seizing the moment of change
We know that Unitarian Universalism has been experiencing a period of decline in membership, as have our siblings in faith across denominational lines. We know the myriad ways our world is changing and recognize the need to harness and shape the changes. Earlier this year, the professional organizations of our religious educators, musicians and ministers co-authored the Excellence in Shared Ministry report, in which they state, “We are listening for what new thing Spirit is calling us to do as a people of faith.”[1] They set forward a vision of collaborative and covenantal shared ministry steeped in mutual respect and enabled by an intentional discipline of sharing deeply in the expertise of each area of ministry. This approach to congregational ministry is also a critical element to a Full Week Faith model.
The fact is that we are too deep in the dense and dim forest of change to know exactly what congregational life and faith formation will look like in the future. The folks sitting next to Martin Luther and John Calvin could not have imagined Shakers, Quakers, speakers-in-tongues, or mega-churches with movie screens. We are still deep in the forest of a societal change of enormous proportions. But we are at least awake in that forest, even if we cannot see all of the trees yet. Given what we do know, we can craft a faithful experiment with willing partners and learn some things that may inform how we support our churches and our faith in the near-term, whatever our role.
awake in the forest
The way that we approach faith formation in our congregations has to shift radically, and soon, in order for our ministries to remain relevant to the students, parents, and extended families coming through our doors today, and those we hope to welcome in the future. At the same time we know that institutions and the emotional systems that govern them resist radical change and tend to adapt at roughly the pace, as my grandmother used to say, of molasses rolling uphill in January.
Many of our religious professionals spend significant time reading and thinking about church and big balcony pictures. They come to District and nationally sponsored professional development opportunities through their professional groups - the UU Ministers Association (UUMA) and the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA), and the Unitarian Universalist Musicians Network (UUMN). Some join study groups that convince them that our work must change in response to emerging calls in the world. They are inspired by visions of future congregations full of life, love, Spirit, and joy; places of powerful witness in a wounded world.
They leave conference rooms, book groups and creative conversations alive with possibility, and they return to congregations where a single individual might start a petition for their dismissal if they propose even the most modest of changes.
In some ways, the landscape is not safe for our religious professionals to make bold changes on their own, nor is it appropriate for the changes to come solely from them. Our religious professionals and lay leaders must work together to build and sustain the health of their congregations; they must create a mutually supportive leadership team. Our UUA and District field offices have implemented some good programs to help develop balcony vision among our lay leaders and to give them information, tools, and inspiration to become not only effective stewards but visionary spiritual leaders. UU University[2] attracted hundreds of lay leaders who wanted to delve more deeply into their faith, to understand it more fully, and to meet other lay leaders to compare notes. Some of our Districts hold residential leadership schools that provide an immersive experience for lay leaders coming together in a particular region. The Leap of Faith[3] pilot introduced a structured way for congregations to learn from one another and to imagine ways of being church and doing church work beyond the “way we’ve always done it” by learning about how others have also done it.
The more opportunities we can take to invite laity onto the balcony with us, the better. Lay leaders in congregations often hew to the systems and structures that have served them thus far, and rarely have the opportunity to examine best practices in congregational life beyond their four walls. Lay leaders don’t generally subscribe to Alban Institute, or read emergent church books in their spare time. Most are serving in leadership roles out of love for their church and obligation to their fellow parishioners, though they are often pleased and surprised to find a deep connection between their service and their individual faith journey. Their service is fervent, their decisions deeply considered, their leadership faithful. And their congregational work often happens largely on the margins of lives full of other significant obligations: jobs, which sometimes require travel or continuing education; family members and friends who sometimes struggle and need focused care and attention; and other community service obligations from the PTO, to serving on school boards, from soup kitchen volunteering to legislative activism. It is no wonder that even our most dedicated and long-tenured lay leaders seldom have the time or opportunity to get a balcony view about the shifting role of church in the twenty-first century! By and large, our congregants may not even be aware of the challenges in our current structures, much less feel they have either desire, capacity, or authority to respond to them.
Our religious professionals spend all of their professional lives and much of their remaining waking hours (and many of their dreaming hours, too!) thinking about congregational life and the role of church in people’s lives and in the fabric of their community. Whatever our role – judicatory staff, religious professionals, lay leaders – we need to empower our professionals to claim the leadership we need for our faith to adapt to and thrive in the new century. We need to intentionally review our training and formation processes to equip our next generation of leaders with the skills they will need to lead. And we need to support our lay leaders as full partners in the work, whose gifts and commitments are absolutely essential to building a Unitarian Universalism today that will live into the future. We need every gift that each of our people can bring to the service of our shared faith. We can spare no one.
defining the scope of faith formation
People frequently come into our congregations with a preconceived picture of what Religious Education (and youth ministry) looks like, often based on their own childhood experiences or popular media characterizations. The general expectation is that religious education is what happens to children during Sunday School. Religious professionals can help break through these expectations by sharing a more robust understanding. A fully developed ministry of faith formation can be imagined through the metaphor of a table – and why not? Vigorous, intentional faith formation is nourishment for the soul.
Four essential elements of Unitarian Universalist faith formation are the legs supporting the table: Content, Community, Covenant, and Context. In creating the structure of the Full Week Faith model, care has been taken to include opportunities that intentionally address each of these. This is something that our religious educators and ministers know both instinctively and by education and training. When preparing our congregations to engage in experilearning with a new paradigm, we have a responsibility to help them understand the dimensions of a fully developed ministry of faith formation that serves all generations and also that it is work that we all share.
Content: A critical end of religious education is to transmit our faith’s traditions, symbols, theology, history, heroes, values, and practices. This is the curriculum of faith formation programming, predominantly delivered through religious education classes for children, youth, and adults. This is Sunday School – what we know as the largest and most visible manifestation of our faith formation ministries. Unitarian Universalist religious education curricula may include lessons from and appreciation of other faith traditions, and may draw upon the sacred texts of multiple traditions, but it exists to connect this moment’s generation of Unitarian Universalists to our own history, and it equips us to carry Unitarian Universalism into the future.
There is flexibility in curricular resources for our congregations to choose the most relevant, based on their unique culture and contextual history. For example, some of our congregations identify strongly with our Christian roots and this identity may be reflected in their choice of curricula that focus on Biblical literacy. A number of high quality curricular resources and religious education models exist for the customization of curriculum delivery, but the goal of forming the current and future generations of Unitarian Universalists is the consistent focus.
In addition to print and online curricula and structured classes, faith formation content also includes the rituals and milestones we celebrate as a community, such as baby and child dedications, coming of age recognitions, bridging ceremonies, marriages, funerals, and memorial services. The chalice we light during worship, the stories we share of Unitarian Universalist forebears, the plaque on the wall with our congregation’s founding statement, these also are pieces of content that support Unitarian Universalist identity and faith formation.
Community: Who are we?[4] is one of the core questions that healthy congregations engage with and know how to answer. There are several layers of understanding this question from the viewpoint of our faith formation ministries.
* Who are we as Unitarian Universalists? Are we fluent in our theology and strong in our associational affinity? Do we understand ourselves to have siblings in faith around the world?
* Who are we as a congregation? Can we complete the sentence, ‘Ours is the church that….?’ What defines our congregational identity and has inspired (or could inspire) our mission and leadership?
* Who are we theologically? Is there a predominant orientation in our congregation? Toward which of our historical and theological ancestors does this draw us? Toward what mission does it direct us?
* Who are we as adults in a mix-it-up multigenerational community? Who are we in huddles of youth? Children? Retirees? Emerging or young adults? What can we offer and seek from those who come before and behind us?
* Who are we individually, as members of this committee, or of that affinity group, or of this classroom? Do I see myself as capable of spiritual leadership? What is my individual role in this time and space? How can I live into my own responsibilities, share my own gifts and also support my peers in developing and bringing their gifts to our common work?
Some of our faith formation activities will provide participants the opportunity to build connections between and among people of all ages and across the spectrum of our diversities - theological and otherwise. We must be able to see ourselves as the creators of, the beneficiaries of, and most importantly, as proud, participating members of this unique and evolving community.
Covenant: The Rev. Alice Blair Wesley wrote,
“The root idea of our entire tradition is the covenant. A covenanted free church is a body of individuals who have freely made a profoundly simple promise, a covenant: We pledge faithfully to walk together in the spirit of mutual love. The spirit of love is alone worthy of our religious loyalty, our ultimate loyalty. So, we will meet often to take counsel concerning the ways of love, and we shall yield religious authority solely to our own understanding of what these ways are, as best we can figure them out or learn or remember them, together.”[5]
Covenant is definitional to our ministry of faith formation. It is what makes our enterprise expressly Unitarian Universalist, and not merely the good works and deeds of committed individuals moving in a common direction. Covenant requires us to bring our best selves to our faith community and invites us to a radical practice of forgiveness each time we commit to begin again in love.
In most of our human relationships – with co-workers, peers and neighbors – we strive to follow the Golden Rule, but when others fail to treat us as we would be treated, we can usually exercise the option of disengagement. In a covenantal faith community, we no longer have the easy option of disengagement. We remain obliged by our promise to bring our best selves to stay in relationship with all of our siblings in faith; we are not excused from our commitment to remain in right relationship.[6]
Context: Where are we and who are our neighbors? A vibrant ministry of faith formation is grounded in, and responsive to, its physical and cultural context. Understanding the dominant culture of your community in relation to your congregation’s theology and identity will help identify a rich faith formation mission. For example, a congregation located in a community or state with anti-gay marriage laws may exercise their spiritual muscles through multigenerational engagement with the Welcoming Congregation program. This good work is not only justice making, it is faith formation.
Being a presence in your community requires congregational leaders to be present in the wider community. When religious professionals and laity alike participate in community life, the areas of deep need which are close to home will quickly and naturally become apparent. In this way, faith formation activities arise which respond to real needs and carry the spiritual work of community building beyond the church’s walls and into the world. Being present in your community also allows congregations to identify who are their partners in the work of building a more just world, be they interfaith partners, service agency partners, campus groups, or “spiritual but not religious” individuals seeking personal growth and allies in creating change.
Understanding our context also requires us to examine all of our resources – our church buildings and property, the skills and gifts of our staff and lay leadership, our endowments and investments – and to make faithful decisions about how these gifts may be leveraged for our communal faith formation and justice building ministries.
-----------------------------------------------
[1]. LREDA/UUMA/UUMN Task Force for Excellence in Shared Ministry, “Final Report,” April 2013, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.uuma.org/resource/resmgr/files/lreda-uuma-uumn_task_force_r.pdf.
[2]. UU University was a specialized leadership development track offered in the days leading up to General Assembly from 2006-2009. For more information, http://www.uua.org/governance/leadership/uuu/.
[3]. Leap of Faith is a congregational mentoring program. The pilot ran over the 2011-2012 church year. For more information, http://www.uua.org/news/newssubmissions/171892.shtml.
[4]. The core questions, Who are we?, Who are our neighbors?, What is our purpose? are derived from the work of Alice Mann and Gil Rendle in Holy Conversations (Alban Institute, 2003).
[5]. Alice Blair Wesley, “Updating the Cambridge Platform” (lecture, The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church: The Spirit and the Promise of Our Covenant, The Minns Lectures, 2000).
[6]. This cursory treatment of Covenant in Unitarian Universalism should in no way be interpreted to mean that individual Unitarian Universalists should be encouraged to put themselves in harm’s way when they have experienced physical, emotional or spiritual trauma at the hands of another.
We know that Unitarian Universalism has been experiencing a period of decline in membership, as have our siblings in faith across denominational lines. We know the myriad ways our world is changing and recognize the need to harness and shape the changes. Earlier this year, the professional organizations of our religious educators, musicians and ministers co-authored the Excellence in Shared Ministry report, in which they state, “We are listening for what new thing Spirit is calling us to do as a people of faith.”[1] They set forward a vision of collaborative and covenantal shared ministry steeped in mutual respect and enabled by an intentional discipline of sharing deeply in the expertise of each area of ministry. This approach to congregational ministry is also a critical element to a Full Week Faith model.
The fact is that we are too deep in the dense and dim forest of change to know exactly what congregational life and faith formation will look like in the future. The folks sitting next to Martin Luther and John Calvin could not have imagined Shakers, Quakers, speakers-in-tongues, or mega-churches with movie screens. We are still deep in the forest of a societal change of enormous proportions. But we are at least awake in that forest, even if we cannot see all of the trees yet. Given what we do know, we can craft a faithful experiment with willing partners and learn some things that may inform how we support our churches and our faith in the near-term, whatever our role.
awake in the forest
The way that we approach faith formation in our congregations has to shift radically, and soon, in order for our ministries to remain relevant to the students, parents, and extended families coming through our doors today, and those we hope to welcome in the future. At the same time we know that institutions and the emotional systems that govern them resist radical change and tend to adapt at roughly the pace, as my grandmother used to say, of molasses rolling uphill in January.
Many of our religious professionals spend significant time reading and thinking about church and big balcony pictures. They come to District and nationally sponsored professional development opportunities through their professional groups - the UU Ministers Association (UUMA) and the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA), and the Unitarian Universalist Musicians Network (UUMN). Some join study groups that convince them that our work must change in response to emerging calls in the world. They are inspired by visions of future congregations full of life, love, Spirit, and joy; places of powerful witness in a wounded world.
They leave conference rooms, book groups and creative conversations alive with possibility, and they return to congregations where a single individual might start a petition for their dismissal if they propose even the most modest of changes.
In some ways, the landscape is not safe for our religious professionals to make bold changes on their own, nor is it appropriate for the changes to come solely from them. Our religious professionals and lay leaders must work together to build and sustain the health of their congregations; they must create a mutually supportive leadership team. Our UUA and District field offices have implemented some good programs to help develop balcony vision among our lay leaders and to give them information, tools, and inspiration to become not only effective stewards but visionary spiritual leaders. UU University[2] attracted hundreds of lay leaders who wanted to delve more deeply into their faith, to understand it more fully, and to meet other lay leaders to compare notes. Some of our Districts hold residential leadership schools that provide an immersive experience for lay leaders coming together in a particular region. The Leap of Faith[3] pilot introduced a structured way for congregations to learn from one another and to imagine ways of being church and doing church work beyond the “way we’ve always done it” by learning about how others have also done it.
The more opportunities we can take to invite laity onto the balcony with us, the better. Lay leaders in congregations often hew to the systems and structures that have served them thus far, and rarely have the opportunity to examine best practices in congregational life beyond their four walls. Lay leaders don’t generally subscribe to Alban Institute, or read emergent church books in their spare time. Most are serving in leadership roles out of love for their church and obligation to their fellow parishioners, though they are often pleased and surprised to find a deep connection between their service and their individual faith journey. Their service is fervent, their decisions deeply considered, their leadership faithful. And their congregational work often happens largely on the margins of lives full of other significant obligations: jobs, which sometimes require travel or continuing education; family members and friends who sometimes struggle and need focused care and attention; and other community service obligations from the PTO, to serving on school boards, from soup kitchen volunteering to legislative activism. It is no wonder that even our most dedicated and long-tenured lay leaders seldom have the time or opportunity to get a balcony view about the shifting role of church in the twenty-first century! By and large, our congregants may not even be aware of the challenges in our current structures, much less feel they have either desire, capacity, or authority to respond to them.
Our religious professionals spend all of their professional lives and much of their remaining waking hours (and many of their dreaming hours, too!) thinking about congregational life and the role of church in people’s lives and in the fabric of their community. Whatever our role – judicatory staff, religious professionals, lay leaders – we need to empower our professionals to claim the leadership we need for our faith to adapt to and thrive in the new century. We need to intentionally review our training and formation processes to equip our next generation of leaders with the skills they will need to lead. And we need to support our lay leaders as full partners in the work, whose gifts and commitments are absolutely essential to building a Unitarian Universalism today that will live into the future. We need every gift that each of our people can bring to the service of our shared faith. We can spare no one.
defining the scope of faith formation
People frequently come into our congregations with a preconceived picture of what Religious Education (and youth ministry) looks like, often based on their own childhood experiences or popular media characterizations. The general expectation is that religious education is what happens to children during Sunday School. Religious professionals can help break through these expectations by sharing a more robust understanding. A fully developed ministry of faith formation can be imagined through the metaphor of a table – and why not? Vigorous, intentional faith formation is nourishment for the soul.
Four essential elements of Unitarian Universalist faith formation are the legs supporting the table: Content, Community, Covenant, and Context. In creating the structure of the Full Week Faith model, care has been taken to include opportunities that intentionally address each of these. This is something that our religious educators and ministers know both instinctively and by education and training. When preparing our congregations to engage in experilearning with a new paradigm, we have a responsibility to help them understand the dimensions of a fully developed ministry of faith formation that serves all generations and also that it is work that we all share.
Content: A critical end of religious education is to transmit our faith’s traditions, symbols, theology, history, heroes, values, and practices. This is the curriculum of faith formation programming, predominantly delivered through religious education classes for children, youth, and adults. This is Sunday School – what we know as the largest and most visible manifestation of our faith formation ministries. Unitarian Universalist religious education curricula may include lessons from and appreciation of other faith traditions, and may draw upon the sacred texts of multiple traditions, but it exists to connect this moment’s generation of Unitarian Universalists to our own history, and it equips us to carry Unitarian Universalism into the future.
There is flexibility in curricular resources for our congregations to choose the most relevant, based on their unique culture and contextual history. For example, some of our congregations identify strongly with our Christian roots and this identity may be reflected in their choice of curricula that focus on Biblical literacy. A number of high quality curricular resources and religious education models exist for the customization of curriculum delivery, but the goal of forming the current and future generations of Unitarian Universalists is the consistent focus.
In addition to print and online curricula and structured classes, faith formation content also includes the rituals and milestones we celebrate as a community, such as baby and child dedications, coming of age recognitions, bridging ceremonies, marriages, funerals, and memorial services. The chalice we light during worship, the stories we share of Unitarian Universalist forebears, the plaque on the wall with our congregation’s founding statement, these also are pieces of content that support Unitarian Universalist identity and faith formation.
Community: Who are we?[4] is one of the core questions that healthy congregations engage with and know how to answer. There are several layers of understanding this question from the viewpoint of our faith formation ministries.
* Who are we as Unitarian Universalists? Are we fluent in our theology and strong in our associational affinity? Do we understand ourselves to have siblings in faith around the world?
* Who are we as a congregation? Can we complete the sentence, ‘Ours is the church that….?’ What defines our congregational identity and has inspired (or could inspire) our mission and leadership?
* Who are we theologically? Is there a predominant orientation in our congregation? Toward which of our historical and theological ancestors does this draw us? Toward what mission does it direct us?
* Who are we as adults in a mix-it-up multigenerational community? Who are we in huddles of youth? Children? Retirees? Emerging or young adults? What can we offer and seek from those who come before and behind us?
* Who are we individually, as members of this committee, or of that affinity group, or of this classroom? Do I see myself as capable of spiritual leadership? What is my individual role in this time and space? How can I live into my own responsibilities, share my own gifts and also support my peers in developing and bringing their gifts to our common work?
Some of our faith formation activities will provide participants the opportunity to build connections between and among people of all ages and across the spectrum of our diversities - theological and otherwise. We must be able to see ourselves as the creators of, the beneficiaries of, and most importantly, as proud, participating members of this unique and evolving community.
Covenant: The Rev. Alice Blair Wesley wrote,
“The root idea of our entire tradition is the covenant. A covenanted free church is a body of individuals who have freely made a profoundly simple promise, a covenant: We pledge faithfully to walk together in the spirit of mutual love. The spirit of love is alone worthy of our religious loyalty, our ultimate loyalty. So, we will meet often to take counsel concerning the ways of love, and we shall yield religious authority solely to our own understanding of what these ways are, as best we can figure them out or learn or remember them, together.”[5]
Covenant is definitional to our ministry of faith formation. It is what makes our enterprise expressly Unitarian Universalist, and not merely the good works and deeds of committed individuals moving in a common direction. Covenant requires us to bring our best selves to our faith community and invites us to a radical practice of forgiveness each time we commit to begin again in love.
In most of our human relationships – with co-workers, peers and neighbors – we strive to follow the Golden Rule, but when others fail to treat us as we would be treated, we can usually exercise the option of disengagement. In a covenantal faith community, we no longer have the easy option of disengagement. We remain obliged by our promise to bring our best selves to stay in relationship with all of our siblings in faith; we are not excused from our commitment to remain in right relationship.[6]
Context: Where are we and who are our neighbors? A vibrant ministry of faith formation is grounded in, and responsive to, its physical and cultural context. Understanding the dominant culture of your community in relation to your congregation’s theology and identity will help identify a rich faith formation mission. For example, a congregation located in a community or state with anti-gay marriage laws may exercise their spiritual muscles through multigenerational engagement with the Welcoming Congregation program. This good work is not only justice making, it is faith formation.
Being a presence in your community requires congregational leaders to be present in the wider community. When religious professionals and laity alike participate in community life, the areas of deep need which are close to home will quickly and naturally become apparent. In this way, faith formation activities arise which respond to real needs and carry the spiritual work of community building beyond the church’s walls and into the world. Being present in your community also allows congregations to identify who are their partners in the work of building a more just world, be they interfaith partners, service agency partners, campus groups, or “spiritual but not religious” individuals seeking personal growth and allies in creating change.
Understanding our context also requires us to examine all of our resources – our church buildings and property, the skills and gifts of our staff and lay leadership, our endowments and investments – and to make faithful decisions about how these gifts may be leveraged for our communal faith formation and justice building ministries.
-----------------------------------------------
[1]. LREDA/UUMA/UUMN Task Force for Excellence in Shared Ministry, “Final Report,” April 2013, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.uuma.org/resource/resmgr/files/lreda-uuma-uumn_task_force_r.pdf.
[2]. UU University was a specialized leadership development track offered in the days leading up to General Assembly from 2006-2009. For more information, http://www.uua.org/governance/leadership/uuu/.
[3]. Leap of Faith is a congregational mentoring program. The pilot ran over the 2011-2012 church year. For more information, http://www.uua.org/news/newssubmissions/171892.shtml.
[4]. The core questions, Who are we?, Who are our neighbors?, What is our purpose? are derived from the work of Alice Mann and Gil Rendle in Holy Conversations (Alban Institute, 2003).
[5]. Alice Blair Wesley, “Updating the Cambridge Platform” (lecture, The Lay and Liberal Doctrine of the Church: The Spirit and the Promise of Our Covenant, The Minns Lectures, 2000).
[6]. This cursory treatment of Covenant in Unitarian Universalism should in no way be interpreted to mean that individual Unitarian Universalists should be encouraged to put themselves in harm’s way when they have experienced physical, emotional or spiritual trauma at the hands of another.