Contemporary Worship

We have to start a third service next year. Gulp. Many UU churches have successfully made the transition to two services, but few have tried three services, so we're making this up as we go along. One option is a band-led service, and in pursuit of knowledge of this worship-beast, several of us crashed a Presbyterian Contemporary Worship service on Saturday evening. It's my third such venture, (one Reformed mega-church, one medium sized UU church, and one big mainline church.) Here's what I'm learning.

Contemporary Worship seems to be a matter of developing a higher level of energy than a traditional worship service has. Indeed, I think that the basic aim of a traditional worship service is to calm people, quiet them, help them be receptive to the message. The music is used to awe and impress...big organ, beautiful anthem...the Glory of God revealed in Music.

In Contemporary Worship, the aim is to get folks up, singing along, and clapping. There's a beat to the music, and the singing goes on for a good long (20 minutes?) time. Well done, and in a well-filled room (last night was well done but a very small crowd, perhaps 60 people in a room that must seat 4-500 people) all that energy is very, well...enlivening, and I can easily imagine that this, too, helps people to focus on the message of the day.

The did project their words, but to very high screens. I bet there's a science to screen height and I bet those were too high. It was a very good message, weaving in Pentecost, Mothers Day, and the end of a sermon series on the gifts of the Spirit. This was the first time I've seen the use of an embedded video in a sermon...this hilarious clip of all the things Mothers Day, sung to the William Tell Overture. Judging by the comments on YouTube, it was shown in a lot of churches this morning, and a lot of folks looked it up to see it again.

I have to say that it feels just impossibly intimidating to be having to find video clips as a part of sermon-writing. I'm feeling glad that our sanctuary is just too bright for projection.

Speaking of intimidating, I think that finding a music repetoire for Contemporary Worship, especially without violating copywrite law, is going to be the biggest trick of all. These Christian Churches can download their stuff off of websites and easily pay royalties. We UU's can't even easily use things from our own hymnals, not to mention finding a way to get permission to use, say, Cris Williamson's "Song of the Soul" as a worship tune.

Short takes

1. Even in informal worship, I think the preacher and band should be dressed up just a tad.
2. Looks like intergenerational bands work.
3. The band needs to have practiced enough that they can put energy into connecting with the congregation...eye contact, etc.
4. electronic drums: This was a great discovery. They can be played at a volume that would work in our sanctuary, they don't take up too much space, and they are not prohibitively expensive.

A Bird in Church for Pentecost

The moment we opened our church doors this morning, a curved bill thrasher flew in. Her(?) mate stayed outside and fussed, but she was confused by our big windows and couldn't find her way out, in spite of the attempts of at least a dozen people. With all our doors open, a second bird flew in...a young dove who was not confused by our windows because she didn't see them. She crashed and I carried her out, her little heart hammering in my hands, wondering at this coincidence; in 20 years, I only remember one other time we've had a bird in the sanctuary, why in the world would we have two in a week!

But, of course! This is not just Mothers Day, it is Pentecost...that day in the Christian Calendar when the Spirit (often depicted as a bird) came upon all the people who could suddenly understand each other's many languages.

The Thrasher and her holiday were noted by the lay leader before the chalice was lit, and she provide a good deal of amusement through the first service and the first half of the second service, strutting along the top of our mural and making short flights through the crowd. She seemed to like the music. She spent the prayer of the second service eyeing the side door which had been left open for her and departed on the stroke of the Amen. We all did feel blessed...and relieved...

Kinda Sad about Hillary

I voted for Obama in our state primary, and I can't say that I like her much, but as the handwriting is on the wall, I have to say...I'm kinda sad about Hillary. It would have been cool to have a woman president.

Hope for the Shade Problem

So what I've been doing in my spare time is obviously not blogging. It's the season to put in the garden, and I'm experimenting with hanging tomato plants to make up for the loss (to shade) of a chunk of my garden. So...meet Chaco, a chocolate cherry tomato, and Ceila, a Celebrity tomato. We'll see how they work...

In the background are the apple and peach trees up top, and invisible in the mulch, three more tomato plants, and cukes and squash under the mesh tunnel (that's for squash borer control.)
I've planted carrots for the first time since I was about 6 and planted a row in my mother's garden which I could not bring myself to thin. My mother believed in learning by experience...so I learned. It's taken 50 years to try again. Now that's a scary thought!

IMG00033.jpg

Now, this picture is not as much fun...it shows the totally pathetic shipment of pepper plants for which I paid $16.95 plus shipping. This picture makes them look good...you don't see the blackened leaves. Only about three of these plants are wroth taking a chance on planting. They were definitely damaged during shipping; the tips of their leaves are black. But mostly they are just puny, leggy little things. What a disappointment!

Trying Hard to Love a Tree

The trees that the absentee owner planted (the 6, 25' trees ) on the short eastern wall of his yard are not to blame for my loss of vegetable garden, and I shouldn't hate them. Nor should I hate my neighbor. Nor should I pray for the death of the trees.

But that vegetable garden was important to me, and so were the raspberries which are likely now in too much shade, and I'm taking the loss hard.

This owner is a privacy nut. He bought a house whose back yard is overlooked by two story houses in the next block and spent a fortune on an illegal wall and on these six trees. The neighbors whose back patios are now totally shaded by the wall have apparently not complained, and I don't think I can complain. If you have invested in solar panels your neighbor can't plant trees that will shade them, but if it's just that you want sun in your garden (no money invested) that's tough luck.

Now that the trees are leafing out, it's become clear that they will cast even more shade than I had imagined when they were planted in November. And it appears that they are Aspens, which means that they will double in height.

They shade my sitting patio, and the tiny leaves make a lovely, soothing sound when they quake, as I discovered this afternoon. But there will be fewer tomatoes from my tiny yard this year, and I'm sad.

Post Traumatic Thanksgiving

I took my son to the airport the other day; he started the Spring Break College Hunting Trip a few days before I could get away. He's an experienced traveler, and took off from the curbside, bag in tow. I was awash in memories of his first solo trip, 10 years ago, this very Spring Break. He was going to stay with his grandparents while I had surgery which we hoped would...and did...cure my cancer. He was a half a year too young to fly alone; his frequent flying grandfather had charmed some airline executive into giving permission for this cross-country, emergency trip.

This was before the days of personal movies, and my son was not yet reading for pleasure. I worried about what he would do for four hours, all by himself, strapped into his seat. A teenaged friend had loaned him a gameboy and I had supplied him with changes of batteries that I wasn't sure he could manage. I walked him all the way to the gate and handed him over to the flight attendant, who, seeing my tears, hustled him down the jetway and out of sight before I could remind him about the batteries.

My parents called later that evening to say that they had collected him on their end with ease, and handed the phone over. "Did you have enough batteries for the gameboy?" I asked. "Oh, I didn't play that." "Really? What did you do?" "I talked to the man sitting next to me. We talked about Star Wars".

I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving to a traveler who, probably wanting to take a nap or get some work done, had instead taken pity on a little boy who needed somebody to talk to on his first, long journey. I'm grateful to this day. He returned home 10 days later, an experienced traveler, with his grandmother in tow; she took care of us all for a while before things lapsed back, slowly, into the new normal that falls around us all after the difficulties of our lives have made us ever more aware of our gratitude for families and friends, for healing and joy, and even for strangers.

Tomorrow I join my college-hunter in Baltimore and we take off on one of those "If it's Thursday, it must be New York" sorts of trips, and I'll begin it in gratitude.

Resurrections

This is the Louisville Unitarian Church. It's right downtown, next to the public library. They had a fire in the early 1990's, and have come back from the ashes in a creative, vital way. The Steeple that was replaced only by a steel structure gives a hint. The building manager postponed his Sunday dinner long enough to show a couple of tourists around. Throughout the building they took what was left to them (the stone structure) and re-built for their needs...a lovely back garden, a more intimate sanctuary, a gathering space. It was a very inspiring sight on Palm Sunday, a reminder that resurrections come in many forms.

Thomas Merton Anniversary, II

I've been in Louisville at the Large Church Conference, and snapped this picture of the Thomas Merton Memorial. Thomas Merton was one of the figures of my young adulthood, and I was thrilled to realize that the moment of his Enlightenment Experience was only a few blocks from our Hotel, and, furthermore, was commemorated by a plaque! It is not often that religious experience is so honored in our society. To complete my amazement, I was told that today is the 50th anniversary of his experience. Someone had read the story in the Louisville newspaper.

I got the picture posted via the miracle of mobile blogging and before I could add text, Rev. Cynthia Cane posted this comment, which I've moved up to the body of the text because her enthusiasm is so contageous!

I believe this (picture) is in downtown Louisville , which we Kentuckians call the 'ville. Thomas Merton wrote an astounding account of a personal about standing on the corner of 4th & Walnut:

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people,” he later wrote, “that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race. ... There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Wow! To-morrow is the 50th anniversary of this moment! And I can go to Louisville. Thanks!!!

Thanks, Cynthia!

Staying Hip

I turned in my paper calendar for a connected organizer in about 1992. The device was an electronic rolodex. Great little 6 oz machine, but I turned it in a year later for a Palm Pilot. A couple of years ago, I added an MP3 player...wonderful for travel and exercise, and last Summer, I started carrying a cell phone. And I started getting camera envy and realizing how many cool pictures I'd take for this blog if only I carried a camera. I'm not an early adopter, but I am an adopter.

I was also getting tired of lugging a Radio Shack Store around in my purse.

Last week, I bought a Blackberry and lightened my load. (I also lightened my bank account.)

This is an addictive little device which is elegantly designed and has the poorest documentation of any piece of technology I've ever purchased. The English is all impeccable, but there's hardly any of it...the equivalent of a "Getting Started" users guide. Even the downloaded, 300 page users manual doesn't tell us such vital things as which of the 4 ways you can "turn off" your phone is what the airlines mean when they tell you to turn off your phone. If you want to play your music or your games or work on stored documents, you have to have the phone off. Does anybody out there know how to do that?

So, my readers, you can look forward to more pictures and mobile blogging!

Mobile blogging

This post comes from my phone. I'm in Omaha, soon to preach the instalation sermon for my old friend Kate.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

What IS Contemporary Worship?

Our growth in Albuquerque is requiring us to think about adding a third sanctuary service to our current line-up of two sanctuary services and three video services. Gulp! One option is to add a "Contemporary" service. A commenter below asks what that is. There are two answers.

1. In a traditional Protestant church, a "Contemporary" worship service is one which uses a band rather than an organ to accompany singing and provide music, which is of the soft rock, or Christian Contemporary/praise chorus style. Generally this service is paired with a traditional service where the organ and German hymn-tunes reign. This style is not very attractive to UU's, who like more variety in their music and already tend to a blended style of worship. (and who prefer to attract the unchurched with the message, not the music anyway.)

2. In UU Circles, a "Contemporary" worship service (insofar as this concept is developed) refers to a service which is presumably Young Adult friendly. The story goes that ex-YRUU'ers prefer circle worship to the square kind their elders do, which they refer to as the "sermon sandwich" and even on the UUA website refer to with very un-UU-like disparagement. In such a worship service, the "message" would be broken down into several parts, delivered by several voices and media; voice, drama, video, music, song, all in one thematic whole. This type of worship is not new. It was called "Creative Worship" 30 years ago and was the mainstay of Worship Committees for a long time. It's hard work, and requires a number of people, not just the preacher, to have developed the ability to share the depth of their thinking. But it is absolutely wonderful when it is pulled off.

3. To the old Creative Worship mix of possibilities, Contemporary Worship has added the element of ritual. The best-developed ritual that I know of is allowing everyone in the congregation to get up and light a candle (silently) based on a theme in the service. If the theme is Mothers and Mothering, the congregation is invited to light a candle for their mother or someone who has mothered them, for instance.

In our situation, a "contemporary" service has to use the sermon as developed for the more traditional services. There's only so much time in a preacher's day, and we are not considering deploying a second minister to write a different sermon. But, borrowing from the Christians, it appears to me that one interesting possibility for a third service which might better be called "Music-lead". In such a service a musician is the worship leader. Taking the themes from the sermon, this person would plan and lead a "music-heavy" liturgy. It would begin welcoming and building the energy of the congregation with several lively songs, hymns, and readings, rather than our usual formal opening, move into a meditation which incorporated an element of ritual or meditation instruction. The Worship leader would make announcements, offer a prayer, and, well...be the worship leader. The preacher would simply be a part of the congregation, enjoying the scene for the first 30 minutes. Then comes the sermon...delivered by a semi-rested preacher. I like this idea. We're experimenting with it this Spring, so stay tunned.

Readin', Writin', and Shootin'

After last night's news of 5 murders and a suicide in a classroom on a college campus, I searched the internet thinking, "hasn't this happened before?" I got lots of links to VA tech and to the Amish killings. It took a surprisingly long time to verify what I was looking for; This was the fifth school/gun incident IN A WEEK.

Six dead at NIU

A week ago, a much more ordinary sort of tragedy: a female teacher shot and stabbed by her husband. She survived. He killed himself.

On February 8, in Louisiana, a rare female gunner killed two classmates and committed suicide.

On the 11th, a 17 year old shot a classmate in Memphis Both survived.

On the 12, a kid in California was shot in the head by a classmate. The victim died a couple of days later.



Everywhere the traumatized witnesses, the blood-spattered floors, the sirens and helicopters and broken hearts.

But nowhere even a counting, much less an effective response. Nobody dare say the only thing worth saying...There are too many guns around, they are too easy to get a hold of, this epidemic of gun violence is a threat far beyond what any terrorist has accomplished and we need to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Just imagine the response if in five communities in our nation last week, "terrorists" had walked into schools and shot people in them. If past experience suggests anything, we'd be at war in three more places by the end of the week. Imagine what would have happened if five different people put poison dust in letters and sent them through the mail? Did you know that more people have died of gun violence than Aids in the last decade in this nation? Did you know that the world just shakes its head at America-the-gun-happy and enjoys a free society without feeling terrorized by guns? (Yes, gun violence happens almost everywhere...but it happens here way, way more often.)

When will they ever learn?

YRUU

Kelsy in the comments, asks for my thoughts about the end of funding for the continental YRUU (Youth programs).

The thing that interests me about the ending of funding for YRUU is how it parallels the reduction of funding for Starr King and Meadville Seminaries, a move taken because we were spending all of our available "seminary money" on two seminaries which were preparing only 1/3 of candidates for our ministry. Even if you believe that these tow schools are preparing students well for ministry, it only seems fair to give the 2/3 of our future ministers who go to other schools some benefit of our collective "seminary money."

It has definitely seemed to me that something has been awry with YRUU and its focus on Cons as the be-all and end-all of Youth programs. In our neck of the woods, that's meant our teens were doing a lot of carbon-intensive travel, and kids like mine, who had weekend activities of their own, start feeling like second class citizens. (actually, I should speak for myself: their moms start feeling like their kids are being treated like second class citizens.) And all ministers do notice that our High School programs are only serving a fraction of the number of kids served by our Mid-High and elementary programs. If we were doing a good job, La Amikoj would be the largest class in the RE program.

So I'm up for seeing if we can find something better.

Slacker-Blogger

Thanks, somebody, for voting for this blog in the UU Blogger Awards going on right now. (Have a look, here.. Not only can you vote, but it's a fast way to get to the best of last year's UU Blogging.)

I know I've been a slacker blogger lately. But blogging is a lot like my my work, and my work in a church which seems to have burst through another size category has been pretty intense lately. We're planning for a third service, probably a contemporary-style service, and it does seem that all the "ways we do things" don't work very well at the moment. I tell myself there are worse problems, but re-thinking church from the ground up is a lot of work. Ergo, no blogging.

I am taking care of myself, however, enjoying weaving in my spare time. Check it out!

The End of America?

I've been reading The End of America by Naomi Wolf in preparation for next week's sermon on Democracy. While it has some good points about America's founders and their constitutional reasoning, a great list of how governments can subvert freedom, and some good history of how that has been done all over the world in the past hundred years, her object is to frighten Americans into thinking that their democracy has toppled, and in service of that goal, she is repeatedly misleading, evasive, and manipulative.

I've been trying to make myself read this book for about two weeks now, and was becoming more and more aware of either sloppy writing or writing that is misleading, evasive, and manipulative, so I started checking footnotes and the internet.

Here's the thing she does in this book.

She tells the beginning of a scary story about the subversion of rights in America these days. Then she moves on to talk about why this sort of thing is dangerous and how it has been done before by Nazis or other totalitarians. Then she moves on to the next scary story. But she doesn't finish her stories. It's implied that the scary things that were threatened in part I of her story resulted in harm to people, but she never quite says it. She supplies us with reassuring footnotes, and I'm sure that most people get her point and skip the fine print.


She tells a story, for instance, about a lecturer on Islam at U-Wisconsin at Madison, who "disputed the official facts of the 9/11 attacks and planned to spend 1-2 weeks of a 16 week course on Islam and Society on post-9/11 matters, raising the hackles of the Right. She talks about the University response, the right-wing media firestorm, and pressure from some legislators, and quotes the president as saying that he doesn't want his faculty exposed to political tests.

Then she drops his story, and speaks generally about how governments moving towards totalitarianism often target university professors, talks about extreme views in America currently against academic freedom, and talks about how in Germany and Italy before WW II, dissenting professors were targeted.

What she never gets around to saying is that the Madison lecturer, who had been hired to teach for one semester, was on leave for a year and has not been hired back, is not simply a teacher who doesn't toe the administration line. He believes that 9/11 was engineered by the US government and has been outspoken to the point of disruptive to make his point. And while the university was pressured to fire him, they didn't do so. It carefully reviewed his work for the previous 10 years as a teaching assistant, and his course outline, reminded him that his job is to teach Islamic culture, not his opinions about the American Government, and let him teach the course. That's a triumph of democracy, not its swan song.

I researched another similar claim before laying the book down. If I can't trust an author to tell me the whole truth, I don't read. Anybody know a better source of information about our post 9-11 constitutional situation?

Church, State, and ID

Ogre (in the comment to the last post) nicely spells out the part of the ID-at-GA problem that seems to have pressed the most buttons in folks. In short, the REAL problem with the requirement to show ID to get into the GA neighborhood is not that some people won't be able to get to come to GA, it's that some people won't be able to come to the WORSHIP SERVICES at GA. Worship services, we feel, should by definition, be open to everyone. The specter of a federal official telling some people that they can't come to our (or any other, presumably) worship service seems especially scary. "What if the feds declared the blocks around your church a security zone and only let people through who had proper ID?" Ogre asks.

(Ogre also remarks that us UU's with our backpacks and Birkenstock's can hardly be considered a threat to port security, especially in a port where containers are not well inspected. The container issue is a huge one, and I sure hope somebody is working on it, but I think we all could easily be convinced that a person with ill intent could certainly dress up just like us if they wanted to. The point of asking for an official ID is to save us all, especially those of us who "look" like foreigners, from the indignity of being singled out, profiled, or subjected to prejudicial activity. )

Back to church and state.

A case where Homeland Security cordoned off a church and required ID for entry would certainly be a challenge to separation of church and state and go to the Supreme Court, and I imagine that we'd all be sending our contributions to the ACLU for that one. There is a considerable body of church/state law in place about such conflicts of rights and values, and the church does not always win.

But my friends, GA isn't our church, though we might hold worship there. We're the most temporary of occupants of the Port of Fort Lauderdale. The doctrine of separation of church and state doesn't mean that anybody can do something they call worship anywhere they please and enjoy immunity from government regulations. We can't hold a worship service in public parks, in the middle of the street, or on other people's property. From the perspective of Homeland Security, we UU's have chosen to enter this sensitive piece of property, and we have to follow the rules that make the nation more secure. Consider this analogy. Suppose a church which had a prison ministry insisted that the prison gates must be thrown open so that anybody could attend because the government has no right to regulate attendance at a worship service. We're in the same position at our GA in the Port of Fort Lauderdale. If we protest showing ID at GA for reasons of separation of church and state, the world is going to laugh at us and wonder why they ever thought Unitarian Universalists were bright, well-read people.

We could, of course, be angry with our own GA Planning Committee, who signed us up for a GA in a secure area, on promises that the ID problem would be solved by now. That wouldn't be very productive, but at least it would be reasonable.

Actually all these "reasons" for the hullabaloo about ID at GA strike me as side issues to what is really bothering us. More about that in another post.

Disecting ID

There are a number of arguments in the "Why we should protest having to show our ID's to get into GA" fracas. I propose to take them one by one. But first let me say that "disliking" and "protesting" are two very different things. I'm going to find the whole ID business disagreeable, like most people will, I imagine. While I've gotten quite used to showing my ID to get on an airplane and kind of used to showing my ID to buy decongestant, showing my ID to get into a convention is new, and I don't like new. And the fact that the convention is my very own precious GA, where I want to be with "my people" and feel like we're powerful....that's going to be an ongoing grief about how things have changed hitting me in my very heart.

So. I'm sad and will no doubt get sadder. But protest? Let's see.

The most dramatic reason that some people will be boycotting GA or protesting is that in their minds, government requirement for ID's in possible terrorist targets such as the Port of Ft. Lauderdale is just another step on the path to fascism. I don't agree with this line of reasoning. I think that there are legitimate reasons for a government to ask for ID, and that there are ways to handle this which are just, democratic, and non-threatening to civil liberties. (There are plenty of other steps on the road to fascism which I worry about quite a bit more, but I still have faith in the political process and the good sense of Americans to deal with.)

For those who make this argument, I ask: Why draw the line in front of a Convention Center? Why not protest your local airport or Federal Court?

Contemporary Worship

Firstly, a shout-out to our church's band, "Spare Parts", a beloved group which plays for us as often as invited, sometimes even when invited on Very Short Notice. (as for the January 6 service featuring commentary on the famous figures who died during the past year, when they treated us to some Dan Fogelberg. Thanks, guys!) Spare Parts is an intergenerational folk-rock sort of band, but heavy on the baby-boomers. It's wonderful, if not quite what people picture when they think, "church band."

Secondly a note that we're starting to think seriously about adding a third service to our growing congregation which is currently almost filling two services. One possibility is to continue with the music and staffing we have for the current two services, and add a "contemporary" style worship service, appealing to young adults, which would be music-heavy and band-led. That's what most churches seem to do, and I'm willing, though pretty much illiterate in the current music set. (Dan Fogelberg was the last pop musician I paid much attention to. I'm totally out of it.)

I set the possibility of a contemporary service before my church's young adult group yesterday, in frank hopes of getting them interested in helping out with such a venture. They were luke warm. We already have a good mix of classical, popular, and world music in our weekly line-up; they're happy with that, they said. (of course, they are the ones who are here...) Then somebody said something else which really surprised me, and they all seemed to agree. "In those Evangelical churches, they have to have a band and screens and all those toys to get people interested in coming and keep them listening. But you don't need to do that. We come because what we hear is helpful to us. We don't need any other rewards."

I'd never thought of it that way.

Do any UU churches have a true contemporary worship service, I wonder? Readers?

Proud to Present...

One of the young adults in my church, currently away at college, has written most interestingly on his blog about various candidates. Find it here.
He's a lot more informed than I am, so I'm watching him carefully. I commend his blog to you, too!

Hillary

Doesn't get it.

Her husband's behavior in the White House was not her fault, and I honor her for apparently forgiving him for it and continuing with the marriage, but in making him such a prominent part of her campaign she's forgotten something that nobody else has, which is what a miserable episode that was and how it laid an important part of the goundwork for the even more miserable time we're having now.

Maybe, in order to forgive Bill she had to tell herself it was all no big deal, but it was a big deal. So while I admire Hillary the wife, Hillary the politician has made a terrible mistake.

How to Find Your Daemon-a meditation

A reader asks exactly how we did this, so here is the script for the guided meditation.

Now, we are going to go on a journey of our imagination, to meet our daemon, or our animal guide…an animal who is just right for our personality. This might be an animal who is a lot like us…shy if we are shy, for instance, or a good runner if we are a good runner…but this animal might have a quality that we don’t have…slow and patient, if we are hyper and impatient, for instance, or smart if we struggle at school. You never can tell with daemons…and you can’t make up your mind in advance. If you go to the right place in your imagination, your daemon will find you. It may be a surprise.

So I want you to wiggle one last wiggle and get yourself comfortable. (big breath…sigh loud, medium, soft) Keep breathing. notice how your breath feels as it goes in and out of your chest, your tummy, your nose. Just breathe. Now, in your imagination, picture yourself taking a walk on a road or a path. Notice what is around you…trees? sky? mountains? And notice what you are walking on. Grass? dirt? pavement? ice? Keep walking. Is the wind blowing? Are you hot? cold? As you walk, you are hoping that the daemon you are about to meet will be just right for you.

Up ahead you see a shelter of some sort. A little house, perhaps…it has a door, and you know that behind that door your daemon is waiting for you. You walk up to the door and stop and take a deep breath…and you open the door.

Your daemon may be right there. If so, say hello and make friends with it. If you don’t see anything, look around the room and wait…see if something comes. Or perhaps you overlooked a very small animal. You were looking for an animal, but some people have invisible daemons, or daemons who are more like people…even objects sometimes.

If you have identified your deamon and made friends with it, tell it, thank it for showing itself to you. Promise that you will come back and visit in your imagination, and ask it for help in your life.

Now, it is time to return. Remembering that you can always come back to this place in your imagination, say goodbye to your daemon, go outside, and start walking back down the road.

When you are ready, come on back and open your eyes….

Now I invite you to turn to the person next to you, or perhaps two of you, and tell them what you found on your imaginary trip.

And now Daylene is going to bring the microphone around so we can hear a variety of daemon stories. If you’d like to tell everyone about your daemon, think up one sentence….

The Daemons discovered ranged from family pets to dragons and Shrek.

I have to say that the intergenerational ongregation was dead silent through this entire guided mediation, which is not something I can say many Sundays!

At Goldencompassmovie.com, there is a widget which will assign you a daemon after a short personality inventory.

Fun Sunday

I've long thought that the "down Sundays" (the Sundays after holidays) are as much self-fulfilling prophesy as anything, and I always try to do interesting things on these weeks. The Sunday after Christmas is one of the hardest and most interesting, since we don't have RE that day and it has to be an intergenerational service. This year we tackled the Golden Compass. Both services were full and I think everyone had a good time. (Since someone asked, here's what we did. We talked a little about the story for those who had not read the book, I lead a guided meditation for the purpose of letting everyone find their daemons, after which people shared their experience with their neighbors, I talked about the UU values in the story (about thinking for yourself, and about being open minded to new understandings of words like God) Ron did a brief theology of Dust, and we ended with an "imposition of dust", inviting all who wished to come forward and get a smudge of glitter on their hand or forehead or just get dusted with glitter. We used the new, tiny glitter so I'm still in good with my janitor, and somewhat to my surprise, most of the people who came up wanted glitter on their forehead. It was great fun.)

Also present at the service was someone from my first congregation. She introduced herself as having known me from the days "of the church of Jesus Christ of the Air Conditioner." That got a non-comprehending laugh and took me back years and years, to the early 1980's, when the church I served in Columbia, South Carolina, owned a tiny church which had once been an Episcopal chapel in a Mill Village. it did indeed have a lovely stained glass window of Jesus in the back, and at some point, the bottom panel had been removed for an Air Conditioner. John Buehrens, later the president of the UUA, visited the congregation before I arrived and dubbed it with that name.

At the second service there were a couple of guys from Knoxville, a church which I served for a Summer as an intern and then for a year as a part time interim.

So many people told me they'd seen The Golden Compass for this service that if there is a sequal, I'm going to take credit for pushing this movie over the top.

Boxing Day at the Hospital

My husband had some elective day surgery today, so I spent a bunch of time hanging out in a nearly empty hospital, mostly, as it turned out, listening to staff chatter. We were there early, as folks were coming to work, and the conversation went like this. "Hi, how was your Christmas." and the answer, "Good, I'm glad it's over." The same thing happened in the cafeteria. I must have heard a dozen variations on that exchange. The nurse for the empty recovery bed next to us confided that she had awakened this morning to a broken clock that told her it was December 23...what a nightmare, she laughed...to have to do it all over again!

It didn't seem that anyone had had a terrible experience on Christmas, it was just too stressful overall. It seemed as if the hospital staff's Christmas was a little like our Boxing Day... nothing awful, but we were glad that it was over with.

Christmas Celebrations are not completely voluntary, but this universal elective surgery response surprised me. I wonder what celebrations would suit people better? Is it just too much of a holiday for families with excited children aged 3-15? That's a relatively small proportion of us, after all. As a family with a 17 year old, we've noticed that it's not quite the same any more. (These days, parents put together the gifts in the morning. The teen now goes to bed after we do and gets up late, too!) But we had a very nice day yesterday, all working our our art projects for nearly a full day. That's a luxury! Late in the evening we made a quick Christmas Visit to drop off gifts at a friend's, which topped off the day nicely.

We have a few treats planned for later this week and a New Year's party to go to. Tomorrow's work is to get ready for the Golden Compass service on Sunday, which, we hope, will bring in the kids who usually don't come to church the week after Christmas. Since most of you, dear readers, can't come to church and discover your Daemon's wisdom, check out the movie site (Goldencompassmovie.com), where, after a short personality inventory, you'll be assigned a deamon of your very own!

Certain Poor Shepherds

Christmas Eve Homily

Last year, someone informed me that when she was a kid, she thought that the Three Kings brought the baby Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth. I smiled for 24 hours. I wrote about it on my blog, and someone commented that when he was a kid, he had confusions about Certain Poor Shepherds.

The way this young person puzzled it out, “to certain” must be a verb, meaning,” to reassure,” so the angels came to reassure some poor shepherds in their fields. Which is not far from the mark, after all. This young person, when told the “real” meaning of the carol, that the angels appeared to “particular” shepherds, wanted to know why some and not others? A young Universalist in the making!

That got me to thinking about other meanings of the word “certain.” Here’s another possibility. They were not “reassured” poor shepherds, or “particular” poor shepherds, they were “confident” poor shepherds…sure of what they have seen and heard. They see an angel in the sky, and nobody says, “Ho, boy, it must be indigestion” or “I’m so stressed out I’ve started imagining things!.” They are certain: it’s an angel. The angel says “Go and See!” and nobody asks if by any chance this is the devil in disguise, or moans about a long walk into town: they Go and they See. They are sure that what they are seeing is their next king in that cold stable, and that’s good news to the poor.

Angels appearing in the sky with crystal clear messages makes for good stories, but it’s never happened to me that way, or to you, I’d wager. The times I’ve thought, maybe, I felt a nudge from God, the message was kind of…well, let’s just say, subtle. Easy to ignore, easy to miss, not at all clear. Never angelic voices. Mostly just a feeling; at a concert, on the bus, hiking, reading, listening to someone. The messages only come when I really need them. They often have a shine of good feeling with them, but no hosanna’s, no voices, no heavenly lights… nothing certain. Always a matter of “hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses,” as the poet T.S. Elliot complained

My experience, really, is much more like what the Magi’s experience must have been: You see a new star in the sky. What does it mean? Who knows what it means? Maybe nothing. maybe Everything. There’s an obscure prophesy about a baby or is it a king? Or is it just restlessness, boredom, avoidance?

Most people, even Magj, would have stayed at home by the fire. They’d have responsibilities, doubts, plans of their own to easily trump the lovely new star. The shepherds had it easy. Big voices. Bright Lights. Clear Instructions. Go and See the Baby! The Bible says they went, but there are any number of folk stories about the Shepherd who stayed behind. Someone had to tend the flocks, after all, and there’s always a skeptic in the crowd. That would be me. Maybe it would also be you.

Certainty or not, the task of our lives to follow the hints that come to us, whether in heavenly voices or, more likely, in the voices of friends, authors, musicians, teachers, and that still, small voice inside us.

They urge us to grow in love and spirit,

and remind us that the journey begins with single, tentative steps.

They urge us to open our hearts to what comes into our lives,

and remind us that it is the unexpected that is often the greatest blessing.

They urge us to look inward.

and remind us of the jewels beyond price that reside there.

They urge us to appreciate the world around us.

and make the things of the world our sacred teachers.

They urge us to give away what is precious to us,

and remind us that when we give in joy, we receive one hundred fold.

They urge us to test our voices and discern our best path,

but remind us not to turn away from new faith and new hope, waiting for a certainty that may never come.

Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is a little tool for your web browser. Set up a few categories you are interested in (I've got knitting, alternative energy, on-line games, and religion going right now), and whenever you have a few idle minutes, click and get websites in those categories. I've found some wonderful knitting blogs, interesting alternative energy ideas, and browsed a world of religious websites. Every time you get a site, you say if you like it, and Stumble Upon gets better and better at entertaining and enlightening (and addicting) you. (more info and download here)

How do websites get chosen for this kind of dissemination? By vote of users. If you're a stumble upon user, and you click the thumbs up on your toolbar...right now, for instance, this blog would get a vote. If you don't use stumble Upon, I've provided a button at the bottom of this post.

We early adopting UU's can help get the UU word out by voting for UU websites in this way. The more web-users who stumble upon UU websites, the more people discover us.

Evangelism...and you don't even have to explain UU!

Gold, Frankencense, and Mirth

Reprise from Last Year.....


A woman at church yesterday said that when she was a kid, she thought that the three Kings brought the baby Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth. I've been smiling ever since.

Those three universal beings (in the folk tradition from which manger scenes are made, they are an elderly European, a middle aged Oriental, and a young African) on their strange journey to bow down before a baby and bring gifts, were supposed to have brought three items of financial worth, gold, a precious incense used in religious ritual and worship, and a precious spice used in, of all things, embalming. Some make something of the latter; a gift for a person whose life was destined to be short.

I'd rather universalize these gifts, making them symbolic of what we need for a good life; a modicum of financial resources, the spiritual resources symbolized by Frankincense, and the emotional and relational resources symbolized by mirth.

Food and fire, hope and spirit, love and community. May your Holiday season be blessed with Gold, Frankincense, and Mirth.

Showing Identification

There's been quite a bit of consternation about the fact that the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center, site of next June's GA, is in a Homeland Security Security Zone (vulnerable port, oil tanks etc. etc.) Everyone entering has to show ID.

Well, that's a bummer. It will be a constant reminder of all the unpleasant changes that have been a part of our lives in the past 7 years and (since no one imagines that terrorists can't get Government Issued ID) will, no doubt remind us of vulnerabilities we'd prefer to ignore. Some people are talking and writing as if it's the step before Concentration Camps, worth boycotting, protesting, and loosing large amounts of money to stand up for democracy.

That's the part that really bugs me. As one who pulls out her ID with every check, every airplane, every Credit Transaction (I sign my credit cards, "Please Check ID") I just don't equate ID checks with Fascism.

It is true that ID checks can be abused. If a government record was being kept of ID's checked, so that a list of people attending GA could be created (not that I doubt that it could be easily created in other ways), that would trouble me. If the ID's were being checked in ways that violated the civil rights of the young, the dark-skinned, or the scruffy, that would trouble me. Every time a layer of enforcement is added to a society opportunities are created to violate the rights of citizens...sometimes because of nefarious government policy, more often because human beings deal so poorly with power. Every local cop has the ability to violate Civil Rights in just the ways we are worrying about, and nobody is talking about observing them! But as I've watched the airport situation develop over 6 years, I have to say that I've been hugely impressed with how much attention has been paid to rights, to cultural sensitivity, and to training people who have a lot of power to use it well. As one who travels with a sometimes scruffy teenager who has looked like he could be over 18 for several years now, I can say that I think we ought to give governments some credit here. We are not the only people in the world who understand privilege and oppression.

The UUA has been assured that ID's will be only checked, not recorded, that everyone will be dealt with courteously, that they welcome observers of this process. One of the conventions they had lately was a Muslem group, and that apparently passed without incident, so I'm not actually very worried about our sometimes scruffy and defiant teens, or our persons of color; something they are actually pretty used to in South Florida.

It is true that those illegal aliens who have not been able to obtain Government Issued ID will not be able to attend our worship services, but I'm having a hard time getting very excited about this. I'm all for putting our force behind a sensible, enforceable immigration policy, but to say as some are saying that we simply can not have a worship service that not everyone can attend makes no sense at all. There are so many people who, for so many reasons can't attend our worship services, week after week, and we do so little about it that in my opinion, it would be the worst kind of hypocrisy to draw our line in the sand about ID checks.


I am still left with the bummer, about how the world has changed, about how much we actually have lost, about the huge expense of dealing with the world as it is today, but that's a post for another day!

One Last Comment about Growth

I can't tell you for sure why this congregation has grown by 40% in the past 7 years. One thing about congregations, you just can't do controlled experiments on them. But their history goes something like this: 1949-60: slow and steady growth to about 200. 1960-1965: Rapid Growth to about 500 (not so rare in those days!) 1965-1988 Plateau/slide to 400 (considering that many of our congregations dropped by half in the late 1960's, this is not as bad as it sounds.) 1988-1992: growth spurt to over 500. 1992-2000, 500-550, which is a glass ceiling hard to burst through. 2001-2007: 489-720.

One thing we did in 2002 was add a second minister to our staff. This was a huge task which was paid for with every penny the congregation had in savings and aggressive fund raising for three years. In some ways a second minister is more expensive than a first minister, because in order to attract someone (outside of a Seminary city, anyway) you have to be paying everyone better than you probably are, you might need new office space, and so on. It's also a huge task because nobody will help you with it. A 100 member church looking for its first minister has everyone's sympathy. There used to be an entire extension program devoted to helping churches hire their first minister, and more than one chalice-lighter grant has helped a congregation over that hump. If they took that minister and grew by 50 members they were considered very successful. But the 400 member church trying to hire its second minister has nobody's sympathy. I said more than once in that near decade of plateau that if I could only have an extension grant for a second minister I could add a small congregation's worth of members to my congregation. I was wrong. With a second minister, we added a medium-sized congregation worth of members.

Other things were right. 9/11 happened. The senior minister (me) quit getting sick and needing months of recuperation time. In our case, a second minister not only did all the things a second minister usually does but changed some very unhealthy dynamics in the church about which I had no leverage by myself. Our city grew almost as fast as the church. Still, if I had to suggest one intervention for a 400 member church which was willing to become a large congregation, that's what I'd suggest.

The Golden Compass: The Movie

Yep, they took liberties with the story and played down the anti-religion theme, and gad, was it loud! But if you kept your fingers close to your ears, it was a magical two hours, in many ways a better story than the book.

The whole church staff has seen it now, and we're planning an intergenerational service on it for that always awkward Sunday after Christmas. (I so want to throw gold glitter around to demonstrate Dust but the last time I did that the janitor didn't speak to me for weeks, so that's out.) I'm looking forward to the opportunity to talk to kids about this new way to think about God or the Spirit of Life.

Is anyone else planning worship or RE around this movie?

Guns and Tooth Powder

I saw tooth powder for sale yesterday. Hadn't seen it in years. Had it as a little kid. You use it instead of toothpaste. Pour a little into your hand, mush your toothbrush in it and brush. Very kid-friendly mess. Adults...they hated the stuff.

It's for sale to travelers. Tooth powder can be taken in one's carry-on luggage. The possibility that a terrorist might put a bomb in a toothpaste tube has changed our lifestyle.

Four people killed in church on Sunday by a suicide gunner. Six kids wounded as they got off a school bus today. This is happening a lot. Add these needless deaths to the ordinary gun related crimes; crimes of property gone wrong or crimes of passion gone all too well, and you have the daily reality of gun violence, right here, in our own neighborhoods, schools, churches, work places. It could happen to any one of us tomorrow.

Let's ditch the ban on toothpaste and put the ban on guns.

When will they ever learn?

A Thriving Branch Congregation

I visited our Branch congregation in Socorro yesterday. I preached"live" at the service their lay worship leader conducted, a member of the Albuquerque congregation provided music, substituting for their regular musician, our DRE told the children's story and then took the group of pre-schoolers off to draw while she gave their child-care provider some tips and materials for future classes. There were about 30 people there. Later that evening, I met with their core leaders and we talked about starting a steering committee, about the Covenant Group and the meditation class they are going to start in the new year, and about the details of their first "solo" service, which will be a Christmas concert gift to their small community. They are expecting about 100 people to pack the sanctuary of the little Episcopal church they meet in.

We also talked about tweaking their regular order of service so that the children will leave a bit earlier in the service. They are looking into getting a stretch of highway to pick up and are wondering how to be more involved with the town's food bank. They have two college students attending and one professor from the State University in the town and they have established a student group on campus. We talked about how they might organize any needed pastoral care, when to call for assistance, and a variety of other things. I brought home a pledge card, a new member's sign-up sheet, and a request by an elderly woman to know how to put the church in her will. (also an envelope with their offering coins, bills, and checks...we're having difficulty getting a local bank account set up for them.)

The core group in Socorro started meeting six months ago and they began weekly worship two months ago. They are a thriving, attractive congregation. They are enjoying each other's company. More than one person has said that this project has hugely enriched their life in their small town. It's been a great project for the whole church; we're all getting a kick out of being on a cutting edge of a new way to organize new congregations.

I've been a part of starting two other congregations, one in a similarly small town in South Carolina and one in the western suburbs of Albuquerque. The first one failed after its first year. The second has been 'on its own' for a decade now and is settling its second minister, but they have not been able to take advantage of the housing boom around them and remain quite small. I felt about both groups that they were fighting nearly impossible odds; they were abandoned babies left to fend for themselves way too early in a hard world. Years ago I promised myself that I'd never do that again.

Our Socorro branch, age 2 months, has access to a good sermon every week, an RE library, advice, training for worship and covenant group leaders, pastoral care, and moral support. It's such a pleasure to watch them take all that and thrive!

The Golden Compass

No blogging lately; I've spent all my spare moments in the last week or so reading Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials. Pullman's books are not as long as the Harry Potter books, but they are substantial, and they are much harder to read. These are stories ABOUT children, not FOR children; they are complex, contain several threads, and there are so many mysteries to keep track of, and you don't know who the good guys and bad buys are for quite a while. My son says he tried to read them in Middle School and gave up; now, at a sophisticated 17, he likes them. We'll get to the movie sometime, and I'm planning a service the week after Christmas about the books, the movie, and the controversy.

There are more than a few potshots at the Catholic Church, although in this alternative universe, this institution seems to have been founded by Calvin, and so is clearly meant to be a diatribe against any kind of religion which represses human freedom and creativity. The church folks who are putting up a stink are damning themselves by their reaction...if I tell a parable about a bad guy and someone says, "How dare you make fun of me!" they have accused themselves.

The big irony about the book is that it's author is a Humanist who believes that all value resides in this world, but his book, for all that it's about a war against the Church, is luminously spiritual. Never again will I look at dust as merely the grit under my feet. In reality, it connects us all, and in parable, is our reminder that grace abounds. The children's values (and in spite of the fact that they've got the authorities in three worlds looking for them, their values are solid and good) are rewarded not only materially but spiritually. I hope to find something more about Mr. Pullman and his beliefs.

Multi-Cultural Growth

It is true that one of the trials of ministry is helping the institution as a whole proceed in balanced and healthy programming, and not letting tails wag dogs. For instance, here in New Mexico, where the issues of racial and cultural tension are not black and white and related to slavery, but are multi-hued and related to immigration, water rights, land grants, reservations, tribes, and other complexities. We've never done anti-racism training; it's just not culturally appropriate here. Sometimes people have been angry about that. (Not that I forbade it, you understand, I just didn't do it myself, and neither did anyone else.) There are those who would make a minister feel like a bad girl for this...that's a part of the pain. In spite of this fact, I would remark, that we have a notably multi-ethnic congregation. The reason might surprise you. We have lots of young adults. Multi-ethnic comes naturally to young adults. They've had it all their lives. When they bring their friends to church, they bring a rainbow with them. As to how we attracted the young adults, well...they are a pure gift. We watched for them, tried not to repel them, and helped them get organized so they were visible to each other and able to organize themselves.

Ministerial Job Descriptions

Anon. has left a really insightful comment in the post below, well worth reading. Here's my response.

Thanks so much for this insightful comment. There are wonderful stories of good relationships among colleagues working on a staff together, but of course, those don't get heard as often as the horror stories. And every job description should have some of "shiny" parts of ministry, the creative, public aspects, and some of the "heavy lifting". Also each minister (really, this goes for any staff person whose job description can be negotiated) should have some things that really excite them. My experience in working with a number of colleagues is that it is hard to know, in advance, what that split of work is going to be and also that it changes with time. I think that it is best for church leaders to give the two ministers as much leeway as they possibly can to decide between themselves how they are going to split up the ministry and to expect them to tweak their division of labor every year. Much as they might like to only hear the senior minister preach, for instance, if the Associate likes to preach and you want a happy associate, you have to find ways to let that happen. (You do want a happy associate and a happy team. An unhappy minister is a menace to themselves and their church and a ministerial transition is a huge expense.) If all ministers have some basic HR training, (that includes training in how to be a good senior colleague) they will know how to negotiate and re-negotiate these things and why it is important to do so.

Some Things UU'ism can do for Growth

By UU'ism, I mean the system within which we exist, of which the UUA is one part. I mean UUA staff, UU Ministers and other professionals like musicians and RE directors, church leaders, and all the ways we all "just know" to do things.

There are some things that no one person or church can do on its own, and one is to create a culture in which staff can work productively together. When we fancied ourselves a denomination of small, lay-lead, one-minister, one-employee churches, we did have an employment culture; a culture that expected that committees of lay people would provide support and if necessary, supervision to employees and ministers. That had its inefficiencies and injustices, but one of the truly painful and conflict-producing consequences of growth was that once you have more than a couple of employees or have grown to need more than one minister, none of that works any more and the loudest voices clamor for impossible structures and a lot of free-for-all and unsupervised staff. That culture makes growth really, really hard, it makes excellence impossible, it makes working on a staff really hard, and it makes being responsible for the work of a staff impossible. So if I could wave my magic wand on the ministerial side of things:

1. I'd insist that every minister have basic Human Resources training. A minister needs to know how to hire, train, coach, manage, discipline, and fire people. Ideally this training would be offered by theological schools or the UUA because all these tasks are somewhat different in the small staff/church environments that we work in. This is particularly tricky when two ordained staff are working together and even more tricky when both ministers are called by the congregation, which vastly complicates their relationship.

2. I'd make serving on a staff a respectable option for ministers. Assistant and Associate positions and part-time program specialties are absolutely vital for churches of over 500 members. Right now, UU ministers are encouraged from several sources to think that these positions are not very respectable and that a "real" minister has his or her "own" church. The UUMA guidelines need to be changed on this point, and I hear that they are.

3. I'd create a group for ministers serving on staffs and assist with funding a yearly retreat for them, and I'd think of them when doing things like putting together groups of ministers to talk about growth. The Associate and Assistant ministers know things the Senior ministers don't know about growth.

How to Kill Growth

When we talked about church growth, we ended up talking about amorphous concepts like "buzz", "love", and "vision", and it may be that church growth just doesn't fit itself into a to-do list. But it's easy to make a to-do list if you want to kill growth. No matter how wonderful the sermons, growth can be easily killed simply by doing any one or two of the following.

1. Get into a fight, don't end the fight, keep it going, let it permeate all aspects of a congregation, never tell the people who are fighting that they are hurting the church, and don't do anything that would tred on their sacred right to freely say whatever hurtful, horrible things they want to say to as many people as they can find. That will insure that the congregation's "buzz" is a matter of whispering in corners or raised and edgy voices. Big Growth Killer. Nobody comes to church to fight. Church fights leave ministers and lay people with Post Traumatic Stress. The people who join a church that's in the middle of a fight are either astoundingly dedicated, clueless or..worse yet, like to fight.
   
2. Let your building and grounds get run down, looking like nobody in this supposedly caring, dedicated community cares.
   
3. Pay absolutely no attention to the changes the churches around you are making in worship. You may have great reasons to do it your way, but if you're clueless (or look clueless) to the culture around you, that culture is not going to knock on your door.
4. Pay no attention to your guests (aka visitors). Make sure they are uncomfortable from the moment they arrive on your property and don't see a sign or a greeter telling them where to go. Keep them wondering after the service...where is that social hall? Don't interrupt your important conversations about church business to say Good Morning or find out where they came.
   
5. Make it clear to parents that you don't really care about children. Tuck them away in a basement. Rent your classrooms to a daycare center which throws sheets over all their cool toys so that the children who come to Sunday School feel like they are camping out in a graveyard of forbidden joys. Use hand-me-down games and toys. Don't sign kids in and out of classrooms. (Parents have been taught to be clinically paranoid about their children's safety. They sign their kids in and out of birthday parties these days.)
   

I could go on and on forever, and in excruciating detail, but it's too depressing. It's all too easy to kill growth in a church! I've seen all these things and had to find ways to get well-meaning UU's to quit doing them. I'm tired now and am going to bed.

Lots of Kinds of Growth

Someone wondered in a comment whether the growth consultation had talked about other kinds of growth, growth in service, in spirituality, inclusiveness of diversity, etc.

The focus of this Consultation was on numerical growth, and the assumption was made that excellence in programming brings growth in service, spirit, inclusiveness, etc, and that is part and parcel of numerical growth. We talked some about the role of the minister in discerning what kind of growth is most likely to benefit the church as a whole, and we talked about the pain and complexity of having to say "no" to or not support projects that some think will be growth-producing.

Since I'm from the "Growth is an outcome, not a goal" school of thought, my focus is always on those "other kinds of growth." Perhaps that's one reason I weathered a decade of non-growth without ever feeling that I was not accomplishing my goals. We were doing much needed renovations. We were re-building community after a church fight. I was working on bringing more spirituality into the worship service. It was very satisfying, productive ministry, and I honor myself and my congregation for it. We were just trying to be a good church...and look what happened, eventually!

Growth Consultation and Transition Wisdom

One of the truisms of Ministerial Transitions is that everyone...ministers and laypeople...take a minister's skills and preferences for granted. Therefore a search committee is likely to look especially hard for the skills and preferences the last minister didn't have, assuming that "everyone" has the skills the last minister did have. So when Rev. Johnson, the world's most caring pastor, retires, a search committee goes out looking for someone who is a little more comfortable with teens. They assume that all ministers love doing pastoral care, and even when they have a candidate who says that's not her thing, she's inclined to spend her time creating a really good youth program, the committee doesn't hear it. And six months later, when the honeymoon is over, the people of the church are adjusting (hopefully) to their new minister, learning to better take care of themselves, telling their new pastor that they want her to pay more attention to the elderly shut-ins, which the minister is hopefully meeting them halfway on. Everyone looks back to realize that they had been making assumptions.

The ministers at the Growth Consultation didn't have much in the way of "nuts and bolts" of growth to discuss. We talked about vision, love, spirituality, and other vast topics. That may say something about a ministerial skill required to grow a church; grand and vast thinking. It may say something about this particular group which didn't include ministers who imagine that they have the one and only growth plan for everyone. But it may also say something about skills and preferences this group was taking for granted. Maybe we didn't want to talk about nuts and bolts of growth because some of those nuts and bolts are too obvious to bring up in an august group of colleagues.

For instance, I have a feeling that growing churches collect data. They know how many people are in church on any Sunday, how many members, children, and teens there are. They know something about the trends they are dealing with. They know how many visitors they have.

(We have, for instance, seen a marked increase in visitors since the Time Ad campaign out.)

Now, nobody mentioned data-keeping as a technology of growth. Too dull. Too obvious. But I know that not every minister insists on keeping and using data like this. We didn't talk about how we convert visitors to members, although I'd lay my money that every church represented had a method of doing that. We did talk briefly about how we assimilate members and help them find their own ministry in the church, in the context of staffing....many growing churches have Membership and Social Justice coordinators, and I'm so jealous. Somehow we limp by with neither. (actually with those functions spread amongst staff and volunteers.)

Perhaps those listening, who kept commenting that this was a very different discussion than they often heard amongst ministers, are better able to figure out what we were taking for granted, and that will be a very interesting report.

Marilyn Sewell on Growth and Love

My Colleague Marilyn Sewell, senior minister of the Portland, OR, congregation was at the Growth consultation and has weighed in here

Buzzing towards Growth

Last week we had a patio fair at coffee hour. (Last week it was warm enough. This week, not so!) There was a little arts and crafts sale, a local fair trade organization was selling gifts, and our Green Sanctuary Committee was selling light bulbs and had invited a representative from our power company to talk to people about their wind power initiative. It was a glorious Fall day and the social hall was deserted except for the folks serving coffee.

At the end of the morning, the Power Company representative approached our administrator, asking for information about the church. "There's great energy, here, " she said. "Everybody is happy!"

We called that, "the buzz" at the Growth Consultation, and we all agreed that (1) it existed and was important, and (2) that an unhappy or conflicted or depressed congregation produces a completely different "buzz". Our experience is that this is an often commented-on, very attractive feature of our congregation. Buzz is very valuable.

"Buzz" happens when the space is full, when people are excited about what and who they find in the space, when groups of people chatting are fluid and open to new people. (A group that is talking intently among itself and does not want to be approached or overheard...the sort of group that might exist during a time of conflict...makes a completely different kind of noise.)

"Buzz" is created by children, which is why we serve cocoa at Coffee Hour. Buzz is created by smiles, expansive gestures, and people calling out to their friends by name.

There comes a time as a church grows, that the members buzzing around at coffee hour don't know whether those around them are new any more, and taking care of those newcomers and helping them be a part of the buzz is really important. That's when versions of the Yellow Cup become important; we have to be able to identify a lot of newcomers in a short span of 10-20 minutes. That's also when some volunteers and staff have to keep firmly in mind that their job at coffee hour is to greet newcomers.

We do things to create buzz at our congregation. We encourage all our scouts to sell their wares, we invite groups to put out information, there are always tables full of sign-up sheets. And while we do wish that we had a larger social hall during the winter, we are glad that we don't have to deal with a cavernous hall, where it would be hard to create the buzz that helps people experience the energy of this congregation.

For churches not growing

I've been fortunate to serve churches which were willing and able to grow, and feel blessed to have been able to lead and assist that growth. But I've also lived out a period of non-growth; a decade in which we did mostly the same things we'd been doing and have done since, plus a building project, and the church see-sawed around on a plateau. There's no doubt in my mind that all the good intention and skill of minister and congregation together can't "produce" growth. I have a favorite reading on this subject, which is also a great reading for Mothers Day, Fathers Day, and to email to folks whose kids have taken an unexpected turn towards difficulty.

Do everything right,

all the time, and the child will prosper. It’s as simple as that, except for fate, luck, heredity, chance, the astrological sign under which the child was born, the order of her birth, his first encounter with evil, the boy who gilts her in spite of her excellent qualities, the war that is being fought when he is a young man, the drugs she may try once or too many times, the friends she makes, how he scores on tests, how well she endures kidding about her shortcomings, how ambitions he becomes, how far she falls behind, circumstantial evidence, ironic perspective, danger when it is least expected, difficulty in triumphing over circumstances, people with hidden agendas, and animals with rabies.” -Ann Beattie, from Picturing Will

Of course, it's all so important, our children, and our churches, that we do our best in spite of all the possible ways things might derail.

Saying Yes, Saying No

Side conversations at the growth conference convinced me that growing churches have what I've heard called a "permission giving" culture. That is, if you have an idea that fits in the church's vision, and want to give leadership to that idea, it is very easy to get permission to do that, to learn what you need to know about room use, publicity, and church policy, and get going with it. In our case most of this is encoded in policy; any staff person can help someone start a new program. We do a lot of saying yes. It may be that a growing church just has to manage this way; there's no way the staff and cadre of old leaders can manage demand by themselves; we just have to loosen up and (within reason) trust the the impassioned to go with their energy.

I have to comment here that I have learned that I'm a very poor predictor of which of these programs will "fly," so it's a good thing I don't feel the need to be controlling. Who would have thought that the group going to work in New Orleans would raise $7,000 by making one appeal on a Sunday morning? Who would have thought that the group splitting off of the young adult group and calling themselves the (old)parents of young children would grow to the point of having 24 adults and 23 children at their meetings? Or that the little group of techies who wanted to video-tape the sermon to put up on Utube and public access TV would morph into our current video ministry which serves two branches, a third service on our site, videos on our website and a sermon subscription service to lay-lead congregations?

But to some programs one must say, "no." Sometimes the program doesn't fit in the church's vision, or would compete with our core programming for space or use too much staff time or...this is the hardest...needs skilled or professional leadership to keep participants safe. There are any number of other times a minister has to just say no. It's one of the hard parts of the job. We started talking about this as the "fierce shepherd" role...the leader who loves the church...it's people and its vision...enough to keep them on track.

Someone advanced the theory...and I think it's a good one, that the minister of a growing church must be such a fierce shepherd, and shepherds who won't do this spend all their energy chasing troubled and troubling sheep around. Some ministers have to learn to step up to this role, others have to learn to codify it with policy and share it with other leaders. But it's gotta be done.

We also commented that female leaders pay a much greater price than male leaders for stepping into this role; even UU's want their female ministers to be tender mommies not fierce shepherds. We wondered if one reason fewer women seem to apply for senior ministry positions in larger churches is that by the time they are experienced enough to think of serving a large church, they've been beaten down by the unequal price of saying "no."

Readability

Well, this is fun! My blog tests out to a high school reading level. I think this is a good thing. We read blogs in our spare time, and too hard to too much like work. You can check out the reading level of any file on the web, so I checked out a few sermons from the church's website.
Mine run to Jr. High level. I think I should be pleased about this, too, after all, its an oral medium, but it's a bit harder...

Growth: Goal or Outcome?

The most heated discussion our little group of 12 had, in the end, was over the question of whether church growth should be a goal, or is better thought of as an outcome of church health.

On the goal side are those who believe that our way of doing religion has a saving message for the world and we should make a goal of reaching more of those people. On the outcome side are those who believe that the goal should be a healthy church and a program which feeds the spiritual hungers of the community (not the church as it stands, but the larger community, however that is defined.) The "Growth as a Goal" folks are gung ho for setting growth goals, since you gotta have a dream, and we who have such an important message outta dream big. The "Growth as an Outcome" folks believe that you should only set goals about things you can control, and you can't in the end, control whether people visit and like you when they do. They were further somewhat suspicious of numerical goals; it sounds like a too-simple, "bigger is better" trip.

Ours was a multi-generational group of ministers, ranging from three to going on 30 years in ministry and twentys to fifties in age. This particular conversation divided starkly along these generational lines. Newer, younger ministers had growth goals for themselves and their churches. Older, more experienced ministers spoke for growth as an outcome of a healthy, serving church. There was some passion in both groups for their chosen style.

This could be more of a difference in language than substance (the "Growth as a goal" folks know that to get growth, you have to have a vital program, and the "Growth as an outcome" ministers had experienced plenty of growth in spite of not aiming for it.) It could be a result of sadder-but-wiser ministers who have endured plateaus and declines in spite of all the good programming and church health they could muster. It could be that the younger folks are braver and bolder and more willing to take the risk of setting goals.

An observer commented that it seemed that this group of ministers believed that Unitarian Unitarianism has a saving message for the world and that growth is a good thing. The stunned silence that greeted that statement was eloquent testimony to this group's unquestioning passion for our movement and what it has to offer our world.

What about you? Is growth a goal in your church? Why or why not?

Afflicting the Comfortable

It's one of the things ministers are supposed to do, along with comforting the afflicted. At its most simple, this 19th century aphorism reminds ministers to do their pastoral care and their prophetic preaching, 'cause their sick folks are afflicted and need comforting and their pew-sitters are too comfy and need afflicting with the world's injustices.

Young ministers quickly discover that that's way too simple. There are some people who are way comfortable with their afflictions and will soak up all the comfort a new minister can give and still need more. There are some pew-sitters who are in so much pain only an ogre would afflict more.

There are some UU ministers who feel uneasy ministering to UU's, who tend to be among the knowledge and professional classes. Way too comfortable by the world's standards, they all have enough to eat, shelter, and heat, the majority have health insurance, especially if they are over 30, and an awful lot can entertain themselves in all the ways their hearts desire.

The world's standards are very low, and frankly, I think of my folks (and myself) as afflicted in spite of their relative wealth. They are afflicted with all ills the flesh is heir to and are often rather isolated. Their lives are way too busy and terribly stressful, the younger ones often carry huge debt, and most are puzzled and uneasy, if not downright frightened, by the current state of the world. I call that afflicted. Most of my preaching is aimed, not at afflicting the comfortable but offering a word of understanding and healing to the afflicted.

We talked some, at the growth consultation, about how we deal with the prophetic side of ministry, and this was an area in which the 12 ministers of growing church clearly had different philosophies. Some do a lot of teaching about social problems and organizing of social change opportunities. Most of what you read about church growth suggests that this is crucial, but Social Justice has never been this church's strong suit, and it has grown anyway. I preach on social issues on the occasions when I think I have an insight to share. Sometime I just share my puzzlement and talk about how to live with fear. What I never do is just wring my hands, or wave my fists, sermonically. If I can't wring some hope and a to-do list out of a situation (the Iraq war comes immediately to mind), it's not fodder for a sermon, it's fodder for the prayer.

The Other Side of the Story

I had imagined, as had the organizers of this growth consultation, that each of the ministers would have pet programs to share, tips about how to grow, and firm opinions about what had done the trick. This worried me because I wasn't sure what I'd say. I've got an interesting program going on now; our development of branches in small towns, but that has not yet been a very large factor in our growth. My church gets great marks for openness to newcomers and willingness to restructure, but we have not done anything to create growth, and which of the things we've done in the name of good ministry that have caused growth..well, who can say?

The session devoted to nuts and bolts was on the agenda but it turned out that most of the participants felt about like I did, and the conversation at that session turned to love. Our love for our churches, for this denomination, for our work. We all agreed on how key that was. Some of us told stories of our call to our churches that bordered on mystical. When called back to nuts and bolts, we mostly talked about worship, spiritual programming such as covenant groups (and Ken, do tell them about your month of gratitude!). There was some talk about the importance of staff work and how unprepared we all felt for the growing task of supervision, and how this always fraught subject is nearly impossible in our UU World. But then we returned to the relationship between minister and congregation.

I wondered what kind of a consultation this would have been if lay leaders have been invited, and if I were following up on this, I'd invite groups of lay people from churches which have grown to a special lunch at, GA, or the Large or Medium Sized church conferences. I'd feed them well, tell them how special and wonderful they are , and ask some of the same questions. I have a feeling they'd have an entirely different perspective.

They'd talk about good preaching much more than we ministers did, I'm sure, (it was a remarkably un-braggy group) but beyond that, I'm not so sure, and I think it's important to know.

What about it, lay readers of this blog? If your church has grown over the past five years, what has caused that growth? What do you think people come for and what keeps them? What has your hard work been devoted to and why have you done it?

Growth Consultation III-redevelopment

As we told our stories we noticed a stark pattern. With the exception of the brand new church, all of our stories were stories of redevelopment. Several churches, like mine, had been on a plateau for a generation. A couple had declined from previous highs. In one church the leaders had said to each other, "If this doesn't work, we need to think about closing."

A second set of stories, which I particularly resonated with, was told about trust, in particular, trusting the minister's leadership. This is not something that comes naturally to UU's, even less so when there has been difficulty between congregation and ministers.

I digress to tell a personal story. Before I accepted the call to Albuquerque, the retiring District Exec sat me down and told me about the difficulties my predecessors had had and had caused and said (to the 35 year old across the table from him), “You do know what this means, don’t you?” “Yes,” I said, in my most serious and grown up voice, “It means that it will be a long time before they trust me or follow me.” He looked surprised, and then relieved. “Well, he said, “As long as you know that, if you love them, you should go.” “I know it.” I said, and I went.

Now I look back fondly on my long dead colleague (he died within a month of that conversation). I wonder what he meant by “a long time”. I know what I meant. I’m embarrassed to report that I meant two years.

It was fifteen years.

Not that I didn’t do a good deal of leading in my first 15 years, but the lack of trust did make everything twice as hard and the toll on me twice as heavy. But about year 15, some of the invisible plasma that had impeded our life together fell away, and it has been so much easier since.

There is nothing like desperation to get an old guarde to grudgingly trust a new minister, and while desperation to grow can't show to the congregation at large, a little quiet desperation in the leadership is probably a necessary thing. It may be that a minister coming to a church that know itself to be in trouble is more likely to be allowed to help that church grow than a minister coming to a church that thinks it's doing a pretty good job already.

Growth Consultation II

The first question that was asked of us was to articulate the purpose or saving message of our church. I think we were all struck by the openly spiritual statements which were made. This group of 12 ministers of growing churches all believe that the purpose of their churches is spiritual growth of individuals and transformation of the world, in that order. Words like "community" and "like minded" didn't, as far as I remember, figure in the mix at all. The statement I made is my own purpose, I want to offer people an opportunity to deepen their lives within a theologically diverse community. I had considered this boldly spiritual but nearly all of my colleagues had even more specifically spiritual statements to make about the saving message of their church.

I've always had a hunch that one reason my church is a vital religious community is because our worship service, no matter who is leading it, is noticeably worshipful, our program is definitely heavy on spiritual growth opportunities, and our language spiritual, religious, and not dogmatic. I was hoping that that hunch would be confirmed in this gathering, which it was. It's an interesting experience to think you're "way out there" and discover that others of your successful colleagues are even more "way out." Very satisfying.

Growth Consultation

I’ve spent a couple of days now at this event, in Louisville. 10 ministers of churches which have had significant, sustained growth over several years, two ministers of churches we all hope will grow significantly, and a dozen lay and ordained members of the UUA’s growth team. The ministers were chosen to have a good mix of geographies, genders, generations and situations. I feel the honor and the responsibility of the thing, and I am very aware that a different dozen ministers could have been easily and productively chosen. Our conversation has mostly been trying to get at what causes churches to grow, how we encourage or cope with growth, and what qualities of ministry and denominational leadership make for growth. Although all of us, I’m sure, have thought about these questions on our own, read about them, and experimented, when there is only you and your church, there are no controlled experiments. My church has grown…from 400 to 500 members in the 90’s, and now from 500 to 700. My first church grew from 90 to 210 members. What did I do?

Well, gosh, and gee…I just did ministry and then struggled as open-heartedly as I could with the aftermath.

That’s no small issue. However growth happens, it is very clear that all it takes to stop or reverse it is inattention, exhaustion, a good church fight, unwillingness or inability to re-structure, unwillingness to relentlessly change old patterns, guide people in the paths of hospitality, mourn change and move on. In other words, growth is hard work. The observers have repeatedly commented on how much centered energy we 12 ministers seem to have. It’s a contrast to other groups of ministers that I don’t see as clearly as the observers seem to, but I trust them. Is the energy and centeredness the cause of the growth? It seems likely. But it also seems likely to me that the centered energy is a result of the growth. We’re shaped by what we do, and those of us who have managed, by hook or crook, to grow churches have, perhaps of necessity, developed an intensity by sheer dint of hard work and the focus it takes to lead a changing institution.

There's more. I've got lots of reflections and notes, which I'll be posting over the next week. A video is also planned.