Category Archives: Liberal religion

Case study: small groups

About nine months ago, a men’s group in the congregation here in Palo Alto made a decision to expand their membership. They already had a solid program in place, so when they came to me for advice I gave them the standard ideas for growing small groups: share your enthusiasm and extend personal invitations to others to join the group; assume you’re going to have newcomers at every meeting and plan how you’re going to integrate them; plan from the beginning to split into two groups when you get to ten members; constantly train new leaders; start the new groups at different times from the old group (different day of the week, different time of day) to accommodate different schedules. They asked me if I cared whether all the participants were members of the congregation. Heck no, I said, this is an important ministry we offer to the community, why would we shut people out?

Within a few months, their attendance had grown enough that they had to split that first group. Since the first group met in the evening, they added a second group for those who preferred to meet during the daytime. Both groups have continued to grow, and the leaders of the two groups are already talking about splitting the evening group. They’re expecting that they’ll be ready to split the morning group within six months.

The evening group invited me to attend a recent meeting, which I did with pleasure — and I was frankly curious about this group that had become so popular that they’re ready to split yet again. After the meeting (about which I’ll tell you nothing, since they have a confidentiality agreement for their group), the leaders asked me for feedback. I told them they did everything right: The first few minutes when someone walks in are crucial, and their non-verbal communication was open and welcoming — they greeted people, walked towards them, met their eyes, shook hands with them. The program topic was really rich, and the group leaders managed to keep a good balance between an open discussion, while at the same time urging men to talk about their feelings for this difficult topic. We did a little bit of problem-solving around specific situations that came up during the meeting — during which, I kept reminding them that leading a small groups is a balancing act where you’re always adjusting; therefore the time to worry is when you don’t feel a little off balance.

They’re proceeding with plans for continued growth. Nothing is definite yet, although there is talk about having a couple of meetings a year when all the men’s groups that came from that original men’s group get together on a Saturday and socialize.

Now, since this is a case study, here are some questions for reflection:

1. The Palo Alto congregation has about 275 members. How many men’s groups would you plan for? In other words, what do you think is the upper limit for growth?
2. If men from other nearby Unitarian Universalist congregations started attending men’s groups at the Palo Alto congregation, do you see that as a problem? Why or why not?
3. What percentage of non-Unitarian Universalist men do you think is allowable?
4. What could be done to keep the men’s groups connected with the congregation?
5. What can be done to maintain “quality control,” that is, to make sure the men’s groups that split off maintain the same high quality program as the original one?
6. Is it a problem that these are men’s groups? What about women’s groups? What about mixed gender, or non-specific gender groups?

The greatest Universalist on earth

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the person who was arguably the most famous Universalist ever: the great showman and promoter, P. T. Barnum, who was born on July 5, 1810. His name still lives on in the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus; and his reputation lives on in a remark he supposedly made, that there’s a sucker born every minute (actually, there is no record that he ever said that).

It is less often remembered that Barnum was a great supporter of many reform causes. Most notably, he supported the temperance movement, and felt that his shows and entertainments helped provide recreational options that could keep people from drinking.

Barnum was also a tireless supporter of Universalism, and a supporter of Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained in the United States by a denominational body. He helped endow Tufts, originally a Universalist college, and for many decades Tufts displayed a stuffed elephant from Barnum’s circus. He even spent time with Quillen Hamilton Shinn, the great Universalist missionary of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and supposedly admired Shinn’s showmanship.

Not long before he died, Barnum wrote a moving statement of his religious identity, titled “Why I am a Universalist.” Some years ago, I adapted a portion of it so it could be used as a responsive reading in contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations:

I base my hopes for humanity on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the race,
The Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity.
It is rather absurd to suppose a heaven filled with saints and sinners shut up all together within four jeweled walls and playing on harps, whether they like it or not.
I have faint hopes that after another hundred years or so, it will begin to dawn on the minds of those to whom this idea is such a weight, that nobody with any sense holds this idea or ever did hold it.
To the Universalist, heaven in its essential nature is not a locality, but a moral and spiritual status, and salvation is not securing one place and avoiding another, but salvation is finding eternal life.
Eternal life has primarily no reference to time or place, but to a quality. Eternal life is right life, here, there, everywhere.
Conduct is three-fourths of life.
This present life is the great pressing concern.

I continue to be moved by the idea that eternal life is a quality, it is right living that can happen in the here and now. Though I am not a theist in the sense Barnum was, this basic concept remains a central part of my own Universalist faith today: this present life is the great pressing concern.

So happy birthday, Phineas Taylor Barnum!

More about Barnum and his Universalism here.

Paying up

The email message from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) was concise: “Your membership is going to expire in 60 days.” The question that now confronts me is whether I’m going pay their new, greatly increased fee in order to renew my membership. And therein hangs a tale.

A couple of years ago, the leadership of the UUMA made what seems on the face of it to be a logical decision: they decided that they were going to hire an executive director to oversee the activities of the association. There had long been a paid administrator of the UUMA, but the volunteer board saw great possibilities in adding another employee, someone who was more than an administrator, someone who could provide leadership to move the organization in exciting new directions. So far, so good.

Since the rest of this post will be of primary interest to a small number of my readers, I’ll continue it after the jump… Continue reading →

Two more UU two hundredth birthdays

With all the attention that’s being paid to the two hundredth anniversary of Theodore Parker’s birth, I somehow missed two other two hundredth birthdays — one of a Unitarian and one of a Universalist.

The Unitarian first: James Freeman Clarke was born on April 4, 1810. Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and Harvard professor, Clarke also published the Western Messenger, which historian David Robinson has called the first Transcendentalist periodical; some of Margaret Fuller’s earliest work was published in the Western Messenger. Robinson adds, “Few Unitarians of his day or after have made a larger contribution to Unitarianism.”

In 1886, Clarke printed a revision of the Five Points of Calvinism into “Five Points of the New Theology,” an optimistic statement of Unitarian faith, in which he said he believed in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever. This affirmation of faith became widely popular in Unitarian circles, and remained popular for decades — I remember hearing it in the Unitarian church of my childhood in the late 1960s.

You can read more about Clarke in the article at the UU Historical Society’s Dictionary of UU Biography. And tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Universalist who was born two hundred years ago this year — possibly the most famous Universalist that ever lived.

Water communion, and the interconnectedness of all living beings

Story for water communion service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto:

Each year we do this water communion service. When we share our water in the common bowl, it symbolizes that while we are separate people, we are also part of an interdependent community.

You probably know about the water cycle. When it rains, water falls from clouds onto the ground, and eventually it flows into a river, and all rivers flow down to the ocean. Water evaporates from the ocean and forms clouds, the clouds drift over the land, it rains, and the cycle begins again. You’re in the middle of this cycle because you drink about 2 liters of water every day, and then you sweat or urinate and put water back into the water cycle. So water is constantly on the move.

You probably know that water is made up of molecules, and that each water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Water molecules are incredibly tiny, so tiny you cannot see them. If you had 18 grams of water, or a little more than half an ounce, that would be about 6 x 10^23 molecules. The molecular weight of water is approximately 18, and therefore 18 grams of water should have a number of molecules equal to Avogadro’s number, or 6.02 x 10^23.

This is a fairly large number:
602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules —
which is the same as 6.02 x 10^23 molecules, or we can also say 602 sextillion molecules.

If you’re a child who weighs about 77 pounds, or 35 kilograms, then you have about 20 liters of water in your body (adults, you can multiply up to figure it out for yourselves). That’s approximately 20,000 grams of water, or 6.02 x 10^26, or 602 septillion, molecules of water in your body if you’re a child. And if you drink 2 liters of water a day, you’re replacing about ten percent of that, or 6 x 10^25 molecules, each day. So if you are 3,650 days old (that’s ten years old), about 2.2 x 10^28 water molecules have already passed through your body. And here’s what that number looks like:

22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules have passed through your body in ten years.

Because water is constantly cycling around, and because every human being has such large numbers of molecules of water cycling through them, there’s a very good chance that each one of us has at least a few molecules of water that were formerly in the body of Socrates, the great philosopher. We each probably have some molecules of water that were once in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the Buddha, and any number of great and wise people who lived in the past.

Thus when we say that we are all interconnected, that statement is quite literally true — we are all interconnected through the water cycle, not only with each other, but with all living beings past and present. Jesus, Confucius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eliza Tupper Wilkes who was the first Unitarian minister in Palo Alto — you might be literally connected with each of these good and wise people.

Tip of the hat to Steve Hersey for saying something much like this in the Watertown, Mass., UU congregation many years ago.

Dr. Watts

I’ve been reading through Isaac Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs. He uses clear, vigorous language to present vivid and compelling imagery. I often disagree with his theology, but I think his hymns have rarely been surpassed in the English language. And sometimes I do I agree with his theology. Take, for example, this hymn:

Hymn 1:24.
The rich sinner dying, Psalm 49:6-9. Eccl. 8:8. Job 3:14-15.

1 In vain the wealthy mortals toil,
And heap their shining dust in vain,
Look down and scorn the humble poor,
And boast their lofty hills of gain.

2 Their golden cordials cannot ease
Their pained hearts or aching heads,
Nor fright nor bribe approaching death
From glittering roofs and downy beds.

3 The lingering, the unwilling soul
The dismal summons must obey,
And bid a long a sad farewell
To the pale lump of lifeless clay.

4 Thence they are huddled to the grave,
Where kings and slaves have equal thrones;
Their bones without distinction lie
Amongst the heap of meaner bones.

Now that’s what I call vivid imagery. Wouldn’t you enjoy singing that hymn? Wouldn’t it help keep you focused on what’s really important in life?

How to disestablish your congregation

If you’re part of any liberal religious community, your congregation is no longer a part of established power structure of the United States. We religious liberals are so far out of the establishment that the majority of U.S. residents don’t even know who we are. This is why so many people in the U.S. believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim — he’s actually a religious liberal (of the mainline Protestant variety), but more U.S. residents know what Islam is than know what liberal religion is, so since Obama is not a born-again Christian they assume he’s a Muslim. As for you, they probably think you belong to a cult.

Your liberal congregation has already been disestablished in pragmatic terms, so now it’s time to disestablish your congregation in terms of self-perception, and in terms of the way you organize. Here’s a handy checklist to help you accomplish this goal:

(1) Re-focus your energy on the core mission of liberal religious congregations: holding common worship services where we focus on that which is larger than our individual selves; raising our children in religious community; holding appropriate rites of passage when people are born, when they marry, and when they die.

(2) Recognize that what we stand for as religious liberals is extremely countercultural in today’s society: we distrust consumerism because it weakens and shrivels our best selves; we distrust the current economic system (which is supported by both liberals and conservatives) both because it is founded on consumerism, and because at present it is increasing the number of poor people in the U.S.; we reject the idea that born-again Christianity is the norm against which all other religion is judged; etc. These countercultural stands mean that we will never be fully accepted in the halls of established power. Continue reading →

This includes us

If you’re an anti-Christian Unitarian Universalist, hold on for a bit, because this post applies to you, too. In an essay in the most recent Christian Century magazine, the Christian theologian Douglas John Hall writes:

“I remember a conversation early in the 1970s in which a small group of clergy in the city where I lived were discussing the question, “On the pattern of Revelation chapters 2 and 3, what do you think ought to be the ‘message of the Spirit’ to the churches of this city?” I found myself answering this question almost without knowing what I said: ‘The Spirit writes to the churches of North America: Disestablish yourselves!’

“I’m afraid my words fell on the ears of my hearers as though I had been speaking in tongues. But I continued to pursue that theme in many lectures and a whole series of books on the future I envisaged, with the help of many others, for a Christian movement that had seriously tried to disentangle itself from the ethos and assumptions of the imperial peoples of the West, with their explicit or implicit racism, ethnocentrisms, militarism, and ideologies of power….”

So says Donald Hall. And the same thing applies to the Unitarian Universalist movement: we need to disentangle ourselves from the ethos and assumptions of the ruling powers of the United States, to disestablish ourselves (actually, in our case, part of the task is finally to understand how little political influence we actually have, and to re-conceptualize ourselves on that basis).

Discuss.

Here come the Assyrians

When we last left them, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl were about to be burned to death by the evil King Manasseh [cue dramatic music]….

Batman somehow gets one hand free,
Reaches his utility belt, presses
The Assyrian army activation device.
Soldiers appear on the streets of Jerusalem,
Commandoes cut Batman and the others free.
It’s another fighting free-for-all!
Crash! Ka-blam! Manasseh goes down!

Batman swoops over and jumps on Manasseh;
Batgirl and Robin put Bat-manacles on him.
“Time for Plan B,” Manasseh says to himself.
The Assyrians and Batman take Manasseh to Babylon.
Manasseh looks up, and calls on Elohim.
“Elohim,” he says, “I repent! I’ll be good!”
So Elohim lets him go back to Jerusalem.

The Assyrians groan, “Not again! Every time
We think we’ve won, the Judeans repent.
Then the guys writing the Bible badmouth us again!”
Batman just grinned : he’s got Batgirl and Robin.
Manasseh grinned too : the idols are gone;
Elohim gets bribed with burnt sacrifices;
And Manasseh still sits on the throne of David.

2 Chron 33.10-20