A Small Congregation Wonders About Clergy

I had a great visit recently with the UU Fellowship in Billings, MT, to help them reflect on the benefits and challenges of having professional clergy serving with them.  We did that Saturday, then had  worship together on Sunday. (Not to mention the road trip and excellent dinner on Saturday evening) What a great group of people, and what an energetic fellowship!

It got me thinking in a more general way about the question of whether or not to have professional clergy in these small, relatively isolated communities of the West.

Some of the items are of the sort that can be listed and weighed against each other, but some are not. The folks in Billings -- not just this congregation, but others I know -- are typical of small congregations in that they think of the minister's job in terms of the Sunday service.  "Will we be bored with hearing the same point of view so often over such a long time?" "Will it assure us of high quality services?"  And indeed, the church growth books tell us the pastor of a small congregation can expect to be a chaplain, in charge of worship and pastoral care and not invited to get involved in leadership.

At the same time, the small congregation could benefit from leadership that includes professional clergy, if they can manage to let it happen.  Clergy have training and experience in church meetings and church politics.  They can sometimes have insight into tangled situations and power struggles. They may have helpful ideas about how to deal with difficult people.  Governance can more easily develop the kind of tone and practice that reflects our Principles when there's a professional clergy person involved.  The minister can be the public face of the fellowship, speaking up on social issues, answering questions from public and press.

The big question is, can the congregation's leadership make room for a minister who is more than a chaplain?  Or is the chaplain role all they can imagine?  That making room takes a surprising amount of internal adjustment. People who have been doing it all, and successfully, are invited to share with this credentialed stranger. How does that work?  Not smoothly.  It needs both the sponsorship of the "pillars" of the congregation and their flexibility in making a place for ministerial leadership.

Surely the new minister can't be one of the authoritarian types.  But assertiveness is necessary. Changes need to begin at once, or they will settle in to being as they always have been, with the minister assigned to leading worship, caring for the sick and elderly, and conducting rites of passage. In our fellowships, it is likely that a minister so assigned will seem an expensive luxury.  "Why are we spending all this money?" people will say.

Existing leadership is key. They need to work hard on making space for professional leadership as they prepare to bring someone in.  And there is no one to tell them how to do that.  It is one of the small miracles of our movement that sometimes an established fellowship manages this shift.

from an anonymous website not in our tradition...these people
signed up to be ushers.. or is one of them the minister?

The Half That Was Never Told and Why it Matters Now

I just finished reading The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward E. Baptist, a remarkable history of the Antebellum United States told from the point of view of slavery's role. I had known that slavery was economically important to the development of the US economy, and had understood the connection between the Northern textile industry and the enslavement of people in the South, but this reading took my understanding deeper in surprisingly unsettling ways.

First, the author nails us religious liberals in one of his carefully documented case studies of individuals.  The individual is the Rev.John Gorham Palfrey, Unitarian clergyman, graduate of Harvard, originally from Louisiana.  He found himself in a difficult situation after his father died back home in the Deep South, because much of his inheritance would be in the form of human beings owned as property. Could he sell them?  No. That would be a problem for his own moral scruples and his reputation in the North. Could he liberate them?  Not in Louisiana in those days. In the end he brought all but one of them to Massachusetts to set them free, finding placements for a few while the others took it on themselves, in the manner of free people, to find jobs and begin their new lives.

"If these newest Bostonians looked up in wonder at the King's Chapel's austerely magnificent vaults which soared like white wedding cake from pillars to roof, and if they felt intimidated by the rich variety of clothes on the congregants...the migrants had nevertheless spent their lives constructing this world."  (p.366)  Palfrey knew this, surely. Slavery was not an easy issue for the Unitarians, many of whom were the Boston elite, who also knew their own wealth rested on slavery.

Baptist shows, as our Unitarian forebears apparently knew, that opposing slavery in Boston and elsewhere in the Northeast was not different from undermining the foundations of American prosperity.  Only as the North became more populous and more economically diverse could it afford to question the wisdom of continuing to be a country where slavery was practiced. Only with greater economic diversity could testimony of enslaved people who had escaped become persuasive.

Slavery is deep in the foundations of who we are as America, and deep in the foundations of who we Unitarian Universalists are as a people. We are going to need to do some deep work to find ways to free ourselves from the morally difficult fact that we still stand on the shoulders of enslaved human beings.

An Opening of the Spirit

After nearly a year of feeling too constrained somehow to post anything, I sense an opening of the spirit, a return to the open road that inspired this blog in the first place.  Afoot and lighthearted, I travel in mind and on electronic wings rather than in body (except around in circles in the valley where I live).  My carved and decorated traveling staff, the one that went with me to interim ministries, rests in the corner of my front room.  It's all good, though I am missing interim ministry big time.

I am in touch with congregations in Montana to get to know them better and maybe knit us together in a network of some kind.  I am in touch with the small congregations office of Pacific Western Region of the Unitarian Universalist Association to see what I can offer in the way of webinars and conference call conversations.  I am still puzzling over what category of Unitarian Universalist Ministers' Association dues I fit into, not wishing to call myself "retired" but also not exactly "unemployed" either. "Retired" will do, I guess. 

Here is the opening stanza, the poem that calls to me, as copied from the American Poetry Foundation's website.

Song of the Open Road

BY WALT WHITMAN

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

The poet was entering middle age when he wrote of the open road, and I am settling in on being old.  Still the youth of spirit he was evoking in his mature years springs within me, too. I am grateful. Strong and content, I go traveling.

Happy Hanukwanzmas?

We Unitarian Universalists love holidays.  We love all the festivals of light in December.  We even have a new one of our own, Chalica, celebrating the UU seven principles at the beginning of the month. And people love that, too. At our congregation, we had an (early) Hanukkah celebration, to be followed by two Winter Solstice events and a Christmas Eve service.  We aren't celebrating Kwanzaa this year, but I hear they have enjoyed it in the past.

As an interim minister, I go from congregation to congregation, among other things helping them through the Winter holidays as best I can.  In the last congregation, we tried a Las Posadas holiday pageant, singing the songs in Spanish and getting a little out of our comfort zone.  I confess, it was my doing, and I am not sorry.  In this congregation, I was the instigator of the Christmas Eve service.  Historically humanist, this Fellowship had not gotten around to making a place for its Christians and others for whom that kind of Christmas experience is meaningful.  Turned out that some people who would have wanted it had by-now long standing traditions of getting together with friends and not going to church.  But for new people who haven't established their traditions...can it help?  We'll see..

The trouble is our diversity.  Maybe it's not trouble.  But you know... there are those for whom various December days have special meaning -- St. Nicholas, St. Lucia, the Virgin of Guadalupe -- all depending on the cultural makeup of the community.  With Buddhists in our midst, sometimes we pause to honor Bodhi Day. I have not served a congregation where Diwali was given more than a nod, but for some it's big. And always Hanukkah.  We celebrate the light that would not go out, and the struggle for religious freedom.  We sing and play dreidel and eat latkes. We pray for peace in the Middle East.

There are those who want to make a pagan ceremony at the solstice, and those who want to do something more humanist, celebrating science and truth.  Others just want to have a party.  One congregation did its own mini-Revels every year for which the whole town turned out.  And then it's on to Christmas!  People who are Christian Unitarian Universalists have a variety of theologies, and people who have moved on just slightly from being Christians do, too.  Somehow we weave all this diversity into a fabric of celebration stretches from one end of December to the other.

In the nearly all-white congregations I have been serving lately, Kwanzaa has not seemed like something we need.  Still, the values of Kwanzaa are things I would like to promote among Unitarian Universalists. I'll find a way without having to have white people pretend to be Black and without drafting the already conspicuous few Black people to show us what Black is like (when it's probably not like that).

We close out the season with a New Year's Eve fire communion.  Cast the things that no longer serve you into the fire on little slips of flash paper!  It seems a suitable finale.

With luck and effort, it does hang together and unify most of our theologies, leaving us feeling more whole as a community.  December ends.  The light returns.  There is unity in diversity, and all is well.
Blessed be!

Sometimes It's a Blue Christmas

            It was Elvis who sang a long, long time ago about a blue, blue Christmas, the kind that happens when what you thought was true love is no longer true.  It’s an apt name for the kind of season some of us may be having.  Maybe this is the first Winter Holiday season since a dear one in your family has died, when all the old traditions bring back memories of times when you were all together, sharing the special joys of the season.  Or maybe there has been a separation, estrangement, divorce from someone living—a partner, a child, someone else-- with whom you used to share these times.  Or maybe you are living in a different place, at loose ends when the holiday comes around, missing everyone who used to be around to share the holidays. 

For some people the holidays are always “hellidays,” a time to get together with people who routinely misconduct themselves, but whom you still love. 

Here are my basic suggestions --gathered from a variety of sources--if your holiday season is going to be a challenging one.

1.  Accept is as it is and plan accordingly.  If you are in a time of loss, do give yourself time for sadness.  Reflect on what traditions will bring comfort, and what will bring pain.  If the painful ones are important anyway, allow extra time before and after to deal with your feelings. If you know family members are going to misbehave, make plans not to expose yourself to the misbehavior by limiting time together.  Rehearse responses that will deflect the arguments you don’t want to have.

2.  Make time for spiritual practice and sleep.  If you don’t do meditation or other formal spiritual practice, plan to take a walk or go to the gym regularly.  Especially walk if you can.  Limit television viewing and other media  Plan to get to bed on time, and really try to make the last half hour before bed a relaxing one. Keeping your days and evenings on an even keel will help you manage your feelings and make good choices.

3. Moderation.  It’s easy to eat and drink too much at the holidays, and if you are feeling troubled, it’s even easier.  Make plans to find alternatives to overeating and over-drinking and stick to them.  Remember, alcohol is a depressant.  If you are depressed already, it will not help. Oh, yes, and avoid overspending, too.  The stuff you buy will not fill the hole in your life any more than another helping of mince pie will. 

4.  Find new traditions.  If there’s an empty place in your holidays, or a gap created by deciding not to spend time in unpleasant company, look around for new traditions.  A good place to look is to volunteer opportunities.  Can you help at the soup kitchen or the food pantry, or join the crew for a community dinner?  Helping others has two benefits – yes, it really does help others, and then, too, it helps you by turning your attention away from yourself. 

5.  Do take time for mourning whatever loss is involved in your blue holiday.  But also take time for gratitude.  Even the worst of times has some blessing in it.  The sun still rises and fills the sky with beauty.  There is much to think about with gratitude, even now.  Allow your sorrow and pain to be interwoven with gratitude and even joy.   It may not be a happy season, but it can at least be mixed!

What White People Can Do

              We think now about the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and wonder what he would do.  I think now, too, about what white people might do that would be truly helpful.  Here is a reflection I wrote some time ago about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was Martin Luther King’s first entry into leadership of the civil rights movement.           

           

 The year was 1954. Things in Alabama had started to change. The determined action over a very long time of a large number of people who were tired of Jim Crow laid the foundation for what started when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. 

Some of those were white people.  There was Myles Horton, founder and director of the Highlander Folk School.  There was Robert Graetz, the Lutheran minister who, with his wife and two small children, served the small Trinity Lutheran parish, ran its school for Negro children, and lived in its parsonage in the Negro neighborhood.  There was Clifford Durr, a white lawyer and Rhodes Scholar from a prominent Alabama family.  Durr had been influential in the founding of the Highlander Folk School, and he had important connections in government circles in Washington, DC.

            The Highlander Folk School was widely regarded in conservative white circles as suspect, and indeed it was having a radical impact on those who participated, bringing people of different races together for conversation and training.  It became the subject of Congressional hearings during the McCarthy era, and Clifford Durr defended it vigorously, with the result that he lost all his white clients in Montgomery.  He and his family paid a high price for advocating change.  But they did it anyway.

            Myles Horton, at Highlander, lived in isolation deep in rural Tennessee, and even though a community formed around the school, it was risky to be such a small island of tolerance in a vast sea of Southern racism.  People simply disappeared sometimes in those days.  Fires sometimes mysteriously burned people's homes. It could have happened at any time to the Hortons, but they did it anyway.

            Robert Graetz, the idealistic young Lutheran pastor from the North, found that he and his family simply had to live as if they were black, partly because they were so completely unaccepted in white society, and partly because it was their choice to do it that way. When they went to the movies, the Graetzes chose to sit in the Negro balcony.  Since is was illegal for the cashiers to sell white tickets to black people or black tickets to white people, the theater staff just let them in for free.  The Graetzes, too, paid a price for their commitment to racial justice.  All of them did it anyway.

            It remains a mystery that the mass movement in Montgomery was not stamped out, that its leaders were not immediately killed or scared out of town, that the longstanding, usual repression was not quickly brought to bear, as had happened so many times in so many places throughout the South for so long. There was constant danger of death.  Stories are still coming to light of those who gave their lives to the work of opposing racial oppression in the South.  Rosa Parks herself was forced to leave town in order to live without fear for her life when it was all said and done.  Black churches continue to be burned from time to time, just because…. 

There was no reason to believe at the outset that this boycott in Montgomery was going to be any different than the protests that had been made elsewhere.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the black community in Montgomery just went ahead, knowing what the odds were, prepared for the heavy-handed response they knew all too well from long experience. 

The white families whose names are recorded in relation to the Montgomery Bus Boycott did five things we would do well to remember.

            The Graetzes went to live and minister with the black community, fully committed to being with black people as equals.  In the struggle for economic justice, some middle-class people can go live and work among the hardworking poor as equals.

            The Durrs used their money and influence to bring a liberalizing institution into existence, and fought for its survival, fully committed to making resources available for black and white people to get to know each other and learn how to work together.  Some of us can do that.  We can support organizations that work with those who are struggling and cannot get ahead, and fight for the survival of those organizations. 

            Clifford Durr put his professional expertise as a lawyer and his important connections at the disposal of the cause.  Some of us can do that.

            And the Hortons put their lives on the line to lead a school that advocated peaceful change by empowering people to speak for themselves.  Some of us might do that.

            All three families retained connections to the white world and shared their stories in the white community.  We can do that -- create the bridges of understanding between the people hardest hit by this economy of injustice and the rest.

            So in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us do these things.  Let us make a commitment to be with all people equals, to use our money and influence to assure the availability of liberalizing institutions, to use our professional expertise to help in the struggle, to participate in programs that advocate peaceful change, and to share our stories.  

Highlander Folk School

The Small Congregation Prepares for Annual Meeting

Annual Meeting is coming.

The idea of preparation is a little new.

The budget must be prepared, but just this week, the Religious Education Committee decided to charge a small fee to help cover the cost of supplies, and never told the Treasurer.  Not really a problem, since it's a wash, but still...

And nobody actually put together a budget item for the 50th anniversary celebration next fall.

But the budget will be presented, probably line by line, and passed.

The nominating committee (known as the Recruitment and Recognition Committee) has managed to find enough people to staff the Board of Trustees, but not to replace themselves.  There may or may not be people who want to nominate for Nominating from the floor.

Most committees have affirmed that they have chairs for the coming year.

There is "always" a pot luck lunch beforehand, although this has not been mentioned so far in the publicity for this event.

The interim minister (that would be me) has instigated a printed booklet of annual reports on the congregation's activities.  The Building and Grounds Committee is alone in declining to participate.  This is a positive development!

The main event is that the part time minister and the part time religious education coordinator-and-administrative-coordinator will be working with this congregation for another year.  This is implicit in the budget and will not be discussed separately, thank goodness!

People are happy about the way things are going.  This is good, because apparently there is no parliamentarian, either official or unofficial. And little knowledge of how to use Robert's or another system to guide discussion to a vote.

Moving to a more formal way of being in the world is happening.  But this congregation is not quite there yet.

That's okay.  In fact, it's fine.

No, this is not the congregation in question....