Democracy for Real

Fake democracy, you know it, we all grew up with it,,,remember Student Government?  What could the students decide that mattered?  Not much.  It was a chance to "gain recognition," or some such thing, and people who saw that as a good thing went for it.  The Principal was in charge of everything we really cared about, and just forget talking to him (occasionally her).

When I first became aware of the Unitarian Universalist Association, it was perfectly clear that it was the same deal.  We elected a Leader, who then proceeded to implement his (conceptually possibly her) own ideas about what was needed.  Administrations changed, new ideas came into view, and new policies were adopted.  The General Assembly was mainly a gathering to hear things.  Not so different from high school.

Well, church is a lot like high school anyway, and the churches I knew as a young person had arrangements that seemed to be a lot like that.  They had Ministers, and basically everything revolved around him (not even in those days conceptually her, at least in my part of the world).  I'm not sure this was really true, because I was young and not involved in governance, and mainly only had student government as a point of reference. Yes, totally circular, but that's part of the point.

Now I am old, and a minister myself, and one of the things I try to do with congregations is help them find their own futures and take possession of their own possibilities. And an interim minister, this really is my role -- someone else will come to lead them into that future, and I want to be sure they go forth to find a new leader with their own possibilities in mind, rather than following the Student Government way.  But it's hard.  We all come to church with a background of work, where a meeting is not a chance  to be heard, but an opportunity to be told. Where leadership is a matter of operating within parameters set from above, not of working with what people around you want to have happen.

There is much countercultural about the way things work in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, if we're getting our Fifth Principle (the one about democracy) right.

And now comes the news that the Unitarian Universalist Association itself is trying to change its culture.  The outgoing Moderator wants us to stop with the thing of voting our leaders in and then just following the things they think up to have us do.  Or complaining about them.  Or ignoring them.

But real democracy is truly not the culture of the UUA.  I have been wishing it would be different for a long time.  And now I want to just say that truly, we can't just say we want it and expect it to happen.  Any more than I can just say to the chair of Committee X in the church that he or she can't lead by decree, that meetings need to be gatherings of peers to work things out, and expect it to happen with no further ado.  This is a big deal.  An important deal.  Our world needs real democracy, not Student Government. So does our Association. So let's get on it.