Do We Have a Dream? A Vision of Beloved Community Rev. Roberta Finkelstein Sunday February 5, 2006 “The congregation of the future is one that will recognize the unique ability of the church to radically alter a person’s worldview, and help people realize they are no longer the people they had once been. Too often we view Unitarian Universalist churches as safe havens, places of comfort that are perceived as a final destination rather than a port of embarkation.” Yes! Amen! I said to myself as I feverishly underlined those words in Michael Durall’s book – The Almost Church. That is exactly what I believe the church should be – a place where you come to experience transformation, to grow in mind and spirit, to be challenged. Not to stay the same, not to find ‘like minded people’ who will never disagree with you, not to be complacent. “Unitarian Universalism has a proud history and tradition,” Durall goes on to say. “One with its saints and martyrs. But what are our churches called to do in this place and time? The primary purpose of the church is to create a community of compassion. All else flows from this. Unitarian Universalist churches should call their members to lead lives of dedication and commitment – lives not just of success, but also of service, and when called upon, sacrifice.” I want to repeat that last phrase. Unitarian Universalist churches should call their members to lead lives of dedication and commitment – lives not just of success, but also of service, and when called upon, sacrifice. And on the very next page, Michael Durall says this. “Unitarian Universalism should be creating churches that make the world a more just, safe, and equitable place. This goal will not be accomplished if church leaders believe that their primary role is to accommodate the people who are already there. I have made the recommendation to numerous congregations that they discontinue the annual ‘satisfaction’ surveys. Our churches should not be in the satisfaction business. More important issues are at stake.” Yes, I said gleefully, Amen! Once again feverishly underlining. Or maybe I should say gratefully underlining as I remembered the words of my first mentor in ministry: When you want to say something dangerous, quote somebody else! Perhaps at this point I should offer a disclaimer. I am an interim minister, here for a year to help you move from where you have been to where you want to go with a new settled minister. The reality of interim ministry is that I am pre-fired. My job is to tell you the truth about yourselves as I see it, without undue concern about your initial feelings when you hear those perceived truths. Being pre-fired frees me to challenge you, to point out things that you might wish to sweep under the rug. Technically, being pre-fired means I don’t have to worry about quoting somebody else when I say something dangerous. But Mike Durall just says some things so well, I decided to quote him anyway. I want to tell you a story from a day in the recent life of your own congregation. Every year the Membership Committee attempts to create an accurate database of members and friends of the congregation. This entails looking over the list, thinking about people who have not been present in the life of the church, talking with the minister and other staff and the Stewardship committee, looking at the Religious Education roster, and probably other things I can’t even think of. The purpose of this exercise is to make sure that we really know who constitutes this community. It is a way to catch up with people who have drifted away, and to invite them back. People who have no financial donation of record, who have not been attending worship or bringing their children to Religious Education, people who have not been present in any way in the life of the church – receive a letter asking them about their intentions. I’ve seen the letter – it expresses concern and understanding for changed life circumstances. It also asks in a direct way for a clarification of the recipient’s relationship to the church. This letter sometimes produces cries of pain from people who, though totally absent from the church, are offended at being asked about the nature of their commitment. The office staff and leaders who receive these complaints don’t want anybody to be unhappy. We agonize over the wording of the letter, ask ourselves, “What did we do wrong?” Now here’s where I’m going to say something dangerous. The problem is not with the wording of the letter, or the intent of the letter. The problem is not with the people who receive the letter and are offended. The problem is with the culture of the congregation. In your desire to be a free and open society, you have created an impression that membership in this church doesn’t carry any deep meaning with, or any obligations. A voluntary association, which we are, is defined by choice. All of you are here as the result of exercising a free choice. Somebody who never comes to worship even though this is primarily a religious/worshipping community, who never volunteers or votes even though this is a self-determining organization, who never contributes even though this is a self-sustaining organization – that somebody has chosen to disassociate. To ask for clarification, to say, “If you choose not to be part of the life of the church then we assume that you are no longer a member” is not antithetical to the principles of our free faith. In fact it is essential to the health of the community that the membership be well enough defined that we can all understand the boundaries. It is a mistake to believe that this congregation has no right to ask anything of its members. But for many people, this is a new way of understanding membership, because nobody ever told them what the expectations of membership are. The real question that you should be asking is not, “what can we do for you, how can we lure you back, what claim do you want to make on us in order for you to stick, are we asking too much?” The real question you should be asking yourselves is, “what claim does membership in this church make on each of us?” The truth as I see it is that you are not asking nearly enough of yourselves and each other. You are not asking for enough money, you are not asking for enough time, you are not asking for enough commitment. You are not, in Mike Durall’s words, calling each other to lives of commitment, dedication, service, and sacrifice. It is not because you are bad at church stuff, or lazy, or uncaring that you do not make this demand. It is because at this point in your history, you lack a unifying vision that invites that level of commitment. Every successful religious congregation in any denomination begins with an idea – or a set of ideas – so compelling that they demand to be incarnated. Organizational development experts call these the governing ideas of an organization. Governing ideas answer three basic questions. The first is “What?” As in, “What is the big picture of the future we are trying to arrive at together?” This is also known as vision. Unitarian Universalists have always had a vision of a radically inclusive, radically free religious community. Let’s call it a realized vision; that is, instead of building our faith on an assumption about what will happen in the after-life, in another place, we build our faith on the assumption that IT – salvation, ultimacy, call-it-what-you-will – is happening right here and now. In formal theology, this is a realized eschatology. Eschatology deals with the end times. A realized eschatology says that the end-time is already here. We are living it. So make the best of it, and live it as rightly as you can. The second question in our set of governing ideas is “Why?” As in, “Why does this congregation exist? Why bother? What is our reason for being, what larger sense of purpose do we bring to even the most mundane tasks of creating and sustaining our church?” This is also known as mission. Mission looks outward, beyond the immediate needs of the people already present. A sense of mission allows you to seek out the ways that you can contribute to the world in a unique way, to make a difference, to bring value to the lives of others. The third question is “How?” “How do we want to be, to act, what qualities of community do we wish to embody, day to day, as we live out our mission and reach towards our vision?” This is also known as covenant. This definition of covenant was written by the staff of the Extension Department of the Unitarian Universalist Association. “Covenant is the central unifying promise or commitment that binds a religious community together in voluntary loyalty. It grows from an affirmation of shared needs, values, purposes, and principles. As such it is rooted in the past, in the tradition of the congregation, and reflects the embodiment of the promise through history. It is a promise made in the present, with implications for the future.” Vision, mission, and covenant, taken together, confer identity. A congregation with a clearly understood and articulated identity is one that enjoys communal health, is able to grow and change and adapt to new circumstances. A well-differentiated identity inoculates a congregation against external and internal forces that might otherwise threaten it. A well-differentiated identity allows the leaders and members of a congregation to articulate expectations of membership; it evokes a sense of commitment rather than entitlement. You are at a point in your history when you need to renew your sense of vision. For many years, it was the building that drove you and centered you. Your hopes and dreams as you went through the building process kept your eyes raised to the horizon. The building was more than just a physical structure; it was an incarnated vision of who you wanted to be. But once the building was built, your eyes were drawn inevitably downward to the more mundane realities of home ownership – a mortgage, a lawn that needed mowing, bathrooms that needed cleaning. Understandably, you lost your sense of purpose. You got caught up in conflict and tensions about money and who was going to do the dishes. The incredible strength and commitment it took to build this beautiful place was followed by a letdown in energy and excitement. Now what? Now you need to get together and cast a new vision. You need to get some clarity about who you are, and where you are going. To know and understand your identity as a congregation is to insure a healthy present and thriving future. The process of forming and articulating that identity, like all aspects of liberal religious revelation, is continuous. You will never be finished. In the past years, you have gone through some radical changes and transitions. You took the leap of faith that got you into this building. Then you took a rest from leaping. You learned something about the fruits of that leap of faith – programming possibilities that you hadn’t imagined, outreach opportunities, maintenance nightmares. It is now time to begin an intentional process of renewing your vision. On March 18th the Interim Transition Team will be holding what we are calling a Diagnostic Leap workshop. The purpose is for the leadership and committed members of UUCF to identify together the strengths you want to build on and the needs you want to address. You have already laid a lot of groundwork -– the study of your history, beginning conversations with the board about organizational structure, a new and open approach to stewardship. This work will continue through the spring, and into next year with your 2nd year pre-fired interim minister. “How do we speak about a corporate religious identity while we believe in individual freedom of belief and with our style of life, which encourages such diversity?” asks the Extension Manual of the Unitarian Universalist Association? “The most obvious and deceptively simple response is that we simply must begin, if we believe ourselves to be a religious community and not merely a collection of individuals. To speak is to take the first step in articulating those areas that unite us as people, and also in understanding the areas that separate us. To paraphrase John Dewey, such a first step is the discovery and identification of ourselves as a religious community.” Five hundred years ago, a group of people had an idea. The idea was that religion was something that each person chooses based on their own unique and personal experience of the power of the faith. Religion is not something that is handed to you; it is not something that can be compelled. It is a personal choice made by adults exercising the God-given gifts of reason and volition. Those adults who make the choice to self-identify as people of a particular faith then gather voluntarily and create the community that incarnates – that is, expresses in living flesh - their chosen faith. Those people we know as the Anabaptists gathered together during the Radical Reformation in small and intensely persecuted communities and set about to create a church that would reflect their faith. They started with an idea – that religion is a matter of volition, personal choice, based on personal experience. From that idea emerged a set of values about religion – the value first of personal religious freedom (after all, how can anybody make the choice of everybody isn’t free to choose?) – and the value, derived from the first, of the practice of voluntary association as the only legitimate way to create a true community of faith. Nobody should be forced by accident of birth or marriage to profess a religious faith. The true congregation can be made up only of true believers voluntarily gathered. Forty years ago, a small group of people following in the footsteps of the Anabaptists gathered for worship for the first time. They gathered in the purest form of voluntary association. Each had made a reasoned choice about their religious faith. Each had decided to become a Unitarian Universalist. Then, as a group, they made another intentional decision - to birth a new congregation. This one. At their first worship service they brought dreams, hopes, a vision for what this new church would be. Though they could not have imagined this particular place, or this particular set of faces, or the size of this year’s budget, they knew that they wanted to establish a church that had the institutional integrity to serve as an expression of the best of contemporary Unitarian Universalism. At about the same time that the founders of this congregation were laying the foundations, another prophet was speaking to America. Martin Luther King often used the term Beloved Community to impart his vision of an America that lived up to its ideals. Beloved Community, the Kingdom of God, a world made fair by human effort – all of these are ways to describe the hopes and dreams of people just like you and me who, throughout history, have hoped and dreamed of a world community of peace, liberty, and justice for all. And here you are, living out the realized vision of all those people – the sixteenth century Anabaptists, the twentieth century founders of the UU Fellowship of Frederick. You may not remember it on a day-to-day basis, but you are, in fact living out the realized vision of a radically free, radically inclusive religious community that would make your foremothers and forefathers proud. So honor our past with gratitude and respect. Live in your present with as much attention and intention as you can muster. But most importantly, lift your eyes once again to the horizon and anticipate and welcome and shape your future with hope and optimism and courage. Without a vision a people perish. Find your vision. Recast the sacred circle of faithful voluntarily gathered around that vision. Speak it, celebrate it, let it challenge you to be the best that you can be. Let that vision call you to a life of faith, of commitment, of dedication, of service, of sacrifice. Benediction I close with words adapted from Michael Durall: Let us be about the business of empowerment – finding the strength and courage to reach out and serve wherever we are needed; to take risks so that we can become engaged in the world in ever-greater ways. Churches seldom die from taking risks; they expire from complacency. Let us be not a complacent church, but a congregation of fortitude, the true church of the future. Amen.