Does a Small UU Congregation Matter?

A small congregation does matter, I say.  They should just be the best small congregation they can be, letting go of the idea that they "should" in some way "grow."  Even if there are other congregations that are a lot bigger and denominations that are a lot stronger, or something, it's not necessarily true that if they stay small, there is something wrong with them.

The smallest of the UU congregations I know has some history of people holding grudges and making life difficult for them.  They also have a couple of difficult members whose ways of relating to newcomers are off putting.  But for all that, they are a good hearted group, capable of putting on a meaningful worship service, producers of very good children's religious education, providers of excellent pastoral care to their members in need, and participants in substantial social service projects.

I enjoy leading worship with them.  They are responsive.  They sing.  They hang out after service and visit with one another and with me.  Coffee hour has a pleasant hum of people engaged with one another. This visit, there was home made cheesecake. (The quality of after-service food and the ambient sound of coffee hour are indicators to me of the general health of congregational life).

Will they grow?  They could, if they can work through the grudge thing and neutralize the members who repel visitors.  I believe they are in the process of turning these roadblocks into signposts, but it may take some time. While these obstacles to growth are being whittled away, they will remain small, embodying our  faith on a small scale, spreading themselves in a small way into their community.  To my mind, this small congregation does matter in our movement.

Let us encourage these small congregations.  It is not their fault that among us there are grudge-holders and people who believe the world revolves around themselves.  The difficult people are ours, too, and the struggle to deal with them in wholesome, loving, ways is our struggle.

When I visit, I extend a word of encouragement.  Connection to their larger movement seems to be important.  I'd like to see small, lay-led fellowships be visited often by religious professionals who are passing through their territories, maybe to lead worship with them, maybe just to stop in and talk with a few leaders about what's on their minds.

Maybe it will help them be the best small congregation they can be, holding up the light of our faith to the community around them.  And maybe that is enough. For now.

Learning at the Feet of a Master

Well, he stood in the front of the large room with the tables in rows, using power points some of the time, but mostly just talking.  But from the back of the room, I still had the feeling I was sitting at the feet of a Master. It was all very down to Earth, though.  Talk about the way things really work about the head and the heart as Roy Oswald unpacked what he knows about Emotional Intelligence with us.

Roy Oswald with Rev. Barbara Child

As I heard it, it seemed to me that emotional intelligence -- something that is partly innate and can also be learned -- is a key to both successful ministry and satisfying congregational life.  It was not surprising that it begins with self-awareness, something to be cultivated not only with meditation and journaling and such reflections of our own, but also with frequent receiving of feedback from others on their perceptions of us.  If we can see our emotional selves as others see us as well as knowing ourselves from the inside out, we've got the foundation.

It's a short step to be able to do effective self regulation, the ability to be responsive, authentic, and appropriate when connecting with others.  And a short step in another direction to have social awareness, the ability to figure out what is going on with others, the foundation for empathy.  Self-awareness on the one hand, empathy on the other, that's all you really need to have authentic and intimate communication without those troublesome "boundary" issues. Who knew?  It's both really simple and really challenging.

Oswald says meditate and keep a journal on a daily basis to promote self-awareness.  I'm going home from this conference with new determination to add to my little daily meditation practice a more robust journaling practice that includes how I really feel about stuff in my day (too many grocery lists in my past journal...) And I will be making more of an effort to solicit and receive feedback in many settings. It matters a lot to connect what I believe I know about myself to what others see and hear!

Will this make me somehow better?  The meditation makes a difference.  The yoga practice does, too.  It can't hurt to add the journal.  For me, the feedback will be the most challenging.  Is "better" what I'm looking for?  Better at making connections, better at doing authentic speaking and listening.  Maybe a happier life because of it.

Easter, Our Problem Holiday

Well, here in the Flathead, Easter comes as spring unfolds.  There are daffodils, for instance.  And baby bison. Bears have come out of hibernation.  The grass is turning green.

Easter could be about spring, yes?

Except that it isn't about spring.  Not if it's Easter.

We can still have an Easter egg hunt, though, right?

Of course!  That's one of the pagan traditions for the day.  And yes, really, then, well, it is about spring, because in Europe where so many of our ancestors came from, as well as here, Easter and spring come together.  The pagan and the Christian intertwine, and it's all Easter.

But for Christians, it is centrally about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the redemption of humankind.

We can recast resurrection as the renewal of life that happens in spring, but to do that, we would have to make Christ into a god of Nature.  What with the Eucharist, that's not totally out of the question -- the wheat is his body, the grapes his blood -- but we would make a lot of traditional Christians really angry.  And the reasonable-scientific part of our own Unitarian Universalist tradition would probably not like it much, either.  Let's not go there.

Our best refuge is to go metaphorical and shift into a more planetary plane.  I'm thinking global warming is a good place to go on Easter.  A planetary disaster is unfolding in slow motion like the disaster of the Roman Empire pressing down on the people of Israel.  We can have Good Friday, something lost when you recast Easter as spring.  I say, joy is rather pale when not preceded by anguish and loss, and we have plenty of real anguish and loss to deal with.

We need redemption from global warming, for real, and in a physical way.  Can there be an Easter of new hope as we turn from cooking the planet to nurturing it?  Is that worth an Alleluja?

What was lost is found, what was broken is lifted up, and tears of frustration turn to shouts of joy.

We still are not really Christians.  We follow the teachings and example of Jesus, who showed us how to live well even in the shadow of evil.  For us, he does not return to life on Easter, but rather continues to inspire us as he does every day.  Instead, on Easter, something planetary begins to happen, and the seeds of a new way begin to sprout.

I'm going to go there this Easter, starting with Good Friday at the beginning, because we don't have a tradition of remembering that part, and ending with joyful possibilities.  Alleluja!

Community at the Edge of the Earth

When the Mountain Desert District of the UUA gathered for its annual meeting in Sheridan, Wyoming, described by one attendee as "the edge of the earth," the congregations who sent representatives were overwhelmingly from the small to tiny congregations that populate this fringy area.  On Saturday morning, MDD Executive Nancy Bowen gave us our marching orders, and we headed out to see what we could share and learn in a really interesting selection of workshops.

Paige Rappleye and I offered a workshop on "Foundations of Growth for Small Fellowships," since  Glacier Fellowship is experiencing some growth, and since I have been gaining experience with the ups and downs of smaller congregations.  It was gratifying that thirty or so hardy souls packed into our little room AFTER the annual meeting to talk about this touchy and tender subject. We were alone -- no big congregations were represented!  So we could let our hair down.

The morning workshop on being a liberal church in a conservative area had helped us warm up -- somehow that session had drawn many of the same folks. Ours was act two of a conversation that was already under way.

We talked about how the real foundations for growth are in the way the congregation does its work, that the first thing needed is to be doing a good job of being a UU fellowship.  And how some simple things can make a difference, especially on Sundays.  Though come to think of it, they might not be so simple.  And how it's important not to make yourselves crazy trying to do things to attract newcomers, because if you're going crazy that really does defeat the purpose.  But a clean, neat room that is well set up to be a UU worship space (even if it's a borrowed facility) really is important.  And so are some basic rules of safety and decorum for the people who participate.

But mostly we talked.  It felt warm and friendly.  No, you shouldn't make people board members when they first show up, except sometimes in a small congregation you have to.  One of our group confessed to being in his second year as a UU and also his second year as Board chair.  We all laughed!  We know we shouldn't, because so often people treated like this burn out and run away.  So I think we learned to try hard to avoid it and give lots of support to the person recruited too early when that's the way it is.  We resolved to try to follow safe congregation guidelines even though "we're all family," remembering that often a child's abuser is a family member.  We shared strategies for having services in the summer without burning out the Sunday Service Committee.  I hope this group finds ways to get together and talk like this again before we forget how valuable it was.  These people are truly inventing liberal religious community in the places they serve, breathing life into it and making it work.

What a fine group of congregational entrepreneurs!  I felt privileged to be among them.  I want to be with them again, and I'm already contemplating how to make it happen.

Winter Magic

This week has been magical here in the Flathead... after a mild spell with light winds that felt almost springlike, Tuesday was a fairyland of frozen fog, with every tree branch lightly coated in frosty crystals.  As is my wont on Tuesdays, I went up to Big Mountain for a couple of hours in the morning.  Lo and behold!  The slopes were above the overcast that kept the lower elevations under wraps.  I skied in the sun, looking out across the mountains to the peaks of Glacier National Park, some wrapped in clouds, some sparkling in the sun.  I came back to earth with a little pink on my cheeks, ready to deal with laundry and liturgy and church politics. I think I'm liking this life.

Glacier park with clouds...

Yesterday, there was a little snow, a wet and clingy snow, so once again the trees were white until the sun and wind came to clear them.  The roads, driveways, and sidewalks continue to be glazed with ice.  Everyone is practicing their penguin walks, while some wise souls wear extra tread on their boots  (I have some, and somehow never remember to put them on).  And yesterday, there was the news that our local girl --Maggie Voisin --was picked for the Olympics!  I think of all those flocks of little kids who ski all over this mountain and marvel... how this kind of recognition can spring from their energy, enthusiasm, and time on skis.  And many lifetimes of happy enjoyment, recognized or not!

Today --can you tell?-- I'm supposed to be writing a sermon.  Fortunately, the sky is gray, and I am carefully not looking at the summit cams for the ski area.  Tomorrow, if I do my work today, I can ski again.  And maybe get that elusive photo from the summit, the one with lots of sun and not so many clouds, that shows the awesome wildness of that view into Glacier.

Whitefish town and lake

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Token Day or Something Else?

The Sunday of the long weekend marking the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poses a special problem for Unitarian Universalist congregations.  One of our regular attenders asked me a few days ago whether this was going to be "token Black" Sunday or something else.  If it was the former, he thought he would stay home.  It was something else, but his concern left me wondering.

We are mostly white.  All white, in this congregation, except for one Black man who comes every now and then. And we are big supporters of nonviolence.  We were in the old days big supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.  On a national level, when Dr. King called for people of faith to come to Selma, we responded. That was fifty years ago, but we remember.  Indeed, we have made efforts and experienced both successes and failures since then to become a less white community, because we care.  And some of our congregations are no longer quite so white.  But in the little congregations I have had a chance to serve,  the Anglo whiteness persists.

On Martin Luther King Sunday, and in February, when schools recognize African American history, what do we do?

Yesterday, we heard about the Montana Innocence Project, a statewide program that works to exonerate people who have been wrongly imprisoned.  In Montana, it does not usually have a racial component.  Just prodding the justice system to do its job.

Justice seems to be where it's at.  And being open to the arrival of new people in our midst, regardless of race, religious background, or whatever.  And watching that openness for spots where it's not.  I'm for inviting people of color and African Americans in particular to speak to us, not particularly on Martin Luther King Sunday and not particularly during Black History Month.  Just do it.  In these parts, it's also important to lift up Native peoples' voices and to listen to Asians as well.  I need to remind myself to find readings not just from women (a longtime interest) but from other less well heard groups, to lift up the examples of lives lived with courage and compassion by people of Native, African, and Asian heritage.  The songs of many cultures that made it into our hymnbook in 1985 need to be updated, but that impulse was good.  This needs my work and attention, too.  Openness.  Can it be done?

If we build a welcome, we invite ourselves to a better place.  And maybe others, seeing that, will want to join us.  And maybe some of them will be people who don't look just like we do.

When the Congregation is Family Size

Joining a family is kind of tricky.  They have a lot of ways of doing things that are well established and not explained at all.

The interim minister comes to shake things up and talk things over so things end up being slightly more intentional.  But it's hard...some of the stuff is pretty obscure.

I was in a small group talking with a long-established member about space for religious education classes. She spoke of a time when  space had been opened up in an outbuilding with the idea that a teen class could meet there, but it not been completed. In the context of finding a way to  have an office for the newly established position of administrator -- a spot more suitable than the space at the end of the kitchen -- this was an interesting piece of news.  Somehow no one had thought of that partially finished space.  The middle school group would need the space the administrator could otherwise use.  End of story.  Has another door opened?  To be continued...

I was in a meeting with a diverse selection of leaders.  The subject of fundraising had come up, and people were expressing opinions in a broad way.  "You've probably lost most of them," said a well-placed leader, "but there was a group of people who were really committed to doing something with the building."  First I'd heard of people being disgruntled over the failure of a building project...  I'd heard of something that might be related, but this was news.  In his mind, the minister and  building were competing for the same resources. This was not a principled opposition to professional ministry, which I was well represented in this congregation's conversations, but rather a practical one. His choice of pronouns ("you" have lost them) let me know he was one of them.  Now I can have a conversation with him and find out more, I hope!

I don't think people are holding back or being devious.  I think these two stories are typical of the way a family size congregation works.  There is no need to explain things because everyone already knows.  And it's not easy to identify people who have particular information because everyone has so many roles over the course of years of membership.  And of course, little is written down. That's part of what makes these congregation's fascinating.

New people who aren't ministers can find similar challenges about finding what's going on and what's expected.  It takes just getting in there and asking a lot of questions, something not every newcomer finds comfortable.