Unitarian Universalist Association – Page 79

November 4, 2003

Pathways Church pool

Watch and Pray notes the new website of the intentional large-church start in Tarrant County (Ft. Worth area), Texas called Pathways Church

He says: “I am curious to see how it all flies? I’ll be conservative, and at this time predict a middlin’ success. Maybe a membership of 300, which would be good, but not the 900+ member church the UUA wants.”

I’m less sanguine. If anyone wants to start a betting pool, I take 195 members for the number Pathways Church certifies as membership in 2008; a bit less than five years from now.

2008 April 24. I lose. 94.

October 30, 2003

Unitarians and Universalists outside the UUA

Earlier, I mentioned the possibility of a Universalist church outside the UUA. As it happens, there are several, though not nearly as many (who opted out of joining the UUA) as there once were. Some died; some became Community Churches and lost their Universalist identity.

One of the survivors — Universalist and Christian, and dear to me — is Rockwell Universalist Church, Winder, Georgia.

Some — well, so far, one — Unitarian church(es) are in the American Unitarian Conference while an case for independence is made by the [2009. defunt, www.utahunitarian.org] Wasatch Front Unitarian Fellowship “an Independent Unitarian Presence in Utah”

Some Unitarian Universalist congregations, especially out west, seem to have a relationship with a UUA district, but aren’t members of the UUA. Whether these small groups ever plan to join the UUA is unclear. I’ve put the names of a couple (with membership numbers in parentheses) in the extended entry.
Continue reading “Unitarians and Universalists outside the UUA”

October 29, 2003

Polity quandries and the UUA Bylaws

Disclosure #1: In my hypothetical church planting exercises, I believe that UUA membership would be desirable, but not essential, to the welfare of the church.

Disclosure #2: Rules — in this case the UUA bylaws — are not made to be broken, but imagination must be applied to them, so as the negative parts of the culture behind the rules do not taint the new work and mission. In other words, there is more than one way to read the UUA bylaws and still stay true to them and Universalist Christian church planting.

Disclosure #3: I believe that any new Universalist Christian church needs to rest on the Winchester Profession, even if there is a local profession built on top of it.

Now, to the UUA Bylaws.

Section C-1.1. Name. The name of this Association shall be Unitarian Universalist Association. It is the successor to the American Unitarian Association, which was founded in 1825 and incorporated in 1847, and the Universalist Church of America, which was founded in 1793 and incorporated in 1866.

Section C-2.4. Freedom of Belief. Nothing herein shall be deemed to infringe upon the individual freedom of belief which is inherent in the Universalist and Unitarian heritages or to conflict with any statement of purpose, covenant, or bond of union used by any congregation unless such is used as a creedal test.

Section C-3.1. Member Congregations. The Unitarian Universalist Association is a voluntary association of autonomous, self-governing local churches and fellowships, referred to herein as member congregations, which have freely chosen to pursue common goals together.

Section C-3.2. Congregational Polity. Nothing in these Bylaws shall be construed as infringing upon the congregational polity or internal self-government of member congregations, including the exclusive right of each such congregation to call and ordain its own minister or ministers, and to control its own property and funds. Any action by a member congregation called for by these Bylaws shall be deemed to have been taken if certified by an authorized officer of the congregation as having been duly and regularly taken in accordance with its own procedures and the laws which govern it.

*Section C-3.3. Admission to Membership. A church or fellowship may become a member congregation upon acceptance by the Board of Trustees of the Association of its written application for membership in which it subscribes to the principles of and pledges to support the Association. The Board of Trustees shall adopt rules to carry out the intent of this Section.

Some telling statistics from the UUA

God bless restless energy and the technology to re-format some information the UUA has on its website.

I stuffed the last UUA congregational certification numbers the membership numbers congregations use in making an annual report for GA, plus the latest available membership numbers for the churches that didn’t certify, minus the Canadian congregations that have since disaffiliated from the UUA into a spreadsheet. Note: there is one existing congregation for which I cannot find good membership numbers.

That said, some facts.

There are 1059 congregations in or approaching membership in the UUA, including the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) and twenty-five “emerging” congregations, the latter which I account as having zero members.

Together, this makes 157,267 adult members. The CLF is the biggest “congregation” (2762 members) but since it is in a category by itself, the “biggest church award” goes to First Unitarian Society, Madison, Wisconsin, with 1300 members.

Remove the CLF and the emerging congregations and you have 1,034 congregations.

The largest 3% (31 congregations; sized 587-1300) have 24,371 members.

The smaller 50% (517 congregations; sized 3-93!) have 23,310 members.

OK, I get desire for large congregations, though I do question the ability for a small-church denomination to accomplish this (including raising the money and managing jealousies) better than organizing more mid-sized churches that make up the middle two-thirds of the UUA collective membership. Not to mention the covenant made among the members of the UUA, and the resources left to fulfill it.

Enough for now. Want a statistic? Ask in the comments.

October 14, 2003

Unitarians of Hazard

No evidence of Tom Wopat, not Universalist (but Unitarian), and ambiguously Christian, but interesting all the same. A little more detail would be nice.

Link: World Brotherhood Church, Hazard, Kentucky.

2008 April 24. The link is dead, and the site has been down since at least 2006.

2009 August 14 Here’s a snapshop from the last working link at Archive.org.

October 3, 2003

Chicago, the home of "jazz killers" and . . .

Apart from changing planes at O’Hare, I’ve never been to Chicago: never have been to the Art Institute, never have ridden the El, and never have visited much less attended a certain double-initialed Unitarian Universalist-related seminary.

Last night, in a new members’ orientation, I told a U of Chicago grad-soon to be new member that I didn’t go because of the weather. (We’re having the first touch of fall in Washington.)

Matthew Gatheringwater rather coveniently spells out one of the two more compelling reasons I chose against Meadville/Lombard in his entries, “Pardon Me, I’m a Unitarian” and “Mysteries.” (The other was the cost of attending.)

August 14, 2003

The Elephant and the Emperor

Sean from Across, Beyond, Through asked the following in the comments of the entry, “Is being many harder than being one?”:

Just checking here–your position is that Unitarianism and Universalism were intentionally changed in order to be more palatable? To each other? To society at large?

I think that there was an embarrasment about the way Unitarianism and Universalism had been, and a fear that these older modes of being wouldn’t carry the religion — and perhaps not support America — into postwar living. Since the two groups that would accomplish this transformation (of themselves, of society) were the Universalists and Unitarians, they needed to be closer together. So yes, to all of the above.

Doing so cut us from our roots and traditions, despite protestations that we “draw” from them, and that was the big mistake, even if it was earnest and (at the time) sensible.

But Sean also challenges me: “And I think my knickers get in a twist because I don’t hear anything that passes as respect or affection for Unitarian Universalism in your posts.”

Fair enough. My loves within the institutions of Unitarian Universalism include the churches I serve and have served, my colleague-friends, and those supports that make maturity as a Universalist Christian possible. As such, I don’t love Unitarian Universalism, in part because I’m not sure it’s an it.

The most I can concede is that Unitarian Universalism is a complex of ideas and assumptions, bound more by historical accident than philosophical cohesion, that infuse so many congregations, schools, and other institutions. If some of the ideas that animate me weren’t present, I would have left long ago. Indeed, I become a real crab when denounced by persons (including colleagues, to their shame) as an ontological impossibility. I may be a minority, but I am real, and since when as excluding minorties been a part of Unitarian Universalism.

Well, in fact, it has been. Theological and social minorities anyway. But that says more about human nature than a denomination.

But this is more than about being member of a thin theological minority hanging on; it is about the soul of the fellowship.

I’m of the age — thirty-four — that I cut my political teeth in the tail end of the Queer Nation/ACT-UP era. (I’ll give you a moment to digest that visual.) I was never a member of either group (mainly because I was closeted during their years of greater vitality) but the ethos did bring me out. (If they were juvenile, well then look to the White House in those days.) I continue to insist that silence equals death.

My experience is that we’re all supposed to agree and be alike, even if it is alike in a perverse criticism of culture (as I’ve seen in some fellowships) or in socio-economic norms (as in worshipping NPR) — and that real dissent isn’t really welcome. Again, human nature. OK, fine. But it doesn’t give us a sense of commonweal or trust, and it can’t help us be a reasonable participant (I refuse to call us an “alternative”) in American and Canadian religious life.

So I’ll even act like a crab to the nude Emperor, it it helps him find some clothes.

July 26, 2003

I lift mine eyes to "Rocky Top Tennessee"

Utah-born and bred Philocrites recalls how the Mormon anthem “Come, Come Ye Saints” moved him to tears when sung at King’s Chapel, Boston.

The closest experience I have had to this was at the Opening Ceremony at Nashville 2000 GA. Mind you, I think Opening Ceremony has been a disorganized rah-rah shambles and needs to be better orchestrated. I even forgave them the 80s-Metal-Band-Reunion-Tour-with-Special-Guest lighting when a bluegrass group broke into “Rocky Top.” OK, this is less “God’s providental care leading us to Deseret” and more “I’m being destroyed in the city and am home-sick for my mountain home where we fornicate, drink hard liquor, and murder Revenuers.” But those are my people. (Except for the murdering part. Probably.) So what are you gonna do?
And this is quite a concession: “Rocky Top” is the fight-song for the Univerity of Tennessee, a football rival of my own alma-mater, The University of Georgia.

At that GA, for the first time I felt “a part of the team” and not in spite of being a Southerner. The usual, but fading message from the Unitarian Universalists, as implied by a fascination about “what happened in Selma”, is “look at those hateful crackers. We’re better than them.”

Bringing in the bluegrass group showed more cultural awareness than the atrocious theme hymn (refrain: We pledge ourselves to diversity.) we were forced to sing. But I cried, not from principle, but because, like Philocrites, I never never never thought I would hear it in a Unitarian Universalist context.

July 14, 2003

UU customs and growth

Do UU customs undercut new church growth? That’s a big question, so I hope my readers will excuse me thinking out loud. (I reserve the right to retract any statement later.) First, I’m not talking about a resistance to evangelism, real or imagined, but systems that discourage new churches from growing to their full potential. This line of thought comes from
some comments after the Opening Ceremony at the UUA General Assembly. At that service/meeting, the churches that joined the UUA in the past year are formally welcomed. This year’s crop was slight, with few members each. A quick review of their certified memberships showed each new congregation had a membership in the 30s or 40s. Going back a few more years — I looked as far as 1999 — you do find a smattering of memberships over a hundred, and a few more between sixty and ninety-nine, but far too many are in the 30s and 40s, with some even smaller and a couple which seem
to have disbanded. Why is this?

I have to think that the minimum number of members for a congregation to be a member of the UUA has to play a
factor. It currently stands at thirty, so I’m thinking that a congregation hits thirty members and joins the UUA as soon as possible. The problem is that thirty is a periously small size for a church to launch with. I’m basing that opinion on a Southern Baptist study cited by Aubrey Malphurs in his Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century (Baker Books) suggesting that new churches that have more than fifty members at the time of their launch have a better chance of surviving and thriving than those that have fifty members. So, perhaps, the thirty-member Unitarian Universalist new start is too small at birth.

But can’t a far-thinking UU new start “delay its birth”? Two factors discourage this. First, and I would want to review past Annual Program Fund (APF) Honor Society lists before taking this too far, a new start has to pay a full “fair share” to the APF to be admitted, but once admitted there is no mechanism to mandate this level of giving. (Though it should be noted that the proportion of APF Honor Societies is going up.)

There would seem to be an incentive to join the UUA as small as possible. Second, and perhaps more damaging to the future of the Association is the creeping rhetoric that a church doesn’t really exist until it joins the UUA. When you hear what should be called “Association Sunday” or “Affiliation Sunday” called “Charter Sunday” you can’t help but assume that membership in the UUA is ontologically essential for these young (and vulnerable) congregations. Belonging (to the UUA) becomes the church’s mission.

A dose of congregational polity memory might be helpful here.

Prematurely stunted churches help nobody, and I hope we’re big enough to recognize habits that make them.

May 26, 2003

What to profess?

I never thought so many people would take an interest in this humble blog. Thank you.

Some of the well-wishing inquiries came with the question, “how do I get one of my own?” I’m not using any web-logging software; just this CSS (thanks, free-of-charge, to Firda Beka at bookofstyles.org [site defunct], modified a bit).

In time, I hope to “power it” with MovableType, but that’s a learning curve I’ve no time to climb.

Much after Sunday worship.

I read a section from Leo Tolstoy’s My Confession in worship, and led it with
a review of Adin Ballou’s influence on him. I should have gone to Friends of Adin Ballou first! This site keeps growing, and is clearly one to watch.

What to Profess? My friend Derek Parker, an Earlham seminarian and the lay pastor of the Universalist Church of Eldorado, Ohio asked me (and I post here with his permission)

If you were building a new Universalist church from the ground-up, what are 3 or 4 essential theological convictions you would like to see in a contemporary Universalist profession? Or would you just repeat the Winchester Profession with updated language?

What a tantalizing question, and one that I hope to spill into this blog and the pulpit in months to come. But first things first. I wouldn’t reject, update, or adopt wholesale the Winchester
Profession in a new church, no matter how much I love it. (And I do.)

Instead, the Winchester Profession deserves its role as the foundational theological standard for Universalism, and one can build on it.

I have sometimes been criticized for not “correcting” the gender language of the Winchester Profession. For the record, I’m trying to uphold the letter and the spirit of what the 1803 Convention asked of future generations in its adopted Plan of the General Assocation:

Section 10th. The Association reserves to itself, under the direction of that divine wisdom which was to accompany the followers of Christ to the end of the world, the right of making hereafter such alterations of this General Plan of the Association, as circumstances may require. But there is no alteration of any part of the three Articles that contain the Profession of our Belief ever to be made at any future period.

(You can see the whole document and much more at www.winchesterprofession.org/eddy1876.html.) [22 April 2005: I let that site lapse in 2003.]

The 1899 and 1935 documents (a “declaration” and a “avowal” respectively) recall “encapsulated” that which came before it.

Thus the Winchester Profession had official standing, not just pious sentiment, until the Universalists consolidated with the Unitarians.

But there are examples — I’ll have to see if I can dig them up — of local churches and state conventions before 1899
(and perhaps after) adopting theological symbols for the fellowship of ministers and churches (locally, I assume the members, too) which stated more but never less than the Winchester Profession. (Of course, there is also the 1903 composite creed, which though it had no official standing, did make it into a denominationally published
prayerbook for more than a generation.)

This might be the theologically appropriate approach to composing a new theological symbol for Universalists. But this also begs a reading of the Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws:

Section C-2.3. Non-discrimination. The Association declares and affirms its special responsibility, and that of its member congregations and organizations, to promote the full participation of persons in all of its and their activities and in the full range of human endeavor without regard to race, color, sex, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, age, or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.

Section C-2.4. Freedom of Belief. Nothing herein shall be deemed to infringe upon the individual freedom of belief which is inherent in the Universalist and Unitarian heritages or to conflict with any statement of purpose, covenant, or bond of union used by any congregation unless such is used as a creedal test.

So, what constitutes a creedal test? And who decides?