introduction:
The world of church is changing. And why not? The world of medicine is changing. The world of journalism is changing. The way we govern, teach, communicate, learn, the way we buy and read books is changing. There’s no good reason to believe that changes would not also impact the way we understand worship and Sunday School and every other aspect of congregational life.
Religious professionals are noticing the changes. Lay leaders feel the tension between fidelity to their congregation’s traditions and the call to something new. Our people are taking small steps, making faithful leaps toward the future.
In 2012, the Sophia Fahs Center at Meadville Lombard Seminary transitioned to the Fahs Collaborative, which launched the Fahs Fellows. In partnership with the Liberal Religious Educators Association and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, the Fahs Collaborative invited three Fahs Fellows to explore innovation in our Faith Formation ministries. We were invited to focus on areas of passion and expertise, and to make use of our resources to think broadly outside convention and tradition to suggest innovations that address some of the pressing issues our congregations are facing. Through this project, we are inviting the conversation about faithful innovation into the public square, “offering pedagogical strategies that have potential to breathe fresh air into how we teach, learn, and grow.[1]”
Full Week Faith is a result of this invitation to engage the adaptive challenges our young century is bringing to our ministries. It is not intended to be the one ‘right’ answer or the only way forward. I hope it invites our religious professionals, our lay leaders, and our families to imagine a ministry of faith formation that is not Sunday School-centric, but rather engages all generations in living Unitarian Universalism in everyday lives and times. Rather than answering the question, “how do we get families to come back to church,” it’s an invitation to ask instead, “how do we get our church to meet people in the places out in the world where their lives are happening?”
I confess to being no closer to knowing what faith formation might look like in 100 years for having done this work. But I invite you to imagine one possibility – vibrant congregations full of Unitarian Universalists living Full Week Faiths, returning to our church on Sunday – or Tuesday, or Friday. Returning to our faith in their hearts every day; keeping the living tradition alive in our homes, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.
Dr. Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” Consider this your invitation. Join the conversation – together let’s imagine vibrant faith formation ministries in congregations living their missions in the world. Invite conversations about the “way we have always done religious education,” and keep those things that are good and faithful and that continue to serve. Help our congregations to retire those practices that no longer serve our families, our faith, or our world, and to do so with grace and gratitude for having been a faithful response in a different time, for a different people. And let us bring these questions, musings, worries, and joys more and more into the public light. Let us be a catalyst for denomination-wide reflection, innovation, and renovation.
why rethink religious education?
Why rethink RE? Our religious education ministries are significant cornerstones of congregational life. We have the blessing of high quality curricular resources available free and online through our UUA. We have gifted and creative Religious Educators and a veritable army of dedicated volunteer teachers staffing our Sunday mornings all across the continent.
At the same time, in most of our congregations, we have a model of religious education that focuses almost exclusively on the Sunday morning classroom experience. And we have families who are no longer coming to church every Sunday.
Many (perhaps most?) of our congregations have a traditional Sunday School model of RE that is based on the public education model, which itself arose from the social and economic context of the Industrial Age, although we spend the rest of our week firmly grounded in the digital/information age. Certainly, we have made technical adaptations to our RE programs – perhaps we use both Spirit Play and Tapestry of Life – but we still center our RE programs – and the work expectations of our religious educators – chiefly on that Sunday morning experience.
Anecdotally, we hear over and over from religious professionals that increasingly sporadic RE attendance creates a significant challenge to making sure all children receive the same lessons. We hear that the pressures on contemporary families make volunteer recruitment and teacher retention more and more difficult.
We know the world has changed much more drastically than our church programs have over the last half-century. So when the Fahs Collaborative asked me to think about Innovation in Multigenerational Faith Formation, I began by thinking about some technical ways we could address one or another of the myriad challenges facing our ministries. Instead, I decided to step back and ask what if….
What if our ministries of Faith Formation did not center on Sunday mornings?
What if RE classes were more widely viewed as only a piece of our Faith Formation programs and ministry?
What if religious professionals believed that the product of their collaboration enabled the spiritual deepening and faith formation work of the whole congregation?
What if our congregations intentionally commissioned religious educators and ministers to spend as much time supporting and equipping our people to live faith-filled lives on all the other days of the week, as they currently spend shaping a single Sunday morning experience?
These are the questions that framed my thinking, and led me to dream a model of congregationally based faith formation ministry I call Full Week Faith. It can be described as a sort of mash-up of family ministry and first century mission-driven Church, with a faithful leveraging of technology and social media to magnify the breadth of our ministries.
And it is only one possible path to our shared future.
why full week faith?
Full Week Faith is offered as one faithful response to what I sense the world is calling us to as Unitarian Universalists. In working on this project, I consulted colleagues, listened to religious professionals, read the ample documentation and discussion about faithful responses from our own people, and in the books and white papers published by our siblings in other faith traditions. It may not work in every context. It may not work with every size program. It certainly is not presented in perfected form on immutable stone tablets. This is an age that calls us to experilearn.
I first encountered the term experilearn in UU circles in a Tweetchat[2] among religious professionals in the summer of 2011[3]. I use the word here to define a faithful experiment in our religious lives together, which is:
* born of and informed by a passion for our faith;
* subject to intentional discernment;
* alows room for Spirit and transcendence to attend;
* and uses theological reflection to evaluate and assess what works well in order to craft the next experilearn.
Experilearning is a process and not an end. No single experilearn will capture the one great answer to any of the challenges our churches face. I’m not convinced there is a single answer. The answers we find may have common elements and similar shapes, but will be deeply connected to and reflective of the cultural and community context from which they spring and in which they will live. If we have done our work well in planning and preparing, our experiment cannot fail; it can only provide us with important learnings that will help shape our next steps together.
I well understand that the idea of decentralizing the Sunday morning experience will seem quite a radical experilearn to many. We also know how people – and how systems – tend to react to change. But not all change is unwanted, unnecessary, or doomed to failure. And certainly, change does not come overnight.
how to use these resources
A good number of us religious professionals have been grappling with making faithful responses to the new realities of 21st century life. We have read books, shared collegial conversations, and attended workshops (over 200 UU’s attended John Roberto’s Faith Formation 2020 workshops over the course of a recent single church year). But in our faith, our ministries are shared with the congregations we serve. And the lay leaders of our congregations, though faithful and devoted servants, generally also have their own full time jobs in other fields. They are not reading the books we are reading; they are not in our collegial conversations. They have not been invited onto the proverbial balcony to view the lay of the land.
This paper has been written for an audience of religious professionals, but it is my hope that other stakeholders in congregational faith formation will still find it accessible and useful. The first section is constructed to lay out some of the most significant cultural, social, and demographic changes in American[4] society over the last couple of generations, and to make visible the implications of these changes on the life and work of the church. It is written not so much to inform ministers and religious educators of these trends – many of us are already well aware of the literature. I hope this survey of cultural dynamics will be a useful tool to make the case to lay leadership for a dramatic shift in our ministries, and to help translate a vision of a shared future to the wider congregation. Religious professionals serve important roles in congregations; they are at once prophet on the hilltop and partner in the trenches. Their work in the future of faith formation in our churches (and beyond) will be to both help frame the vision of what comes next, as well as to walk through the sometimes sloppy, sometimes rocky path toward institutional change.
If the first section of this paper could broadly be understood as the “What,” setting forth the context for rethinking religious education, then the second section might be the “So What?” What implication do these new realities have for our common lives? How might we be called to respond? In this section, I ground the model of Full Week Faith in our history, traditions, and the legacy of our good thinkers and forebears.
The final section describes Full Week Faith in greater detail. It describes some of the qualities of a congregation well suited to experilearn together, and suggests ways forward to implement right-sized moves in its direction. In addition, I have included some sample activities that religious and lay leaders might undertake to support a Full Week Faith model of faith formation, activities that could be incorporated into existing programs with relative ease.
In addition to this paper, at the 2013 LREDA Fall Conference in St. Paul, I will provide a set of cards with sample Full Week Faith activities that conference participants can bring back to their work in their home congregations. Each card includes the faith formation goal of the activity; the role of the religious professionals in implementing that activity; how a family might take it home; and how a congregation might take it further. These cards will be available online as a resource in late October 2013.
Finally, I will present at Fall Con, to accompany this paper, a model of a smartphone / mobile app that congregations could customize and use to support the development of a Full Week Faith model in their own congregations.
It has been a privilege to spend this year in reflection, study, and dreaming. Always, I have asked for Spirit to guide the work that it may serve our people and our world. With no small measure of joy, I turn it over to minds wiser than mine, and to the hands and hearts that will truly shape the future of Unitarian Universalism.
May we be not afraid. All that we will need, we shall have it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]. “The Fahs Fellows,” Meadville Lombard Theological School, 2013, http://www.meadville.edu/Fahs-fellows/, paragraph 1.
[2]. A Tweetchat is a virtual gathering on Twitter where participants contribute to the conversation in 140-character tweets using a hashtag (#) to identify their topic of conversation.
[3]. The Rev. Phil Lund actually used the word “experifail,” to express the feeling that congregational leaders should be willing to acknowledge that some of our experiments in 21st century faith formation will fail, but we should experiment anyway. In subsequent months, the Rev. Janet Bush and DRE Cindy Beal of the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence suggested a tweak to “experilearn,” shifting the emphasis from the potential failure of an experiment to the potential learning that can be gleaned through experimentation.
[4]. It should be understood throughout this report, I am writing from the perspective of the United States of America. It is my hope that the work will be relevant to our Canadian siblings in faith as well, and leave to their good judgment the extent to which it succeeds.
The world of church is changing. And why not? The world of medicine is changing. The world of journalism is changing. The way we govern, teach, communicate, learn, the way we buy and read books is changing. There’s no good reason to believe that changes would not also impact the way we understand worship and Sunday School and every other aspect of congregational life.
Religious professionals are noticing the changes. Lay leaders feel the tension between fidelity to their congregation’s traditions and the call to something new. Our people are taking small steps, making faithful leaps toward the future.
In 2012, the Sophia Fahs Center at Meadville Lombard Seminary transitioned to the Fahs Collaborative, which launched the Fahs Fellows. In partnership with the Liberal Religious Educators Association and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, the Fahs Collaborative invited three Fahs Fellows to explore innovation in our Faith Formation ministries. We were invited to focus on areas of passion and expertise, and to make use of our resources to think broadly outside convention and tradition to suggest innovations that address some of the pressing issues our congregations are facing. Through this project, we are inviting the conversation about faithful innovation into the public square, “offering pedagogical strategies that have potential to breathe fresh air into how we teach, learn, and grow.[1]”
Full Week Faith is a result of this invitation to engage the adaptive challenges our young century is bringing to our ministries. It is not intended to be the one ‘right’ answer or the only way forward. I hope it invites our religious professionals, our lay leaders, and our families to imagine a ministry of faith formation that is not Sunday School-centric, but rather engages all generations in living Unitarian Universalism in everyday lives and times. Rather than answering the question, “how do we get families to come back to church,” it’s an invitation to ask instead, “how do we get our church to meet people in the places out in the world where their lives are happening?”
I confess to being no closer to knowing what faith formation might look like in 100 years for having done this work. But I invite you to imagine one possibility – vibrant congregations full of Unitarian Universalists living Full Week Faiths, returning to our church on Sunday – or Tuesday, or Friday. Returning to our faith in their hearts every day; keeping the living tradition alive in our homes, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.
Dr. Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” Consider this your invitation. Join the conversation – together let’s imagine vibrant faith formation ministries in congregations living their missions in the world. Invite conversations about the “way we have always done religious education,” and keep those things that are good and faithful and that continue to serve. Help our congregations to retire those practices that no longer serve our families, our faith, or our world, and to do so with grace and gratitude for having been a faithful response in a different time, for a different people. And let us bring these questions, musings, worries, and joys more and more into the public light. Let us be a catalyst for denomination-wide reflection, innovation, and renovation.
why rethink religious education?
Why rethink RE? Our religious education ministries are significant cornerstones of congregational life. We have the blessing of high quality curricular resources available free and online through our UUA. We have gifted and creative Religious Educators and a veritable army of dedicated volunteer teachers staffing our Sunday mornings all across the continent.
At the same time, in most of our congregations, we have a model of religious education that focuses almost exclusively on the Sunday morning classroom experience. And we have families who are no longer coming to church every Sunday.
Many (perhaps most?) of our congregations have a traditional Sunday School model of RE that is based on the public education model, which itself arose from the social and economic context of the Industrial Age, although we spend the rest of our week firmly grounded in the digital/information age. Certainly, we have made technical adaptations to our RE programs – perhaps we use both Spirit Play and Tapestry of Life – but we still center our RE programs – and the work expectations of our religious educators – chiefly on that Sunday morning experience.
Anecdotally, we hear over and over from religious professionals that increasingly sporadic RE attendance creates a significant challenge to making sure all children receive the same lessons. We hear that the pressures on contemporary families make volunteer recruitment and teacher retention more and more difficult.
We know the world has changed much more drastically than our church programs have over the last half-century. So when the Fahs Collaborative asked me to think about Innovation in Multigenerational Faith Formation, I began by thinking about some technical ways we could address one or another of the myriad challenges facing our ministries. Instead, I decided to step back and ask what if….
What if our ministries of Faith Formation did not center on Sunday mornings?
What if RE classes were more widely viewed as only a piece of our Faith Formation programs and ministry?
What if religious professionals believed that the product of their collaboration enabled the spiritual deepening and faith formation work of the whole congregation?
What if our congregations intentionally commissioned religious educators and ministers to spend as much time supporting and equipping our people to live faith-filled lives on all the other days of the week, as they currently spend shaping a single Sunday morning experience?
These are the questions that framed my thinking, and led me to dream a model of congregationally based faith formation ministry I call Full Week Faith. It can be described as a sort of mash-up of family ministry and first century mission-driven Church, with a faithful leveraging of technology and social media to magnify the breadth of our ministries.
And it is only one possible path to our shared future.
why full week faith?
Full Week Faith is offered as one faithful response to what I sense the world is calling us to as Unitarian Universalists. In working on this project, I consulted colleagues, listened to religious professionals, read the ample documentation and discussion about faithful responses from our own people, and in the books and white papers published by our siblings in other faith traditions. It may not work in every context. It may not work with every size program. It certainly is not presented in perfected form on immutable stone tablets. This is an age that calls us to experilearn.
I first encountered the term experilearn in UU circles in a Tweetchat[2] among religious professionals in the summer of 2011[3]. I use the word here to define a faithful experiment in our religious lives together, which is:
* born of and informed by a passion for our faith;
* subject to intentional discernment;
* alows room for Spirit and transcendence to attend;
* and uses theological reflection to evaluate and assess what works well in order to craft the next experilearn.
Experilearning is a process and not an end. No single experilearn will capture the one great answer to any of the challenges our churches face. I’m not convinced there is a single answer. The answers we find may have common elements and similar shapes, but will be deeply connected to and reflective of the cultural and community context from which they spring and in which they will live. If we have done our work well in planning and preparing, our experiment cannot fail; it can only provide us with important learnings that will help shape our next steps together.
I well understand that the idea of decentralizing the Sunday morning experience will seem quite a radical experilearn to many. We also know how people – and how systems – tend to react to change. But not all change is unwanted, unnecessary, or doomed to failure. And certainly, change does not come overnight.
how to use these resources
A good number of us religious professionals have been grappling with making faithful responses to the new realities of 21st century life. We have read books, shared collegial conversations, and attended workshops (over 200 UU’s attended John Roberto’s Faith Formation 2020 workshops over the course of a recent single church year). But in our faith, our ministries are shared with the congregations we serve. And the lay leaders of our congregations, though faithful and devoted servants, generally also have their own full time jobs in other fields. They are not reading the books we are reading; they are not in our collegial conversations. They have not been invited onto the proverbial balcony to view the lay of the land.
This paper has been written for an audience of religious professionals, but it is my hope that other stakeholders in congregational faith formation will still find it accessible and useful. The first section is constructed to lay out some of the most significant cultural, social, and demographic changes in American[4] society over the last couple of generations, and to make visible the implications of these changes on the life and work of the church. It is written not so much to inform ministers and religious educators of these trends – many of us are already well aware of the literature. I hope this survey of cultural dynamics will be a useful tool to make the case to lay leadership for a dramatic shift in our ministries, and to help translate a vision of a shared future to the wider congregation. Religious professionals serve important roles in congregations; they are at once prophet on the hilltop and partner in the trenches. Their work in the future of faith formation in our churches (and beyond) will be to both help frame the vision of what comes next, as well as to walk through the sometimes sloppy, sometimes rocky path toward institutional change.
If the first section of this paper could broadly be understood as the “What,” setting forth the context for rethinking religious education, then the second section might be the “So What?” What implication do these new realities have for our common lives? How might we be called to respond? In this section, I ground the model of Full Week Faith in our history, traditions, and the legacy of our good thinkers and forebears.
The final section describes Full Week Faith in greater detail. It describes some of the qualities of a congregation well suited to experilearn together, and suggests ways forward to implement right-sized moves in its direction. In addition, I have included some sample activities that religious and lay leaders might undertake to support a Full Week Faith model of faith formation, activities that could be incorporated into existing programs with relative ease.
In addition to this paper, at the 2013 LREDA Fall Conference in St. Paul, I will provide a set of cards with sample Full Week Faith activities that conference participants can bring back to their work in their home congregations. Each card includes the faith formation goal of the activity; the role of the religious professionals in implementing that activity; how a family might take it home; and how a congregation might take it further. These cards will be available online as a resource in late October 2013.
Finally, I will present at Fall Con, to accompany this paper, a model of a smartphone / mobile app that congregations could customize and use to support the development of a Full Week Faith model in their own congregations.
It has been a privilege to spend this year in reflection, study, and dreaming. Always, I have asked for Spirit to guide the work that it may serve our people and our world. With no small measure of joy, I turn it over to minds wiser than mine, and to the hands and hearts that will truly shape the future of Unitarian Universalism.
May we be not afraid. All that we will need, we shall have it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]. “The Fahs Fellows,” Meadville Lombard Theological School, 2013, http://www.meadville.edu/Fahs-fellows/, paragraph 1.
[2]. A Tweetchat is a virtual gathering on Twitter where participants contribute to the conversation in 140-character tweets using a hashtag (#) to identify their topic of conversation.
[3]. The Rev. Phil Lund actually used the word “experifail,” to express the feeling that congregational leaders should be willing to acknowledge that some of our experiments in 21st century faith formation will fail, but we should experiment anyway. In subsequent months, the Rev. Janet Bush and DRE Cindy Beal of the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence suggested a tweak to “experilearn,” shifting the emphasis from the potential failure of an experiment to the potential learning that can be gleaned through experimentation.
[4]. It should be understood throughout this report, I am writing from the perspective of the United States of America. It is my hope that the work will be relevant to our Canadian siblings in faith as well, and leave to their good judgment the extent to which it succeeds.