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, you might have run into Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager, which is another system that gets at the same basic idea — that you have to treat a rank beginner differently than you treat someone who’s been on the job for years. This is more than an idea; it’s an essential rule for any effective organization.

Unitarian Universalist congregations routinely break this rule. On the one hand, we take rank beginners, people who are new to Unitarian Universalism and new to volunteering in a congregation, and shove them into important committee slots and Board positions that really should be filled by long-term, committed Unitarian Universalists with experience in running our kind of congregations. In so doing, we break the rule by sticking novices into positions that should be filled by experts. On the other hand, we often treat experienced volunteers as though they are imbeciles, and the perfect example of this is when we give one of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s curriculums (which are all written to be “teacher-proof,” to support rank novices) and hand it to someone who is a skilled and gifted teacher and expect them to follow that curriculum. In so doing, we break the rule by treated an experienced volunteer like a novice.

In many Unitarian Universalist congregations, volunteer management consists of trying to find warm bodies with no real skills to fill volunteer job vacancies. Instead, we could think of volunteer management as a way of equipping and transforming persons over time so that they acquire valuable skills that will help them carry our larger mission in the world. Take the example of Sunday school teachers: We would still offer the UUA’s teacher-proof curriculums to all teachers, but we would set the expectation that the more experienced a teacher is, the more we expect them to draw on their own skills to create transformative experiences that will help their classes live out the larger mission of our congregation.

To quote Seth Godin once again: “If you treat an expert like a novice, you’ll fail.”

Balancing the equalitarian and libertarian impulses

“The two main elements of which American democracy is compounded may be seen united in the familiar phrases of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ One element is the idea of equality; the other is the idea of liberty. These are not only different ideas — they are in some ways quite contradictory. Equalitarianism implies the individual’s responsibility to and dependence on the community; libertarianism implies the community’s responsibility to and dependence on the individual. … Although the equalitarian and libertarian tendencies were each predominant at one or another period in our history, neither alone defines American democracy. Rather, it is their imperfect fusion, their interconnection, and their interaction.” — from “American Democracy and Music (1830-1914)” by Irving Lowens, in Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 265-266.

The problem with American democracy in the past three decades, it seems to me, is that the libertarian impulse has been slowly swamping the equalitarian impulse.

This problem pervades our society, and our congregations are not immune from it. The question facing us, then, is simple: How can we promote a better balance between the equalitarian and libertarian impulses within our congregations?

In the long run

“In the long run we are all dead.”

So said economist John Maynard Keynes in “A Tract on Monetary Reform” (1923). That’s a delightful statement in and of itself, taken completely out of context. It’s even better in context. Keynes is making an argument reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that it’s rather too easy to take the very long view. If you really want to take a long view as an economist, you can simply say that in the end everyone’s going to be dead, which means it’s really easy to make economic predictions, e.g., in a hundred years the current economic crisis won’t seem so bad, because we’ll all be dead.

It’s easy to make this kind of mistake in your local congregation. In a hundred years, it won’t matter if the roof is leaking. Compared to the infinitudes of Transcendentalist theology, it doesn’t matter if the grass is all dead on the children’s play area at church. Both these are true but pointless statements. This kind of attitude doesn’t get you very far.

It’s also easy to make the opposite mistake: only paying attention to the problems that are staring you in the face right here and now. Don’t fix the roof until it leaks, and then wait a couple of year until we have enough money in the operating budget. Don’t worry about the lack of grass in the children’s play area until the rainy season begins, until the children’s favorite game becomes mud wrestling. As with the previous attitude, this kind of attitude doesn’t get you very far.

In my sixteen years of working in local congregations, I have found one of the hardest tasks is finding a good balance between these two extremes. It’s easy and ultimately useless to take the very long view that we’ll all be dead. It is equally easy, and in the end equally useless, only to pay attention to problems that hit you in the face. It’s really hard to try to predict problems far enough in advance to deal with them in a timely manner, but not so far in advance that you’re wasting your time solving them now.

“I think it might be a crisis…”

Carol and I were talking about the ongoing trend of civic disengagement.

“I think it might be a crisis,” she said.

I think she’s right. There are fewer people than ever before who understand how to be good institutionalists. Most people don’t belong to more than one or two voluntary associations. There are many people who spend all their non-work hours doing nothing more than passively consuming entertainment.

We all know that civic disengagement has an adverse effect on democracy. But in a democracy, where religious organizations are voluntary associations, civic disengagement also has an adverse effect on organized religion. I’d be willing to say that of all the social factors that are pushing organized religion into decline, civic disengagement may be the most powerful such force.

Ταυτ ειδως σοφος ισθι, ματην δ'’ Επικουρον εασον
που το κενον ζητειν, και τινες αι μοναδες.

— Automedon

Samuel Johnson includes this as the epigram preceding his essay “The Study of Life” (Rambler 180, Saturday 7 December 1751). Johnson provides the following translation:

On life, on morals, be thy thoughts employ’d;
Leave to the schools their atoms and void.

This is a nice commentary on the current disagreements in our society about whether science provides all answers. Clearly, these disagreements have been going on at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Johnson, addressing the same problem in the eighteenth century, provides the following anecdote, in which no one comes out looking perfect:

“It is somewhere related by LeClerc that a wealthy trader of good understanding, having the common ambition to breed his son a scholar, carried him to a university, resolving to use his own judgment in the choice of a tutor. He had been taught, by whatever intelligence, the nearest way to the heart of an academic, and at his arrival entertained all who came to him with such profusion, that the professors were lured by the smell of his table from their books, and flocked around him with all the cringes of awkward complaisance. This eagerness answered the merchant’s purpose. He glutted them with delicacies, and softened them with caresses till he prevailed upon one after the other to open his bosom and make a discovery of his competitions, jealousies, and resentments. Having thus learned each man’s character, partly from himself and partly from his acquaintances, he resolved to find some other education for his son, and went away convinced that a scholastic life has no other tendency than to vitiate the morals and contract the understanding. Nor would he afterward hear the praises of the ancient authors, being persuaded that scholars of all ages must have been the same, and that Xenophon and Cicero were professors of some former university, and therefore mean and selfish, ignorant and servile, like those whom he had lately visited and forsaken….

“A man of learning is expected to excel the unlettered and unenlightened even on occasions where scholarly attainments are of no use; and among weak minds loses part of his reverence by discovering no superiority in those parts of life in which all are unavoidably equal.”

Alas, I still have no way of including the diacritical marks with ancient Greek — those of you who are classicists (which I emphatically am not) will notice that I had to include a couple in the above passage, but many more are missing. Sorry, classicists!

μετρον αριστον

— Cleobulus the Lindian

Samuel Johnson translates this phrase as “Mediocrity is best”, where we should take “mediocrity” to refer to “the quality or condition of being between two extremes… a quasi-technical term, with reference to the Aristotelian theory of ‘the mean.'” (OED)

Liberal religious dictionary: Sin

sin, noun. 1. An action which deserves universal condemnation, and which promotes evil rather than good in the world. Sin exists among politicians and other secular leaders who set policies with which we disagree; however, sin does not exist among religious liberals. The following sentence is a proper use of the word — When Governor Sanford cheated on his wife, it was a sin. However, when the speaker is a religious liberal, the proper construction would be as follows — When I cheated on my spouse, we went into couples therapy together so we could resolve our issues. (N.B.: For those religious liberals who agreed with Governor Sanford’s policies, his action was not a sin, but was instead evidence that he needed therapy.)