Signs in Washington

The coverage of Jon Stewart’s sanity rally in Washington, D.C., has been decidedly spotty thus far. Thinking they were only providing some journalistic color, USA Today managed to touch on the real reason any of us reads coverage about such rallies: “The audience came prepared to play along. Many brought signs to underscore the message of reasonableness, or just to be funny.” And then USA Today actually quoted three signs:

I’m somewhat irritated about extreme outrage.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — and spiders.
Stand united against signs.

The New York Times, in order to prove they are more serious than USA Today, deigned to report on only two signs:

Shrinks for sanity.
I can see the real America from my house.

The Washington Post, trying to be just as serious as the New York Times, reported just two signs, except one of the signs was two-sided so they actually reported on three signs, proving they are not as serious as the Times: Continue reading →

Pragmatism and ideologues

Yesterday’s New York Times carried a review of a lecture by historian James T. Kloppenberg, titled “In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed.” According to the article, Kloppenberg contends that Obama is a true intellectual and a “philosopher president,” as were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson.

If Kloppenberg is correct, it is astonishing that Obama was even elected in this age of anti-intellectualism. Kloppenberg identifies Obama’s philosophical stance as American pragmatism, which is not surprising given Obama’s predilection for Reinhold Niebuhr. But given that we live in an age dominated by ideologues, it is therefore also astonishing that this country elected a pragmatist, which is to say a sort of anti-ideologue.

I’m uncomfortable with Obama’s politics; he’s too far to the right for me. But I have been trying to figure out why I am so much more comfortable with Obama than I was with either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, and I suspect it’s because of his philosophical stance. George W. Bush was (and is) an ideologue, someone who believes in an ultimate truth regardless of contradictory evidence (his rigid morality is a result of being an ideologue). Bill Clinton has, as far as I can tell, no philosophy whatsoever beyond mere expediency (and he has no more morality than a stick). It’s not Obama’s politics with which I’m comfortable, but with his philosophy of pragmatism (and with his morals, which are solid while able to grow and mature). I may not like his politics, but Obama is neither an ideologue like George W. Bush, or nothing at all like Bill Clinton.

This has gotten me thinking about the extent to which ideologues and ideologies have taken over the civic space, from the national stage, to science fiction fandom. These days, we have ideologues on the right and on the left and in the center. What little common morality we have is rigid and based on ideology. Ideologues scare the $#!t out of me; now they’re dominating this country, and that really scares the $#!t out of me.

Crickets

It’s a warm evening. I just got up to stretch my legs, and I walked around the church grounds. There are crickets singing in the rose garden in front of the Main Hall, and I stopped to listen for a minute. I’ve heard hardly any crickets this summer, perhaps because the weather has been too cool. When I got back to my office, I realized that there were crickets singing in the little garden outside my office. It’s a peaceful sound. I opened my door to hear them better.

Unitarian Universalist Humanism: Introductory lecture

Introductory lecture delivered tonight, in a course in UU humanism:

In this introductory lecture, I’m going to attempt to outline Unitarian Universalist humanism for you. My primary approach in this lecture is going to be based on an approach used by the humanist theologian Anthony Pinn in his book Varieties of African American Religious Experience. After pointing out the inadequacies of theological traditions which merely point towards some ultimate revelation, something beyond what we see and hear and experience in this life, Pinn describes his approach as follows:

“I want to suggest that the task of … constructive theologies … is more in line with [Gordon] Kaufman’s ‘third-order theology’ and Charles Long’s reflections upon the theology of the opqaue. That is to say, theology is deliberate or self-conscious human construction focused upon uncovering and exploring the meaning and structures of religious experience within a larger body of cultural production. It is, by nature, comparative in a way that does not seek to denounce or destructively handle other traditions.”

I find Pinn’s approach to theology to be incredibly useful for at least four reasons. Continue reading →

Still true today

Dana Greeley, the first president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, wrote the following in 1970:

“I once preached what I thought was a pretty good sermon on ‘The Methodological Conservatism of Theological Liberals.’ We have to be as inventive with our money as we are with tools or medicine or private enterprise. And to me it is more important, and more natural, for liberal religion to be bold, and to grow, than for IBM or some new computer company to be bold or grow. The worst complacency in the world is religious complacency.”

The purpose of UU worship services

In a recent comment, Joe C. asks some very good questions, saying: “I agree that increasing worship attendance is a worthy goal and is likely to have good side effects. The questions then become: how do we increasing worship attendance? what kinds of worship service satisfy the needs of current and future members? what is the purpose of worship services in the UU context and how do we know if we achieved this purpose?”

All very good questions. Every local congregation is going to have to answer these questions to meet their local situations. A general principle seems apparent, though: one increases worship service attendance by directly addressing the hurts and hopes of present members and friends — and this is likely to address the hurts and hopes of potential members and friends, who may then begin attending worship services.

In this context, the purpose of UU worship services is to put individuals in touch with something larger than themselves. Some Unitarian Universalists (a minority these days) might say that it is God which is larger than ourselves, and the rest of us will not wish to put God in that place. But whatever our stand on the God question, all of us will say that there are larger moral and ethical principles that should govern our lives; there is the interrelationship of all life; etc. However we name that larger principle, one primary purpose of Unitarian Universalist worship services is to remind people that there is something larger than ourselves.

A second purpose of Unitarian Universalist worship services is to put individuals in touch with a living human community. This community is literally the immediate and present community of that Unitarian Universalist congregation. More figuratively, it is the worldwide community of Unitarians, Universalists, Unitarian Universalists, and other religious liberals; and it is the historical community to which the local congregation traces its roots. It is to our living human community that we can bring our hurts and hopes. It is from this living human community that we can draw strength to get through the hurtful and difficult times in life; furthermore, we can draw strength from this living human community, and take that strength out into the world to make the world a better place, i.e., to make our hopes come true.

Thus, when we say our goal is to increase worship service attendance, we are actually inviting people to join us in connecting with something that is larger than our individual selves, and we are inviting people to share their hurts and hopes with us as we share our hurts and hopes with them. When we talk about increasing worship attendance, we are implying that there are larger ends contained within that simple numerical goal.

How do we know if we have achieved these larger goals? In my experience in congregations that have lived out these ideals, there aren’t specific metrics we can look to (unlike some Christian churches that point to how many people have been saved). Instead, what we look for is anecdotal evidence that people’s lives are being changed, both by staying in touch with something larger than themselves, and staying in touch with a living human community. This anecdotal evidence can be reflected back to the congregation in a variety of formats: some UU congregations ask members and friends to give one or two minutes “testimonies” of how the congregation has changed their lives; some UU congregations reflect these stories back through the sermon (having asked permission from those concerned, of course); some UU congregations find that “Joys and Sorrows” (or as we call it here in Palo Alto, “Caring and Sharing”) is the time when persons reflect this back; some UU congregations may find this happens during a pastoral prayer; in some congregations, this occasionally may also take place outside of worship, e.g., in the newsletter.

A worthy strategic growth objective

In light of growth initiatives here in the Palo Alto congregation, I’ve been considering the following passage from Twelve Keys to an Effective Church by Kennon L. Callahan, the classic congregational growth book:

“…It is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between worship attendance and membership growth and income. Those churches that have increased their worship attendance tend also to discover that their membership grows and their financial resources increase as well. Frankly, those churches whose primary objectives are increasing their membership and improving their giving are working on the wrong strategic objectives. As a matter of fact, they would do better to work on the objective of increasing worship attendance. The by-products of that alone would be an increase in membership and an increase in giving. … We do not work to increase worship attendance as a means to the ends of more members and more giving. Rather, we genuinely and thoughtfully share corporate, dynamic worship in outreaching and outgoing ways for the help and hope it delivers in people’s lives….” [p. 32]

In my experience, Callahan is generally correct: an increase worship attendance correlates to an increase in membership growth and giving. I once saw growth in worship attendance that was couple with a decline in membership, but that was in a congregation where there were many members who were members on paper only and had no real connection to the congregation; since that increase in worship attendance led to an overall gain in giving, I did not worry about the decline in membership.

I believe Callahan is also correct in saying that increasing worship attendance is a worthy strategic objective, but increasing membership and giving are not good strategic objectives. Over and over again, I have seen congregations state that they are going to increase membership and giving — and then fail to do so, because increasing membership and giving are not worthy ends in themselves. But when we say that we’re going to increase worship attendance, it’s immediately clear why we want to do so: we know in our guts that having more people at worship will feel better, not only because there will be more energy in the room, not only because attending religious services makes me feel better and I want to share that with other people — but also because if there’s hardly anyone at the worship service I attend, I feel like a chump for having gotten out of bed on Sunday to go to something that no one else is going to.

Having more people at worship makes me feel like I’m not a chump. Having more people at worship makes worship more exciting for me. Having more people at worship makes me feel good because I know more people are sharing in something I think is worth sharing in. It is a worthy end in and of itself.

Follow-up post: “The purposes of UU worship services”

Going to the series

Carol and I went out for a walk. It was dark and drizzling rain. A few cars whizzed by on the wet pavement, and aside from that it was quiet. Then I heard fireworks somewhere off to our right.”I wonder who’s having fireworks tonight?” I said. Then we heard fireworks in front of us. “Maybe it’s the Giants game,” said Carol. “Of course,” I said, “they must’ve won.” Later, a car full of people drove past us, the windows down in spite of the rain. The people in the car shouted something that sounded like “Wa waba!” A few minutes later another car drove by, an orange and black piece of cloth flapping out a rear window. When we got to downtown San Mateo, we could hear blaring horns and people shouting down along Fourth Avenue.

The Giants are going to the World Series, and people on the Peninsula are celebrating.

Rainy season

It rained today; usually not much more than a drizzle or a mist, barely enough to feel on your face, but a few times I could hear the rain pattering on the roof. It didn’t rain all day, nor even the majority of the day, but it felt like a rainy day. The air is humid, and outdoors the smells are more intense: the smell of the pine tree near our house, the smell of the big Dumpster we walked by, the smells coming up out of the storm drains, the smell of some flower we walked by. Everything feels damp, and the bath towels we used this morning still haven’t dried out. This feels like the real beginning to this year’s rainy season.