Author: Scott Wells

Universalist minister in Washington, D.C.
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Fix the UUA: Demand open standards and open licensed resources

Think of a traditional wedding service. “Dearly beloved . . . ” This image of the traditional wedding service (no doubt) became traditional because most American Protestants used some variation (depending on which edition was authorized when the adoption took place) of the US Episcopal Church’s wedding service as their own. To a lesser degree, the same is true of funeral services. All of this is possible because, in the United States, the Book of Common Prayer has always been in the public domain. It became influential because it could be adopted, even when changed. Look to the services in the “old red hymnal” and you would think the Unitarians and Universalists of 1937 owed as much or more to the Episcopalians as their own forbears. The Universalist prayerbook of 1894 is plainly a revision of the BCP of 1892.

When intellectual rights are relaxed — not even as far as public domain, but including such — it is possible for different people to build on common work, each giving it a particular nuance, without having to start from scratch. Sure, in theory, I could make a few cents licensing my sermons, but who would buy them? I created them for the glory of God and the edification of a particular congregation. Sermons don’t age well, as a rule. I would rather see someone take what they can, and re-craft it for another use than see it mildew, with all rights reserved. This phenomeon scales larger, too. An denominationally-minded people — without regard to which denomination — have a yen to make all the resources they need from scratch. What a waste. We could and should share ideas.

We talk about the UUA being a service agency, but I think it would help if we demanded of the administration and each other resources that we could share and develop. As I get a chance, I’m going to go back and re-license some of the more valuable and practical articles I wrote for this express purpose. Several bloggers have made all their works open licensed, to one degree or another. Let’s not be afraid to riff on one another. It will save us time, effort, and money. Use resources — like Wikipedia — and add to them. Google, through its advance search function, allows you to look particularly for these.

Likewise, I’ve not been very keen on ideas of information maintainance that (a) depends on proprietary software or (b) data in proprietary formats. It breeds lock-in, and stifles creative and useful alteration of our own data. So I’m not keen on any effort to centralize district data-keeping, or the use of commercial browse-in services. Better i think to agree to certain standards of data management, and then promote that software (whatever its provenance, cost, or license) that meets the standard.

Perhaps the folk at 25 can take a cue from their next-door-neighbor. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has made world headlines over its insistance that its data should be free, much to Microsoft’s ire and woe.

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PDF download: 1902 Universalist General Convention Board of Trustees rules and Theological Schools notice

The PDF file linked from this page is in the public domain.

This is a little experiment in both open licenses (public domain, really) and getting hard-to-find documents “out there.”

This is the inside back cover of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Trustees (1902) of the Universalist General Convention, the national denominational body. It is what the title suggests: the Board’s own rules, and a word about the three seminaries, and how an aspirant for ministry might proceed.

I have a few of these reports, and find them fascinating. Like how the denominational young adults group was an avid fund-raiser for church planting ministers’ salaries. Or how an optional fund (“Cent-a-Day”) would yield $81.82 per participant in today’s dollars.

One word of warning; it is 2 megabytes large. Later. I’ve made a better, cleaner, and smaller (230K) version.

1902 Universalist General Convention Board of Trustees rules and Theological Schools notice

27 January. Well, I can’t get it to download either. I work on that this evening.

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Memo book resources

Does anyone else out there use a six-holed ring-bound memo-style organizer? (I think this is the same configuaration as Franklin-Covey compact, but a half-inch narrower). The pages are 3.75 inches wide by 6.75 inches tall.

I have a snazzy six-hole punch (Franklin-Covey, in fact) and I am making up a calendar and planner, with a few Universalist and Christian tidbits besides. Certainly a service of Morning Prayer. Perhaps some Psalms. Perhaps some key polity docs for reference.
Question: would anyone else find this kind of thing useful?

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My favorite churchly site

We all know the Desert Island game — immortalized on the BBC with its Desert Island Disks show — where you are limited to x number of books or records for an indefinite amount of time.

Not quite in the spirit of the game (unless one had it cached on a solar-powered laptop) is the Desert Island website. I suppose it should be about making a coconut radio or something the Professor would do. But assuming I was the chaplain, say, on Lost, what would I want?

Easy-peasy. Give me Ken Collins’ Web Site. Not an inspiring name, but a fantastic resource as a training tool for lay pastors or seminarians, or a refresher and resource for the more seasoned. I’ve not written articles because I know Ken Collins — a Disciples of Christ minister in the DC ‘burbs with a good sense of what’s core Christianity — wrote it first.

He writes well, with humor, and is very practical. To see what I mean, start with “How to Lead a Lousy Worship Service”.

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What made Universalist churches Universalist

Before I start suggesting changes to the UUA, I’d like to talk about the fused Unitarian and Universalist polity pieces we have. Well, mostly Unitarian, meaning it is at heart a service bureau, a meeting of ideas, and a ministerial settlement service. But the Universalist idea of church — especially postbellum — was local and non-local alike. This culminated in the redubbing of the Universalist General Convention as the Universalist Church of America. The Universalist church was local, state-wide (through its conventions) and national. Really international, given its conspicuous presence in Japan, and to a lesser degree, England.

A minister was Universalist because he or she had a particular relationship — sorry to be vague but this relationship changed over the years — with Universalist professions of faith, and had the fellowship of the state convention (or the General Convention when there was no state convention.) Same with the churches. The church collectively had a particular relationship with Universalist professions of faith and fellowship in the state or General convention. Universalist churches had Universalist ministers. If one decided to shop around for a non-Universalist minister or church (respectively) fellowship could be withdrawn! (Dual fellowship between Unitarian and Universalist ministries was a key step towards consolidation — and the death of many Universalist churches, who couldn’t afford to outbid the clergy-strapped Unitarians.)
Until the first decade of the twentieth century, many or most local “churches” were really two twin entities: the church (of believers, led by the pastor and deacons, and was the holder of the sacraments) and the parish (led by a lay moderator, of attendees and contributors, focused on teaching and public morality), with a great deal of overlap in their memberships. OK: that’s drawn pretty broadly, but you get the idea. Those familiar with Unitarian origins will recognize this senario: with few exceptions, the Standing Order parishes in eastern Massachusetts became Unitarian; the churches clothed themselves in new “second” or orthodox parishes and became the Congregationalists.

Some Universalist “churches” were mostly parishes (a.k.a. “societies”) and some parishes didn’t have a church-twin (as a company of professed believers) at all. Unless I’m mistaken, parishoners didn’t have to make a religious profession. Many a Universalist convention sermon scolded lazy parishes for not gathering churches. In time, for the sake of administration, churches and parishes were encouraged to merge, and the parish-nature eased out the church-nature. I have observed that those Universalist churches that retained Christianity were those that preserved independent churches and parishes (very few) or retained distinct churchly features. Also, the sacraments started drying up before Christianity fell from the norm.
OK — like how does this matter? Well, for one it is important to understand how we got here. It wasn’t some post-1946 weirdness in the water, but the succession of the polity, and the Unitarians started there.

But mostly this matters because the interlocking relationships of this polity survive in how we do ministerial fellowship, if in a flattened form. If the UUA were to be radically simplified or changed, this might be the last function to go.

Or we might adopt a Unitarian-Congregational mode of fellowship via councils. Alice Blair Wesley’s recent Minns Lectures would suggest a trajectory, but I think it would be rather unpopular.

The last option would be perfect independency. Again, unlikely.

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Fixing the UUA: a prologue

Unlike a lot of other bloggers, I don’t mind that the UUA, via the General Assembly and the Administration, steps up and makes political statements. I usually agree with the content of these statements, too.

What I mind is that there’s energy for these, and a number of other non-core activities, and much less evidence that the core mission — the Purposes of the Principles and Purposes — are fulfilled. These are

Oh heck. UUA.org is down. I’ll add them later.

Well, I’m talking about church planting and the nuts and bolts of associated religious life. Fausto made a comment at ChaliceChick’s blog that sums up another turn the UUA has made instiutionally:

The function of our central organization should be to serve as our staff, not our leadership. We are its clients, not its flock. To the extent that it leads, it should be like the Process Theology God, by offering oppertunities, not by postulating standards.

Lastly, I agree broadly with Clyde’s experience that UUA staffers are talented, overtaxed, and earnest. Which leads me to an savory conclusion: at the heart of the current Unitarian Universalist way of doing things is despair.

Consider for a moment the frequent assertion that Unitarian Universalism is unique, valuable, and irreplacable. Add in that there is no alternate version of it in the United States. (The American Unitarian Conference is so small and disfunctional that I refuse to dignify it as an alternative.) All the eggs are in one basket, and the basket looks a little frayed. It must be carefully preserve, and its distinctive features must be played up. It must seem active, relevant, and progressive. It must be convincing and inclusive. It must be healthy. It must be all of these things, but accomplishing them is hard.
A lot of what I think’s window-dressing can be explained as an attempt — not conscious so much as intuitive — to seem active. But without real growth, with real criticism, and in a social setting that makes its worldview seem all that much more imperilled, the do-able path is the one with flashy results and good — well, any — press. Not that good work isn’t being done in Boston, but almost all of it is sustaining what we have. It is in the realm of “getting more” that the UUA falls flat programmatically, and frustrates many for its excursions into inessentials. All the while fewer and fewer new congregations enter the UUA. A recipe for a multi-generational death.

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Who complains about the UUA?

I don’t want to debate “the merits of the case” now but only respond to an assertion Steve Caldwell made on his blog about popular feeling about the UUA. (While I’m at it: Chutney, I think you over-read Steve’s call for research, and over-reacted. At least, I don’t think it unfair to expect those who write about a structure to know how it runs formally.)

Back to the simmering masses. I’ve seen plenty of evidence of resentment towards, and a desired change to, the institutional workings of the UUA. It comes from (some) ministers. For the most part these are quiet, feeling that overt criticism is unwelcome. Perhaps it will foul up some desired outcome from Boston (a new settlement being handled properly and a building loan guarantee are two example I’ve heard; one was recent, the other was a few years ago). More often the feeling is that “the beast” doesn’t want to be changed and so can’t be. Why bother making a fuss; there’s plenty of work at church. Note, the theology of the ministers I’m thinking run the gamut, save Pagans, whom I know too few to make a reasonable sample. (I’ve known laypersons in historically Universalist churches and Christians complain over coffee too, but since when has anyone listened to their complaints?) The one reliable avenue to address bad UUA programs — by which I include those which were born from the head and not the base — is to ignore and stonewall. And people wonder why Fulfilling the Promise (which I still don’t get) and Journey Torwards Wholeness failed to thrive. (The UU Voice counts as an occasional avenue.)

For the longest time — the 90s really and perhaps before — the best way to silence complaints in the ministerial college seemed to charge the innovators as anti-institutionalists, which itself is rather funny as heirs of Emerson. (Though I think the “dump Emerson” proposal is spot on. I’m more of an Elbridge Gerry Brooks — he filled some of the role Frederic Henry Hedge did with the Unitarians, though Brooks was more ecumenically Christian than Hedge the Transcendentalist — man myself.) For anti-institutionalist read not a team player, which might have been true before but doesn’t pass muster when serious institutionalists begin to make the same charges. See, for instance, the Free Church Conference.

The biggest difference between what the former aren’t saying and the bloggers who are is an open vehicle to communicate, a bit of leadership (thanks ChaliceChick) and hope that things might change. A shame that nothing will come of it.

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Domain check: .info please

Well, the Universalism.info and UUA.info domains are being squatted on, but Unitarian.info (gladly) is held and used by the London District and South Eastern Provincial Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. The site isn’t fashionable, but it is useful. Well, perhaps “useful” is a bit of a stretch, but it is there and a squat isn’t. Perhaps it would be helpful if planning a trip to London that falls over a Sunday and you’re looking for a church to attend. (Then you could rule out the ones that are closed any given week.)

There is a nice page of links, one of which is for the new page of Unitarian College Manchester (unitarian-college.org.uk), a ministerial training college.

Unitarians in London (Unitarian.info)

[2009. Sill owned by the London Unitarians but currently unused.]

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Progressive Christian Brunch remembered

Jo Guldi blogged about the brunch that she convened, and that Hubby and I attended. (The drinks pictured are ours: Hubby’s bloody and my decaf.) There were a few small factual errors — Hubby’s name, the fact that I’m not a Unitarian, and that Philocrites isn’t clergy — but none more than calling conversation with another brunch attendee (over the utility of demonstrations like the one were a number of clergy were arrested in DC a few weeks back; I think they are dated, useless, over-staged political theater) furous. She ain’t seen me in a furious debate.

All in all, though, a useful way to organize.

Report from Progressive Christian Brunch