Our congregation’s CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapter asked me to meet with them this evening and talk with them about Unitarian Universalism. Which forced me to a quick overview of the current state of Unitarian Universalism. Here’s my short list of what we stand for these days:

1. We’re non-creedal. We explicitly state that we don’t tell you what to believe.
2. But we have boundaries, too. One of our boundaries: you shouldn’t come into a Unitarian Universalist congregation and tell other people what to believe.
3. We’re pro-science. For example, we do not find evolutionary biology to be threatening to our religion.
4. We’re disorganized. Like the rest of the religious liberals (or spiritual progressives, if you like that name better), we can’t seem to get our act together organizationally speaking.
5. We’re “post-Christian.” To my friend the rabbi we look like Christians, but more conservative Christians are quite sure that we are not Christians. So I’d say we’re post-Christian and proud of it.
6. We’re relatively open. No human community is perfect, and we have our moments of intolerance, but as religious organizations go we’re pretty open.

As one example of a definition of Unitarian Universalism, I passed out printed copies of Time Berners-Lee’s online essay WWW, UU, and I — which I still think is one of the best expositions of what it means to be a Unitarian Unviersalist in our time.

Then I talked a little bit about where Unitarian Universalism seems to be heading. Acknowledging that we’re too anarchic to really agree on a direction in which to head, here’s my short list of preferred destinations:

1. We should be moving towards a new way of organizing. The organizational structure of most Unitarian Universalist congregations keeps us at 50 to 100 members. We should adopt a scalable organizational architecture. I like the idea of small groups linked in larger web formations (see Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics for a good discussion of this, or the Small Group Ministry Network for another approach).
2. We should be interpreting the Western religious traditions (Western Christian, Jewish, and European pagan traditions) to support the healing of Nature and the earth.
3. We should be working on building dialogue between secular non-religious folk and religious liberals, helping both groups to find common causes on which they can work together.

Towards the end, we also talked about how various religious liberal groups — pagans, Unitarian Universalists, liberal Christians, liberal Jews — could work together on the same sex marriage issue. We all pretty much agreed that this is the big issue facing religious liberals in Massachusetts today. (So I told the CUUPS group about the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry and Mass Equality — send them money, and sign up to receive email updates from them!)

That’s my quick overview of Unitarian Universalism. Your results may vary. No guarantees that I will agree with myself tomorrow.