Category: Practical religion

What youth engagement can look like

In the last 1990s, I took Prof. Robert Pazmino’s course in teaching practices and principles, aimed at education in local congregations. One of Bob’s memorable insights was that congregations should have a teen voting member on every church committee, including the governing board. As Bob pointed out, not only is that the best way for teens to learn how congregational governance works, it’s also good for congregations who want to figure out how to meet the emerging needs of the rising generation.

This principle holds true for all nonprofit organizations. In 2014, when the Religious Education Association annual conference was in Boston, I went with a group to visit the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). This community group, which served a white-minority low-income neighborhood, had 4 seats on its 25-seat board dedicated to teens. Not only did DSNI benefit from the insights of its teen board members — not only did the teens benefit enormously from this real-life experience — but serving on the DSNI board as a teen provided a direct path into city government for ambitious teens; this helped both the teens, and DSNI, who now had a sympathetic ear in City Hall.

Now Hamilton Ontario is applying this same principle to the public sector:

“When Hamilton [Ontario] first set its sights on bolstering youth engagement, it focused on some of the places it could connect with the greatest number of young people: local universities. After years of working with individual institutions in effective, yet often one-off and ad hoc ways, the city saw merit in striking a long-term partnership with its three core schools—Mohawk College and McMaster and Redeemer universities—with the shared aim of integrating students into public problem solving…. All four partners committed to a five-year pilot program—including funding, time, and even a physical building next to city hall—to turn the seat of local government into a classroom and the schools into extensions of city hall….” [via Bloomberg Cities Network at Johns Hopkins Univ.]

So… now you have even more motivation to get teens on your congregation’s board and committees.

Questionable quotes

While researching the provenance of quotes from the UUA’s “Wayside Pulpit” quote collection, I’ve uncovered a number of questionable quotes. Some of the quotes are clearly spurious or otherwise wrong. Others, however, may be real quotations, but my research didn’t happen to turn up a firm attribution. Since some of my readers enjoy working on this kind of puzzle, I’ll post some of the results of my research below.

Continue reading “Questionable quotes”

Quotes for the Wayside Pulpit

The “Wayside Pulpit” is a long tradition for Unitarian Universalist congregations. In the old days, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) would print up large poster-size sheets with various inspirational quotes on them, and congregations would purchase those sheets, and post them in signboards outside their church or meetinghouse. Nowadays, the UUA provides free PDFs and you print them yourself.

When we installed a Wayside Pulpit outside the meetinghouse of First Parish in Cohasset, Mass., I started looking for some more (and more recent) quotations to add to the ones I found in the UUA website. I quickly discovered that the web is inundated with spurious quotes, and quotes with inaccurate attributions. Then I noticed that some of the quotes provided by the UUA had problems. As an example, the quotation “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing” gets attributed to Edmund Burke, but the Quote Investigator website states that this attribution is wrong. Or take the quotation that says “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way” — the UUA attributes this to James Freeman Clarke, but I couldn’t find it in Clarke’s published works (which are mostly digitized and easily searchable online), and various online sources attribute this same quote to Napoleon Hill or Martin Luther King, Jr.

After many hours of research, I finally came up with 77 quotes where I had reasonably good evidence that (a) the quote was actually said by the person it’s attributed to, and (b) it represents pretty much the same words that the person actually said or wrote. For each quote, I included attributions showing their source. (In a couple of cases, I shortened quotes so they’d fit into the Wayside Pulpit format; I’ve noted where I’ve done so, and I also give the original wording.)

Several of these quotes date from the past five years, including words from Brene Brown, Joy Harjo, Tricia Hersey, Yara Shahidi, Taylor Swift, and Greta Thunberg. I’ve also added a couple of quotes from non-White UUs including Mark Morrison-Reed and Imaoka Shin’ichiro. (Update: just added a bunch of quotes from scientists, for those of us who are geeks.)

You can see this collection of quotes here.

A sign in front of the corner of a New England clapboard meetinghouse.
The Wayside Pulpit in front of the 1747 Cohasset Meetinghouse.

When to open

Since COVID, I’ve noticed a growing trend among Unitarian Universalist congregations — decisions about whether to close on a given Sunday. Here in New England, that often takes the form of deciding whether to open up when there’s a winter storm on Sunday morning. This has been especially noticeable because we’ve had a winter storm hit on each of the past Sundays.

Typically, three options are considered — (1) Have both an in-person service and a livestreaming option; (2) No in-person service, service available via livestream only; and (3) Cancel the service entirely. Congregations within a couple of miles of each other can wind up making different decisions based on their livestream capabilities vs. their in-person capabilities, as well as the needs and interests of their members and friends. There is no one correct answer. Yet although there is no one correct answer, canceling in-person services carries a significant risk.

Here’s how I explain that risk: Congregations are operating in an increasingly competitive market for people’s leisure time. We used to place based on the assumption that congregations were in competition with one another, e.g., the Unitarian Universalist congregation was in competition with the local Congregational church and Reform Jewish synagogue. But now our primary competition is with other leisure time activities. For many people, our primary value may not be religion and spirituality, but community and interpersonal contact. So here at First Parish in Cohasset, our most direct competition includes both the liberal UCC church across the street, and the local coffee shop a block away.

As it happens, I live above the local coffee shop. The past two Sundays, the coffee shop opened promptly at 7 a.m. as usual, regardless of the winter storms. Because I’ve noticed that the coffee shop is always open, I’m reluctant to cancel in-person services for a winter storm — if we do cancel, we’re essentially saying that we’re less important than a cup of coffee. At the same time, we offer livestreaming for anyone who’s still snowed in, or who feels physically unable to wade through snow and ice to get to services. (And maybe there’s a sense in which livestr4eaming allows us to out-compete the coffee shop.)

Yes, in-person attendance was low both weeks (on 2/9, 11 in person, 32 livestream log-ins; on 2/16, 20 in person, 20 livestream log-ins). Foot traffic at the coffee shop was also low, from what I could see. But First Parish wants to remain competitive with other leisure time activities, and that’s reason enough to stay open for both in-person and livestreaming during both winter storms. — Mind you, that’s me speaking as someone who’s worked in sales and marketing; I can totally understand why other congregations would think this strange.

Kids, mental health, and social media

Last year, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, issued an advisory report on social media and the mental health of kids:

“The current body of evidence indicates that while social media may
have benefits for some children and adolescents, there are ample indicators
that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health
and well-being of children and adolescents….” — Social Media and Youth Mental Health (U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, 2023)

Since then, Dr. Murthy has called on Congress to place health warning labels on social media sites.

This is not just a public health concern. It’s also a religious concern, or should be. In a recent opinion piece, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin writes:

“A religious temperament might mean questioning our utter reliance on such technology: creating islands of time, like the Sabbath or Sunday, when we would liberate ourselves from technology and being more self-aware of how we use our tools, which have become our toys…. That [old] rabbinic statement that has become a cliche: ‘Whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved the entire world.’ If regulating access to social media will save the life of one kid, it will be worth it.”

We now know that social media has serious adverse effects on adolescent and pre-adolescent health. So let’s do something about it.

COVID, again

Carol came back from a conference a week ago feeling a little under the weather. Last Sunday, she tested positive for COVID. Our apartment is too small and is not laid out properly for quarantining, so I moved into a hotel. But yesterday morning, I tested positive for COVID.

Neither one of us is especially ill; we both feel like we have a head cold. But with COVID, it doesn’t matter how you feel, the main issue is that you don’t want to spread the disease to someone else. So we’re staying in quarantine until we’re sure we’re not going to spread the virus to others.

Which meant that I could not preach this morning. I emailed the sermon text (and everything else) to Worship Associate Eric, and then all I could do was sit at home watch the livestream. Eric did a fabulous job leading the service, with help from Worship Associate Nancy.

Prior to COVID, I almost never missed a Sunday. You just always showed up on Sunday. (I remember preaching when I had bronchitis. I think the only Sunday I missed was 15 years ago when I had a norovirus and had to be near a toilet.) But these days, if you have COVID or any respiratory ailment, the CDC tells you to stay home. I feel guilty staying home, but I’d feel way more guilty if I gave someone else COVID.

More copyright-free hymns

This week someone contacted me about the copyright-free hymns I’ve posted online. This prompted me to look in my files, where I discovered I had another ten hymns ready to upload. Those ten new hymns are now online here. I’ll include info about these hymns below the jump.

Four of the newly-uploaded hymns are patriotic hymns. Unitarian Universalist hymnals used to include patriotic songs, but that ended with the 1993 gray hymnal. This was a short-sighted policy. Today, U.S. religious conservatives wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotism and maintain that theirs is the only patriotism. Well, Unitarians and Universalists were key players in the founding of the United States, and we need to reclaim that part of our heritage so that we can inject our own religious vies into contemporary political discourse — our views being that the U.S. is a democracy (not an autocracy) and is not a Christian country; that our country is founded on the separation of religion and the state; and that the revolution continues through our ongoing efforts to make sure all persons are treated as equals. With the approach of the 250th anniversary of the singing of the Declaration of Independence, it’s time for us to show our patriotism again. I’ve uploaded America, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and The New Patriot, all taken from pre-1993 UU hymnals. I also uploaded Chester, a patriotic song actually written during the Revolution — it’s of limited use, but can be useful for Massachusetts congregations that recognize Patriots Day.

The other six hymns include African American spirituals, a hymn allegedly by Rabindranath Tagore, a South African song, etc. After you read the descriptions below, look for the songs on my music website.

Continue reading “More copyright-free hymns”

Where do we learn from?

Carey Nieuwhof is the founding pastor of Connexus Church — a conservative Christian church that would probably give hives to most Unitarian Universalists. Carey Nieuwhof also has a leadership podcast that’s insanely popular, and a website and blog that reaches tens of thousand of people.

I may not agree with Carey Nieuwhof’s theology, and he’d probably call me a heretic or an apostate (I’m never quite clear on the distinction between heretic and apostate). Nevertheless, I read Nieuwhof’s tips on leadership. For example, I’ve found that his “Post-Modern Church Leader’s Survival Checklist” has given me some good food for thought. One of those tips, by the way, goes like this:

“The challenge for many of us in church leadership is that we listen to the same voices over and over again. You become a fan of a certain preacher, a certain theologian, and you read and listen to only them. I find I often learn the most from people who are least like me. Sometimes the answers to your problem lies outside your discipline, not within it.”

One of my concerns about Unitarian Universalism is that we’ve become an echo chamber. We are a tiny group. There are fewer Unitarian Universalists in the U.S. than there are members of the Living Faith Church in Lagos — fewer people in our whole denomination than there are in one single church.

Yet even though there are so few of us, we often seem reluctant to look for answers outside the ranks of Unitarian Universalism. If one Unitarian Universalist (UU) comes up with an idea, we all get on the bandwagon, and that becomes the only idea to consider. I saw this happen fifteen years ago when Thandeka challenged the prevailing UU opinion on anti-racism, and was ignored or even attacked. I’m actually quite critical of Thandeka’s thought in general, but I read her material anyway because I learn from it. And I agree with Carey Nieuwhof, with whom I have many profound disagreements, that we often learn the most from people who are least like us.

I see this dynamic also playing out in religious education. I learn far more from the Religious Education Association (REA), an international interfaith group of scholars and practitioners, than from the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA). Sure, the REA has its own problems, and like LREDA it has its own little insider group of people who seem only to talk to each other. But the REA is making a distinct effort to include a diversity of viewpoints in its journal; for example, I learned a lot from an article about Korean American Christian religious education. By contrast, LREDA seems to focus almost exclusively on what’s going on within Unitarian Universalist religious education. The REA casts a much wider net than does LREDA.

Most recently, a friend pointed me to an article in Science of Mind magazine, telling about the Mile Hi Church in Lakewood, Colorado. Mile Hi Church, affiliated with the Centers for Spiritual Living (formerly Church of Religious Science), is huge by UU standards. Yet like the rest of us, in the aftermath of the pandemic, Mile Hi Church is struggling. Their “sanctuary is half full.” Instead of giving in to gloom, though, they say this:

“Five years ago, you simply counted the people in the seats. Today, you count the in-person attendance, the online live attendance, the people who watched the online recording over 24 hours, those who watched the message during the week, and the folks who listened to the podcast on Monday morning. And guess what? That’s OK. In fact, it’s exciting.”

I think it’s great to communicate with other Unitarian Universalists. But we can’t live in a UU echo chamber. One of the reasons I no longer attend General Assembly (GA) is that it feels like a UU echo chamber. I don’t learn as much at GA as I can learn by getting out into the wider world beyond Unitarian Universalism.

Most UU congregations are struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic. We can do as we usually do, and look inwards, listening mostly to other Unitarian Universalists. Or we can look outwards, and embrace the wild diversity that is the wider world.

Healthy youth programs

On Wednesday and Thursday, I attended a training in “CampWell,” a new wellness program that’s being developed by the Alliance for Camp Health (ACH). Created in cooperation with the American Camp Association (ACA), CampWell emphasizes training front-line staff “to identify, understand, cultivate, and create a community of well-being.” The training I attended was aimed at program directors and leaders, so they can train their staff to promote well-being both in themselves and in the campers they serve.

I wish this program existed when I was active in Unitarian Universalist (UU) youth ministry at the district and continental levels. Around the year 2000, I had a contract with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) to write training materials for youth advisors and youth leaders, and while I did the best I could with the scanty resources I had, the CampWell program makes me realize how inadequate those UUA trainings were.

CampWell benefits from a quarter of a century of research into social-emotional learning, MESH+ (mental, emotional, and social health), psychology of emotions, play, and more. CampWell is also much better funded than UUA youth ministry ever was, and the quality of the training materials is very high. Plus, ACH is engaged in ongoing research in how CampWell is implemented, which will lead to ongoing revision of the program.

While most UU organizations won’t be able to afford to send staff to CampWell trainings, here are some free or inexpensive resources on their website that could be useful in programs such as OWL, youth groups, summer camps, etc.:

MESH+ resource page — Scroll down for links to a variety of online resources. The links connect to other websites, such as ACA’s “Healthy Camp Toolbox” (wish I had this when I was helping plan overnight youth conferences), Search Institute info on fostering connections for positive youth development, and more.

MESH Pocket Guide — Meant to go in the backpacks of camp counselors, this 12 page folding guide gives tips for active listening, tips for when to seek help, tips for self-care, and more. While it may seem expensive at $8 each, the Guide is waterproof and tough, meant to stand up to hard use. I’ll be purchasing a couple to use in our congregation’s summer camp, and I also think it would be a great resource of OWL facilitators and youth advisors.

MESH Resource Guide — At $50, this is not cheap, but there’s lots of good material in here that could be shared with youth advisors, OWL facilitators, day camp staff, etc. Some of what’s included: an excellent overview of trauma in youth; causes and prevention of bullying; interacting with different types of parents; assessing youth participant behavior issues; and much more.

One final resource I learned about from the CampWell training — Mental Health First Aid. Given the epidemic of teen mental health issues we’re all seeing, this should be something every UU congregation learns about. Their motto is “Let’s make mental health first aid as common as CPR.” I completely agree. Now I just need to find a course near me.

A heads-up for congregational marketing

Cory Doctorow lays down an obvious marketing rule for 2024:

“If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is not the moment to be ‘social first.’ This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control….” (Here’s Cory’s blog post — just be aware the title of the post is Not Safe For Work.)

This applies to congregations, too. If you’re relying on Facebook as your central marketing strategy, that’s probably not a wise thing to do. Sure, it’s fine to use a Facebook account for marketing, but Cory’s point is that you really want to use that Facebook account to drive people to your own website. Which you control. So it cannot be censored, or walled off, or otherwise controlled by Big Tech.