Category: Religion

How you can change three negative trends in 2012, pt. 2

The second of three negative trends for 2012 is this:

Liberal congregations will continue to focus more on short-term financial goals than on long term ministry and mission goals.

And here are three possible steps you can take to reverse this negative trend:

Step 1: Let’s begin by asking what is absolutely essential for a liberal congregation.

Only three things are absolutely essential:
— A liberal congregation must have weekly Sunday services.
— A liberal congregation must raise up the next generation.
— A liberal congregation must provide pastoral care and nurture to those who are part of it.

Nothing else is absolutely essential. Nothing. Really.

Step 2: Now let’s look at what is not essential, and what to do about the on-essentials.

— Owning and maintaining a building may be very important, but it is not essential; plenty of congregations rent space.
— Having paid staff may be very important, but it is not essential; there are congregations that have no paid staff.
— Carrying out social justice in the name of the congregation is very important, but it is not essential; what is essential is providing weekly religious services, and pastoral care and nurture, to support those who are doing social justice. Continue reading “How you can change three negative trends in 2012, pt. 2”

How you can change three negative trends in 2012, pt. 1

In my last post, I made three safe predictions for 2012:

1. Baby Boomers will continue to run most liberal religious congregations to suit themselves.
2. Liberal congregations will continue to focus more on short-term financial goals than on long term ministry and mission goals.
3. Fewer kids will be part of liberal religious congregations.

Each of these three trends, if left unchecked, will lead to continued decline of liberal religion. I’ll take these on in separate posts. Here are my thoughts on fighting the first of these trends:

Liberal congregations can learn basic volunteer management and leadership development skills.

The way you move entrenched leadership out of positions of power is by training up new leaders to take their place. The way you train up new leaders is to revamp your volunteer management system. Continue reading “How you can change three negative trends in 2012, pt. 1”

Three safe predictions for 2012

Allow me to make three safe predictions for liberal religion in 2012. Here’s a summary of my three predictions:

1. Baby Boomers will continue to run most liberal religious congregations to suit themselves.
2. Liberal congregations will continue to focus more on short-term financial goals than on long term ministry and mission goals.
3. Fewer kids will be part of liberal religious congregations.

Now on to my reasons for making these predictions: Continue reading “Three safe predictions for 2012”

Another folk-type hymn

I ran across a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper variously titled “Let the Light Enter” or “The Dying Words of Goethe.” I thought it would make a good hymn: it’s a poem by a liberal religious writer, and we religious liberals have too few poems on the topic of death and dying. So I wrote a simple folk-type melody to go with the poem — it’s a little schmaltzy, but not (I hope) too schmaltzy — and provided a basic harmonic structure, with guitar chords, and an easy bass line to fill that out a little.

Somehow I can’t see many religious liberals using this in a Sunday service. But I’ve found it fun to sing, and I can see it as a campfire song, or something along those lines. On the off chance that someone else might have fun with it, here’s a PDF of the sheet music (you humanists will want to lose the sixth and last verse):

Let the Light Enter (The Dying Words of Goethe)

2011 in review: the liberal religious blogosphere

The most important trend in liberal religious blogging in 2011 was the continued growth of other forms of social media. Facebook and Twitter are obvious cases in point. Compared to blogging, it’s so much easier to post a quick status update to Facebook or Twitter, so much easier to let someone else manage the technical infrastructure, so much easier to stay in touch with your friends and family without juggling RSS feeds. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter (and Tumblr and Google Plus and LinkedIn and Pintrest and all the other multitudinous social media outlets) are different from blogs, they help to spread good blog posts to a wider readership, and they serve more to supplement blogs than to supplant them.

The second most important trend in liberal religious blogging: plenty of people are still writing and reading blogs. The main aggregator of Unitarian Universalist blogs, Uupdates.net, is now tracking over 500 blogs. This represents, I believe, a slight increase over last year, and on the order of a tenfold increase over five years ago. It’s impossible to keep track of that many Unitarian Universalist blogs, and I would say there is no longer a coherent UU blogosphere — there are just a lot of blogs, a lot of bloggers, and a lot of blog readers.

As an example of the ongoing strength of blogs, “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist” continues to rise slowly in readership; last time I checked, back in October, this site was approaching ten thousand unique visitors a month. (I’m not keeping track at the moment — my Web host got rid of their analytic tools, and I haven’t had time to install an alternative.) And there are plenty of other liberal religious blogs out there with bigger readerships.

And speaking only for myself, the third most important trend in liberal religious blogging has been my return to non-Unitarian Universalist blogs. In 2003 when I first started reading religious blogs regularly, there were only half a dozen Unitarian Universalist blogs; you were almost forced to read read non-UU blogs. Then for a while I tried read every UU blog at least a couple of times a year. I continue to look at uuworld.org’s UU blog round up, and I try to scan UUpdates.net periodically. But I I find myself going back to my 203 habits, and reading lots of non-UU blogs. I scan the blog of Steve Thorngate — he’s an associate editor at Christian Century — for religion news, and the intersection of religion and politics. I sometimes read Carol Merritt’s blog “Tribal Church,” mostly about young adults and religion, which is also on the Christian Century Web site. For leadership and growth issues, I regularly scan the weekly Alban Institute “Conversations” posts, which are linked to from their “Roundtable” blog. Recently, I rediscovered The Velveteen Rabbi, and am enjoying the personal take on spirituality there. So yes, I’m reading lots of non-UU blogs these days, and I’ve been enjoying the wider perspective that I’ve been getting.

The most bestest thing about liberal religion in 2011

Here it is — the most bestest thing about liberal religion in 2011:

1. I’m seeing less focus on administrivia and more focus on mission. I’m seeing less interest in clinging to power for no good reason, and more interest in developing greater spiritual maturation. I’m seeing more people smiling, and fewer people arguing.

In short, I’m seeing more and more religious liberals actually having fun while doing religion.

What could be better than that? Happy new year!

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 8

2. For two straight years, U.S. Unitarian Universalists have focused a good portion of their social justice attention on immigration reform. I believe some of this focus is somewhat misguided, e.g., on the national stage we should be paying more attention to Alabama than to Arizona. Nor am I particularly interested in immigration myself — personally, I remain most interested in working peace, poverty, overpopulation, and workers rights. Nor do I believe that the so-called “Justice General Assembly” scheduled for June, 2012, in Arizona is change anything.

But c’mon, Unitarian Universalists have managed to focus their attention longer than six months on one issue. That’s incredible. If we could do that more often, we might actually make a difference in the world.

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 7

3. This year, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) reported the fourth year of decline in religious education enrollment in congregations. This decline came after a couple of decades of steady growth. Worse yet, 2007 marked the highest number of births since 1961, at the height of the Baby Boom, which means we should be seeing an increase in the number of kids in our congregations.

Why is the fourth straight year of decline a good thing? Because now this is a trend that can’t be ignored, nor dismissed as a statistical aberration. Congregations are going to have to face up to the results of years of nibbling away at the infrastructure for religious education — cutting hours and salaries of religious educators, giving away religious education office and storage space to other age groups, deferring maintenance on classrooms, neglecting to place parents in leadership positions, and treating children and youth as a burdensome expense rather than as a central part of the congregation’s mission. And the UUA is going to have to face up to the results of cutting staff positions, producing uninspiring curriculum and other resources, not having parents in positions of leadership, andand treating children and youth as an extra expense rather than as a central part of our shared mission.

Not that I am silly enough to believe that congregations and the denomination are actually going to change their behavior, and begin treating children, youth, and their families as central to our reason for existence. But at least congregations and denomination can no longer pretend that they care about kids — no longer can they cover over the fact that they’re trying to make liberal religion into an over-55 community.

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 6

4. I have found more and more people are willing to look at religion in new ways: more openly, with fewer preconceptions. I believe this is because ours has become an increasingly secular society, which means Christianity is less and less normative, which means that more people are more likely to look at religion without Christian preconceptions. The political and commercial realms are still several decades behind the rest of society, and politics and commerce both still claim Christianity as normative of all religion.

But forget about politics and commerce for the moment. Within liberal religion, I’m meeting a few people for whom religion is yet another form of cultural production, similar to other forms of cultural production like dance, writing, performance art and theatre, film, music, etc. I find it enormously freeing to talk with people with this understanding — and exciting, too, for when I talk with these people, all kinds of possibilities begin to open up.

Top ten best things about liberal religion in 2011, pt. 5

The new year is getting close, and to finish this top ten list before the end of the old year, I’m going to have to

6. I’m not sure this has really been happening, but it seems to me there has been decreasing tolerance within Unitarian Universalism for anti-Christian bias. You know what I mean by anti-Christian bias: the willingness to explore any major world’s religion except Christianity; a fear of acknowledging that we once came out of Christianity; a willful blindness towards our Christian past and the associated refusal to use certain words (“God,” “worship,” “Jesus,” etc.) that remind of us whence we came.

We Unitarian Universalists have good reason to be anti-Christian: from our beginnings we got called heretics by other Christians, and a hundred years ago we got kicked out of various Christian clubs like the National Council of Churches, and in the middle of the twentieth century the Neo-Orthodox dismissed us. Even today, a scholar like Gary Dorrien can’t quite keep the scorn out of his authorial voice when he writes about nineteenth century Unitarians in his histories. So we got in the habit of thinking: Hey, if the Christians don’t want us in their club, why should we want anything to do with Christianity?

Yet though we have grown into something that is no longer a Christian denomination but something else (we’re not quite sure what), we still carry grew out of the fertile ground of the Radical Reformation, and of the English free church movement, and of American freethinking Christians. The roots of our commitment to social justice, the roots of our use of reason in religion, the roots of our belief that love is the most powerful force in the universe, all go back to that fertile ground.

Thus I have been pleased to see what I believe is a growing respect both for our Christian past, and for those among us who still claim the name “Christian.” Maybe we have gotten so far from Christianity, maybe we are so obviously no longer a Christian sect, that we can relax a little bit.

5. We have definitely made some real progress in preventing clergy sexual misconduct this year. Most of this progress has been made by the UU Ministers Association (UUMA), which is remarkable in of itself: ministers have generally been woefully bad at policing themselves when it comes to sexual misconduct. But the UUMA has begun to make some real progress.

In one example of progress, Rev. Deborah Pope-Lance was invited to give this year’s Berry Street Lecture, she spoke on clergy sexual misconduct, and hundreds of ministers sat and listened to her in rapt silence. Mind you, Deborah has been speaking out for years on the evils of clergy sexual misconduct, but it has too often seemed as though other ministers were not particularly willing to listen to her — what was remarkable was seeing so many ministers watching with apparent approval and interest.

In another example of progress, the members of the UUMA voted in June to approve a new amendment to the professional guidelines — but there was a sense that even the new amendment wasn’t strong enough, and so a committee has already drafted a new, stricter, amendment. One could be cynical and say that by telling clergy that they can’t have sexual contact with anyone they serve in their ministries, the UUMA is merely catching up with what is already the law in 27 states in the U.S. But I’m not cynical, because it would be very easy to ignore those state laws; and besides, my impressions is that the new amendment will be even stricter than those state laws.

Obviously, there is still lots of work to be done. I would love it if the Unitarian Universalist Association didn’t take quite such mushy stands on clergy sexual misconduct. I would love it if some of the Unitarian Universalists who work on legislative action would start actively pushing for laws against clergy having sex with congregants in the 23 states without such laws. But after years of very little progress in this area, I’ll take what I can get.