Bah, humbug

‘Tis the season to hate Christmas, and your pal Mr. Crankypants is right out there in front of the crowd of Christmas-haters. The two different stories you can read in Matthew and Luke are just fine (though it does irk Mr. C. that Christmas-lovers continually get their angels mixed up with their magi, and their basic Christmas holiday mixed up with their Epiphany holiday). The consumerist Christmas, on the other hand, has no redeeming value, unless you’re a retailer with a heart of black ink.

Into the Christmas consumerist fray steps a brave economist, Professor Joel Waldfogel of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In his book Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Give Presents for the Holidays, Waldfogel “looks at decades of retail spending data to make the case that buying gifts destroys wealth and happiness — and in many cases it would be better to not buy presents for the holidays at all. So put down that credit card and think before you use money you don’t have to buy things that recipients don’t really want.”

Now, repeat after Mr. Crankypants: “Bah! humbug! Christmas humbug!”

Thanks to Carol for the tip!

What Unitarians know…

Back in October, the Wall Street Journal reviewed Sam Harris’s new book under the title “What the Unitarians know (and Sam Harris doesn’t).” It’s well-written, as you’d expect of something in the Wall Street Journal, and gets at many of the blind spots of the New Atheists and those who think religion, morality, and ethics can be based on science. You might not agree with it, you may not like the mildly dismissive reference to the “Unitarians,” but definitely worth reading.

Thanks to Dick D. for pointing this out to me!

Headlights

Carol came to the church last night at about quarter to ten to pick me up. We got in the car, and we both suddenly realized the headlights weren’t on. “I was sure I put them on,” muttered Carol, and sure enough, she had put them on — but both bulbs were burned out. She backed up, back to the bright outdoor lights near my office. I rustled around in the glove compartment, hoping against hope that I had a spare bulb for at least one headlight, but there wasn’t one. I fiddled around under the hood of the car, wishing I had replaced that one headlight as soon as it had burned out a week or so ago. But there was nothing to be done now; we were stuck.

“Let’s drive back anyway,” said Carol, but I wasn’t brave either to drive on brightly-lit roads with no lights, or to leave my high beams on all the time. We found the train schedule on the Web, and had just enough time to walk over to the station and catch the last train home that night.

The train was packed, but we managed to find two seats together. “Was there a game or something?” Carol said. “I heard someone say it was the Sharks game,” I said. Two guys wearing hats with Sharks logos walked into the car and stopped to say hi to some other guys. They jammed themselves into some seats and all opened beers. In Boston, if you’re on a train after a hockey game and a bunch of guys open up some beers, you’d expect things to get loud and you might even worry about fights breaking out; but this being California, all the guys did was stand around and talk quietly and happily to each other about the game.

A thin, young-looking man walked into the car. He was wearing an elaborate headdress made out of balloons. He stopped just inside the door, next to a seat with two children and their parents, and started making a little tiger out of balloons. He talked to a couple of guys standing at the end of the car, talked to people walking by, talked to the children, all the while pumping up balloons and rapidly twisting them and shaping them into a tiger and a turtle. One of the parents gave him some money. He gave each kid a high five, and walked on.

Two young women sitting across the aisle from us stopped him to talk. “I’ll make you a tiger bracelet for three dollars,” he said. One young woman said she guessed she wanted one. “Two for five dollars,” he said, and the second young woman said she guessed she’d take a turtle bracelet. “Put them in the freezer and they’ll last two or three months,” he said. By the time he was done with theirs, someone else wanted a big turtle for his daughter. The man asked him if he did events. “Call my agent,” he said, “that’s my mom. My mom does all my bookings.” How long had he been making things out of balloons? “Since I was six,” he said, “for five years now…” — a pause while he waited for the laughter, then he smiled, all the while twisting balloons together.

At last he left and went on to the next car, and somehow he left some of his cheerfulness behind. Carol said, “He’s good.” I agreed. Carol said, “This was the right train to take.” I felt the same way, and was just as glad that the headlights had burned out so we had had to take the train.

Epilogue: We found an auto parts store open today, got two new bulbs, and everything is back in order now.

Old 100 x 4

I remembered reading somewhere that the Pilgrims liked the tune to “Old Hundredth” because it was lively — not the modernized, plain vanilla, 4/4 version found in most hymnals these days, but the original version that trips up modern singers on the last line because of the change in rhythm. I convinced Amy that we should sing the original version in the intergenerational Thanksgiving service this past Sunday — sure enough, at the 9:30 service all of us (including me!) got tripped up on the rhythm of the last line. At the 11:00 service, I was smart enough to warn people to watch out for that last line, and we sang it without a hitch.

Later I realized I should have created a half-sheet insert of the sheet music for the order of service. Even though fewer and fewer people read music these days, there are still enough music readers that they could have helped keep everyone else on track. (Plus when you provide an insert, it can serve as a teaching and outreach tool — music readers might take it home and learn one of the harmony parts to the music.) Since someone else might actually use such an insert, below is a link to a PDF. The text is a common humanist version of words by Isaac Watts: “From all that dwell below the skies, / Let songs of hope and faith arise, / Let peace, good will on earth be sung, / Through every land by every tongue.”

Old Hundredth (original form).

The Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, sings their doxology to Old Hundredth every week — but they use different versions of the tune, including the original version above, and a version by Susan Conant with more modern harmonies and even more interesting rhythms. If you’re going to sing the same thing every week, you might as well make it interesting! In that spirit, here’s yet another version of Old Hundredth — William Walker’s arrangement of Old Hundredth from The Southern Harmony (1835), laid out in classic shape-note fashion on a half-sheet size suitable for an insert into an order of service:

Old Hundredth arr. by William Walker.

Stupid Thanksgiving jokes

Q: How do you make a turkey float?
A: One turkey, two scoops of ice cream, and root beer.

Q: Why did the turkey cross the road?
A: It was the chicken’s day off.

Q: Why did the Unitarian Universalist turkey cross the road?
A: To support the other turkey on its spiritual path.

Q: How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to stuff a turkey?
A: One, but you have to push really hard to get him into the turkey.

I was supposed to have Thanksgiving with my Unitarian Universalist relatives, but I couldn’t take it. I left early. I didn’t mind having to join the Committee for the Implementation of Roasted Foodstuffs. I didn’t mind deciding not to have turkey so we could protest the poor working conditions of poultry workers. But after five hours of sitting in a circle trying to reach consensus on how to make stuffing for the turkey we weren’t going to have, I gave up and went to MacDonalds.

Told you they were stupid jokes.

“Mission drift”

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about possible reasons behind congregational decline, or at least the reasons behind congregations surviving but not thriving. Peter Stienke, a respected expert in congregational dynamics, has an article in the latest issue of Christian Century magazine titled “Buckle Up: Congregation Change Isn’t Easy.” In this article, Steinke defines what he calls “mission drift:”

…Some members say their congregation has a sense of mission because they have a mission statement. Sad to say, few know what it is.

Limping along without a focus is called mission drift. It is what happens when people have forgotten what their objective is and are just going through the motions. To judge from my experience, congregations in mission drift will at some point:

  • engage in conflict,
  • suffer a malaise of spirit
  • decline in some statistical manner
  • adapt to their most immature members
  • fail to mobilize people’s gifts and energy
  • surrender to apathy or complacency
  • do little planning
  • become turned in on themselves
  • blame outside forces (or perhaps one another) for their depression, and/or
  • be unable to make effective appropriate changes.

Interestingly, I’d say that this list of symptoms also applies to congregations that are in a stalled transition from a pastoral-size congregation (average attendance of up to 150) to a program-size congregation (average attendance of over 200). This suggests that there might be some correlation between mission drift and a stalled size transition. I say “correlation” because I’m not willing to assign a causal connection between the two. While it seems possible that mission drift could stall a size transition, wouldn’t there be some kind mission in place to prompt growth before the stall happened? And it’s hard to imagine how that a size transition somehow magically makes a congregational mission disappear. Perhaps there’s an underlying cause, e.g., perhaps when a congregation gets up past an average attendance of 150, the old informal communications network breaks down — where everyone just knows what they need to know — and there is as yet no formal communications network in place to effectively pass on the mission statement to newcomers, and to repeatedly remind old-timers.

100 years later

Today, I went on the Powell’s Books Web site and ordered Mark Twain’s Autobiography, published on November 15, 100 years after Twain’s death. Coincidentally, today Dick D. from the Palo Alto church sent me this passage which he found in Twain’s Autobiography:

The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.

As Dick said, plus ça change….

Welcome to the club, Christians

In an article in Christianity Today titled “The Leavers,” author Drew Dyck informs the fairly conservative Christian readers of that periodical that young Christians are leaving religion behind:

At the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, top political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell presented research from their book American Grace, released last month. They reported that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).”

There has been a corresponding drop in church involvement. According to Rainer Research, approximately 70 percent of American youth drop out of church between the age of 18 and 22. The Barna Group estimates that 80 percent of those reared in the church will be “disengaged” by the time they are 29….

This is not a new trend for us Unitarian Universalists — at a rough estimate, only 15% of the people raised as Unitarian Universalists stay with it as adults. Welcome to the club, conservative Christians! (Oh, and by the way, could you please send the folks who leave your churches our way? — some of our best Unitarian Universalists are people who were born into conservative Christian churches, and left as young adults.)

The habits of graceful growth (and decline)

Fourth and last in a series | First post in the series

There are two common threads running through the first three post in this series on growth. While I never stated the first of these threads explicitly, attentive readers will have noticed that whether you want your congregation to stay the same size gracefully, or decline gracefully, or perhaps even grow gracefully, I believe you must (1) know what your congregation stands for, and (2) provide steady and consistent management for your congregation.

While some Unitarian Universalist congregations have a clear sense of what their congregation stands for, in my experience the vast majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations do not provide steady and consistent management over a period of years and decades. This is half of the reason why most congregational surveys are a waste of time — you go through all the work of doing a survey, and within months lay leaders have gone on to other things. This is also why it’s often a waste of time to bring in an outside consultant — you spend all that money on an outside consultant, and a year later the consultant’s recommendations have been essentially forgotten. More than once, I have found myself in a situation where, as a staff person, I’m still trying to implement the recommendations that came out of a survey or a consultant’s visit a year before, only to find myself taken to task by lay leaders and other staff people who want to move on to something new. “That old consultant was a waste of time,” they’ll tell me, “and his recommendations didn’t work. We need to do something new.” That old consultant’s recommendations didn’t work because no one actually did the long-term work to implement them.

This reality — for it is a reality in most Unitarian Universalist congregations — has to be faced before long-term, consistent, and graceful growth can take place. So why are Unitarian Universalist congregations unable to provide steady and consistent management for graceful growth (or for graceful decline, or graceful steady-state, if that’s the way you need to go)? I can think of several reasons: Continue reading →