Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie

I’m taking a break from our district staff meetings here at Ghost Ranch, so I thought it’d be a good time to add another element of to my posts on the seven parts of a contemplative approach to youth ministry (according to the Youth Ministry & Spirituality Project). This next one uses a word that UUs should feel particularly comfortable with: covenant. Everything we do on an institutional level (congregations, districts, and the association) is built on the notion of covenant. It’s a word used in our founding documents as well as our Principles and Purposes. In our more recent history it’s been used to describe a way of being in relation with a group of 10 or so people in small groups—covenant groups. According to the YM&SP folks, covenantal community is an essential part of youth ministry.

A contemplative approach to youth ministry is practiced within a covenant community of Christian disciples. Just as Jesus called and ministered with others in a community of spiritual companions (Mt 10:1-4), we also encourage, support and practice small covenant groups who sense a common call to spiritual growth through Christian living and ministry to young people. These groups offer prophetic witness to a way of life that is creatively resistant to the seductions of the market culture and the dullness that can inhabit Christian institutions. Companions of the Project commit to meeting regularly in covenant communities for sharing, prayer, scripture study and discernment in the service of their ministry to young people.

Rather than “Christian disciples,” I might use the words “faithful Unitarian Universalists,” or “stewards of our faith.” Rather that “Christian living,” I might say “living out our UU principles,” or “living out the deepest values of our faith.” And for “the dullness that can inhabit Christian institutions”? We are not exempt for the same tendency. That’s why so many youth currently seek programs outside of our congregations. For a group of such bright people, we can be incredibly dull! Would groups like this help overcome that dullness? We’ll never know until we try.
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A colleague of mine (Lisa Presley, who’s sitting in the first class cabin of NWA flight 623 to Albuquerque, New Mexico at this very moment…while my work partner Nancy Heege and I are with the huddled masses back in Economy) likes to remind us that the hymn “Spirit of Life” was intended by its composer, Carolyn McDade, to be sung slowly…like a prayer. I mention this because “Spirit of Life” is such a favorite among UUs—probably for that very reason. It’s a prayer for folks who usually don’t pray.

And some sort of prayer life is important for the kind of spiritual growth I’ve been blogging about the last few days—especially for youth. Why? Well, here’s what the Youth Spirituality & Ministry Project says about prayer as one of the seven components of a contemplative youth ministry:

We practice and teach many forms of prayer but are particularly committed to regular periods of contemplative prayer in order to be healed, inspired and guided by the power of the Holy Spirit. Contemplative prayer invites us to attend to God's mystical presence dwelling silently within the depths of our hearts opening our whole being to ongoing conversion and freeing us for an ever-deepening awareness of that Presence in all persons, things, and events of our lives.

I like the reference to “ongoing conversion,” or as UU minister Rob Hardies puts it being “born again...and again...and again.” I’m thinking that a good way for UUs to approach this practice is to consider the prayerful qualities of “Spirit of Life,” then apply those qualities to regular moments of quiet and reflection, where we open ourselves to the presence of the spirit of life and the promptings of the power of love. Are our youth ready for this kind of openness to “that which is beyond knowledge”? Are we? We’d better be if we’re serious about making spiritual growth a genuine outcome of the Consultation on Ministry To and With Youth (as well as seeing the vision of the lifespan faith development come true).
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That's the title of an article in today's Washington Post, and it raises a question that I think congregations need to answer, especially if we think in terms providing "a youth ministry the meets the spiritual needs of youth and increases the spiritual depth of our congregations" (to quote one of the desired outcomes of the UUA's Consultation on Ministry To and With Youth). Consider these opening paragraphs from the Post's article:

It's homework time and 17-year-old Megan Casady of Silver Spring is ready to study.

She heads down to the basement, turns on MTV and boots up her computer. Over the next half hour, Megan will send about a dozen instant messages discussing the potential for a midweek snow day. She'll take at least one cellphone call, fire off a couple of text messages, scan Weather.com, volunteer to help with a campus cleanup day at James Hubert Blake High School where she is a senior, post some comments on a friend's Facebook page and check out the new pom squad pictures another friend has posted on hers.

In between, she'll define "descent with modification" and explain how "the tree analogy represents the evolutionary relationship of creatures" on a worksheet for her AP biology class.

Call it multitasking homework, Generation 'Net style.

I can see one cost to this multitasking: taking the time necessary to develop a spiritual practice. If we're going to achieve the desired outcome of "a youth ministry the meets the spiritual needs of youth," we'll all need to stop for a moment to catch our collective breath, over and over again. And that's what the first of the seven principles of contemplative ministry defined by the Youth Ministry & Spiritualy Project comes it. Here's what YMSP charter says about Sabbath:

A contemplative approach to youth ministry is grounded in a Christian community committed to the sacred balance between work and rest. Just as Jesus led a life of simplicity with times for rest, solitude and silence (Mt 14:22-23), we also are committed to helping Christian communities find rest and balance in a hyperactive culture. A life that honors Sabbath rest helps us to be more in touch with our heart and soul, more aware of the Spirit of God and more available for relationships of love. Youth blossom in the midst of adults who know how to savor life through a Sabbath rhythm of rest, work and play. Companions of the Project seek to maintain this simplicity and sacred balance in their own lives and ministry.

Okay, so replace "Christian" with "Unitarian Universalist," "God" with "Life," and "Jesus" with "Thoreau." Sound like something that could apply to UUs? I think so. Not only would it help meet the spiritual needs of our youth, attending to Sabbath time and Sabbath mind could increase the spiritual depth of our congregations as well.
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I’m flying to Columbus, Ohio right now to co-facilitate another district-level conversation on ministry to and with youth—the second one this month. Not that I’m complaining. I really appreciate the opportunity to be part of this work, and I hope that my experience will be helpful when the time comes for Prairie Star to hold its conversation. When would that be, you ask? Why April 14, 2007 as part of the Annual Conference in Minneapolis. Participants need to be registered for the conference, so if you’re interested in being part of the conversation, please download an Annual Conference registration form and brochure at www.psduua.org. There’s scholarship money for youth to attend, and there’s even the possibility of helping adults interested in attending the conversation pay for the conference registration fee…send me an e-mail at either plund@psduua.org or psdlund@earthlink.net and I’ll send you the details.

There are several desired outcomes for the whole Consultation on Ministry To and With Youth process:

More than just a one-size-fits-all youth ministry—a youth ministry that is robust, flexible, and diverse
Denominational youth work that focuses on serving local congregations
Mutually respectful and empowering relationships between youth and adults
Anti-racism and anti-oppression work infused within every part of youth ministry, with a recognition that there is not one "right" way of doing the work—providing a forum for youth identity development and institutional change
A youth ministry the meets the spiritual needs of youth and increases the spiritual depth of our congregations
Effective communication within, between, and among all areas of the Association.

If you looked at my last post, you’ll know that I’m especially interested in doing a better job of meeting the spiritual needs of our youth, and I’m really quite intrigued by the idea of youth ministry being a catalyst for increasing the overall spiritual depth in our congregations. So with your indulgence, I’d like to use my next few posts to blog specifically about that. My next entry, then, will be about then need for a youth ministry that emphasizes the notion of Sabbath time.
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"...on an open sea, no direction, and no one to lead." Those are some lyrics from "New Resolution," a song by Heartless Bastards, one of my favorite bands (click here to learn more about the band and download some songs for free!). I think these words apply to this post. You be the judge....

Being part of the UUA’s Consultation on Ministry To and With Youth (as both a co-facilitator for two district gatherings and as host for the Prairie Star District gathering) has caused me to do some reflecting on what my experience with youth ministry was like. My family attended a Methodist church when I was growing up, and we went fairly regularly on Sundays because my dad was the choir director. I was pretty much involved in Sunday school and the middle school youth group (and the youth choir, of course) until I was around 14 or 15. That’s when my parents’ marriage fell apart, and I felt that the church had nothing to offer me (breaking up with a girlfriend who attended the same church didn’t help, either). The group that had the least to offer me, or so I thought, was the youth group. I had all the peer-to-peer support I needed from my friends outside of the church, and the youth minister seemed to be more of an activities director than a spiritual guide.

And that, I think, is what I really needed then—a spiritual guide. So here’s where the current consultation process fits in. There’s a lot of talk about the need for a greater emphasis on spirituality in our youth ministry, which is fantastic. But spirituality is, not surprisingly, a pretty slippery concept for adult UUs, so I’m wondering what sort of spiritual direction we’ll be cobbling together for our youth once the consultation is over. My fear is that we’ll probably put a lot of energy into refining the same sort of collective spirituality our youth ministry has relied on all these years and not do much to develop resources for individual spiritual growth. What we really need, I believe, is some intense training for capable, committed youth advisors to become spiritual directors for our youth. (We also need for our parish ministers to take more responsibility for the spiritual growth and faith development of our youth…but that’s another post.)

Here’s something to consider: a UU version of The Youth Ministry & Spirituality Project. Take a look at this site and see what you think. Look especially at the Practices & Processes section. I wish there had been someone around when I was a youth to give this sort of spiritual guidance. Of course, if there had been, I might still be a Methodist!

Way back in 1999, Diane Miller, who was the head of the UUA's Ministry Department, reported that "Something remarkable has happened. We have reached a point in our active ministry where our movement is being served and led by essentially equal numbers of women and men." The specific numbers, as of March 25, 1999, were: 853 ministers actively engaged in ministry, 431 women and 422 men. According to the UUA Board of Trustees Report from that year, "This is without precedent in church history, a major transformation in our time."

As I recall, this was big, big news--it was even covered in the New York Times. But like the old farmer in the Taoist story, when people say, "How wonderful!" I reply, "Maybe." Why? Because according to a recent survey of congregational life in the United States, one of the major challenges U.S. congregations face is

There are fewer men in worship than women--61% of worshipers are women. There are fewer men than women in the pews in every age category. There are fewer men than women across all life stages (singles, parents, those who are widowed, etc.).

And there are fewer men than women in the pulpits in our Unitarian Universalist congregations. What I'd like to bring up here is the possibility that an Association led primarily by women may have a hard time attracting men, something that should concern those of us who are interested in growth. As Chance Hunter recently reported in his excellent blog Open the Doors, one of main characteristics of growing congregations is that they "Attract a larger proportion of men, who tend to be less religiously active." I'm not sure what to do about this, but I have a feeling that something needs to be done.

I'll certainly be writing more about this in the future, but in the meantime, if you'd care to share, let me know if your congregation is doing anything to deliberately attract men. And just for kicks, check out the Men's Basic Training Day at Mars Hill Church in the Seattle area.
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I was going to title this "Thich Nhat Hanh Speaks from Beyond the Grave" in hopes of having a few stray surfers check out this post (you know, "Huh? I thought Thich Nhat Hanh was still alive!"). Don't worry. He is, indeed, still alive...Wikipedia says so, so it must be true. But I did run across this timely advice from him in his 1995 classic Living Buddha, Living Christ. It's from the chapter entitled "For a Future to Be Possible," and it goes like this:

Many of our young people are uprooted. They no longer believe in the traditions of their parents and grandparents, and they have not found anything else to replace them. Spiritual leaders need to address this very real issue, but most simply do not know what to do. They have not been able to transmit the deepest values of their traditions, perhaps because they themselves have not fully understood or experienced them.

And in the closing words of the same chapter, he offers this advice about ministering to youth:

For a future to be possible, I urge you to study and practice the best values of your religious tradition and to share them with young people in ways they can understand.

So here's how I interpret these words in light of the current youth consultation process: We have not been able to transmit the deepest values of our tradition because we ourselves have not fully understood or experienced them. Hence the perpetual online hand wringing about whether or not we even have any core beliefs. I think we do, but it seems that many (most?) Unitarian Universalists don't fully understand or experience them.

How, then, are we supposed to share our deepest values with young people in ways they can understand when A.) We don't understand them ourselves, and B.) The spiritual leaders of our association (read ordained clergy) are, for the most part, AWOL from the consultation process? Just asking.
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I have to say that yesterday’s closing worship for the RE-Focus on the Family conference was one of the best I’ve experienced for this sort of event. Jennifer Nichols-Payne (my colleague in the Southwest Conference) and I put together a nicely balanced service celebrating families and connections called “Ordinary Miracles.” Some of the highlights:

Music from Singing the Journey, the new UUA hymnal supplement, including “We Are” (#1051), “When I Am Frightened” (#1012), and “Meditation of Breathing” (#1009).
A terrific reading from Meg Barnhouse called “Be There.”
An opportunity to experience a sacred moment based on an exercise by Edwin C. Lynn from Everyday Spiritual Practice.

I was pretty much responsible for “The Sacred Moment” moment, and I heard from several of the participants that it was a very successful exercise. Here’s a quick run down of what we did: We explained the six “S” components of Lynn’s “Sacred Moment” (Sight, Sky, Stance, Sound, Sense, and Smell), then we learned to sing the Meditation on Breathing—all three parts (When I breathe in, I’ll breathe in peace…. When I breathe out, I’ll breathe out love, etc.); finally, we went outside and wandered around the Briarwood Retreat Center in Argyle, Texas, each of us trying to be mindful of what we saw, how the sky looked, how it felt to be held by gravity to the Earth, what we heard, what we felt on our skin, and what we smelled. And when it was time to return to the worship area, Jennifer and I began singing “Meditation on Breathing,” slowly gathering the participants as we made our way back to the dining hall.

I’m particularly pleased with how it went because I’m trying to take the “spiritual guide” role of ministry a little more seriously. And I can honestly say to anyone interested in making a connection to the transcendent that spending 10 or 15 minutes in nature keeping Lynn’s six “S” elements in mind is one of the best ways to practice mindfulness. One last note: as I was passing a fellow participant during the exercise, I put my palms together in front of my chest and gave her a slight bow and silently said “Namaste” in my heart. I was surprised by how natural the impulse was. I think that after spending a few minutes experiencing nature as a sacred place, saluting the sacred within a fellow human being only made sense, spiritually.

I sort of lost my cool yesterday when giving my presentation on ministering to families. It happened just as I finished reading a couple of “Success Stories” from the Roehlkepartain’s book Embracing Parents: How Your Congregation Can Strengthen Families. As you can see, both of these stories involve the internet:

Making Life Easier for Busy Parents Parents at old River Terrace United Methodist Church in Channelview, Texas, never have to worry about what to cook for dinner (or breakfast or lunch). The congregation publishes easy-to-make, affordable recipes for busy parents on its website. Parents can quickly find a recipe (along with a color photo to entice them to try it) and also submit their favorite recipes to be posted on the website. As parents cook, they can download coloring pages, mazes, games, and crafts for their kids to do. (The congregation also has these on their family fun website.) Kids interested in cooking can try the recipes posted just for them.
Parenting Resources to Read and Discuss Faith Baptist Church in Grayslake, Illinois, posts Christian parenting books on its website. Listed in the “parents’ library” are six current books parents can choose from. Each book has its cover pictured and includes explanatory paragraph about the book.

As soon as I finished reading the second one, a participant questioned the assumption that everyone was connected to the internet or could afford to pay for the gas to drive to the library to use a computer. I have to confess that I “over responded” (i.e., lost my cool) because I really am a bit weary of congregations finding excuses to not do things—like offering resources over the internet—because there might be someone out there who doesn’t quite fit into a particular category. I mean it’s one thing when we're talking about excluding people with different abilities or sexual/affectional orientations or racial/cultural backgrounds. But to not use the internet as a resource (both for outreach and for ministering to congregants) because someone may not be connected to the internet seems to be a case of postulating an injustice that may not really be there.

Granted, the information gap is something that we need to address. But I would rather err on the side of advocating for universal access to the internet (and affordable computers for all families) than limiting the extent of our web presence because someone, somewhere may not be able to afford to be online (which is what I discussed with the person who raised the concern when we were able to have a private conversation after the presentation).
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I’m starting today’s RE-Focus on the Family presentation with a personal note on why I’m passionate about family ministry, and I’d like to share it with you here….

My family of origin pretty much disintegrated when I was a teenager, and the fairly liberal Methodist congregation we attended in the ‘70s did absolutely nothing to help. Nada. Zilch. No one checked in with us children to see how we were doing. The pastors didn’t offer any counseling for my parents (at least none that I was aware of). And—surprise—when my parents finally divorced and my father quit being the choir director at the Methodist church and took a job at the Presbyterian church, and when my mother became more and more involved in a nondenominational, charismatic-type of Christianity, my brothers and my sister and I pretty much had to fend for ourselves, spirituality-wise. (We had to fend for ourselves in other ways, too, but looking back on it, the spiritual crisis was the one that needed attending to the most.)

What this means is I have some firsthand experience with the aftereffects of being involved with a congregation that didn’t offer any real family ministry to speak of. And I’m not alone. It seems that there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of adults like me whose mainstream Protestant congregations failed to help them when their parents divorced 30 or so years ago. And guess what? Conservative and Evangelical congregations are now offering specific ministries to people like me (check this segment out from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly). What’s more, they’re also ministering to the children in their congregations whose parents are getting divorced now—presumably so these children won’t end up like me (and all those other adult children of neglectful mainstream Protestant congregations): wounded and distrusting of organized religion—a state that took me about 20 years to get over. (Maybe I’m still not over it, which would explain why I’m a UU!)

So when I look around at our liberal religious congregations and see the meager family ministries we offer, I’m sad and angry. And I want to do something about it. So I preach and do workshops and write blog posts. And I wonder where are the programs that would help me today if I were a child or youth whose family was falling apart?
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I’m on a plane to Dallas/Fort Worth at the moment, working on the presentation I’ll be giving tomorrow at the RE-Focus on the Family conference. The message I really want to make sure to cover in this post has to do with last part of my family ministry trinity of relationships, community, and values. I’ve written about values here in the past, but that was before I took a vow to limit the length of my posts. So here’s the skinny on values.

If we’re unable to clearly articulate the values we share in our communities of faith, then we’re probably not offering a comprehensible message to families looking for a spiritual home. Our Principles and Purposes are an excellent example of limited comprehensibility. We know what we mean when we say things like “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part” or “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” but for an outsider, these phrases may be seen as more evidence that Unitarian Universalists are just a bunch of over-educated elitists.

How, then, do we make our message clearer? By grounding it in the language of our shared values. So at the risk of sounding like an over-educated elitist, I’d like to suggest that we do more “collective values clarification” or CVC for short (just kidding). Truth is, identifying our shared values is a relatively easy process, and it can even be fun. Here’s one I’ve done repeatedly and successfully. Gather the people. Show them a list of values (I use the 21 values George Lakoff mentions in his book Moral Politics). Give the people multiple votes to identify their top three values. Tally the votes. Take the top six or so values and use them in all of your congregation’s promotional material—welcoming brochures, websites, descriptions of religious education classes (for children, youth and adults), etc. Do a sermon series on them. Teach them to your children. Design small group ministry plans around them. Incorporate them into your shared spiritual practices. Use them to guide your social justice activities. You can even build your mission and vision statements around them.

For extra credit, you can transform your values into a tasty little slogan, something like, “We need not think alike to love alike.” It worked for Francis David!
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Supporting children in our homes is even more important than supporting them in our congregations. After all, if a child is going to learn to “feel at home in the universe,” he or she needs to feel at home, er, at home. Which is why supporting the parents of the children in our communities of faith is the next priority for a progressive family ministry program. How do we do this? Truth is, it’s fairly easy. In Embracing Parents: How Your Congregation Can Strengthen Families, by Jolene and Eugene Roehlkepartain (a book I’ve mentioned here before), the authors share the results of a poll of 1005 parents in the United States. Here’s what they found:

Most parents surveyed are going alone.
Many parents interviewed lack a strong relationship with a spouse or a partner.
A majority of parents surveyed feel successful as parents most of the time.
Most parents polled face ongoing challenges.
Many things these parents say would help them as parents are easy things others can do.

I’d like to offer an example of “an easy thing others can do” not from the book, but from a congregation here in Prairie Star: Unity Church-Unitarian. Check out this notice from the latest issue of the CommUnity newsletter:

Unity Nights Out
To help foster friendships among Unity adults, the Ministry with Children and Youth department is sponsoring a series of monthly “nights out” by providing two hours of free childcare to parents: our only stipulation is that adults take advantage of this opportunity to go to dinner, coffee or an event with other adults from Unity Church.

This is a perfect example of how supporting children means support parents—especially supporting the adult relationships parents need (with their partners and with others) to stay…well, to stay sane. For the workshop I’m doing this Saturday, I’ll offer more examples from the book. But as you can see, little things like monthly nights out are easy to do.
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I’ve been thinking about the word connected lately. It seems like almost every book I’ve been reading recently either has it in the title or the subtitle. From what I can gather, people are using it in one of two ways: human connections or technological connections. I’m beginning to think that a truly relevant congregation is going to have to be adept at both kinds of connections. Hence my title for this post, “The Connected Congregation.”

Today I want to focus on the human connections, especially how they fit into my ideas about progressive family ministry. As I mentioned previously, if family ministry means that congregations need to attend to relationships, community, and values, then community is the best place to start. And if we think first of what our children need, connected community is what we need to build. Here, then, are the 10 characteristics of a connected (authoritative) community as presented in the Hardwired to Connect report:

It is a social institution that includes children and youth.
It treats children as ends in themselves.
It is warm and nurturing.
It establishes clear limits and expectations.
The core of its work is performed largely by non-specialists.
It is multi-generational.
It has a long-term focus.
It reflects and transmits a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person.
It encourages spiritual and religious development.
It is philosophically oriented to the equal dignity of all persons and to the principle of love of neighbor.

If congregations really want to attend to the needs of families, we must begin with the needs of children—and building connected communities is the best place to start.

Relationships. Community. Values. Which of these three important areas of liberal religious family ministry should be the place for us—lay and ordained, professional and volunteer religious leaders—to start? I think it would be great if we all felt free to start with any one of them. Is your congregation preparing to offer more programs for couples, parents, teens, and elders? If so, keep working to make those programs the best they can possibly be. Is your congregation undergoing a visioning process which includes clarifying your shared values? Terrific! Unless you can clearly articulate (over and over and over again) what you collectively value most, progressive families searching for a spiritual home won’t have the opportunity up front to know what they’re getting into by becoming part of your community of faith. Building community, however, is the one place where every congregation can always begin to make substantial changes that positively affect the experience spiritual progressive families have of our Unitarian Universalist fellowships, societies, and congregations.

I hope this isn’t an example of excessive use of a quotation in a blog (surely there must be some sort of referee signal for that…and by the way, as a Hoosier who grew up 90 minutes from Chicago, last Sunday’s Super Bowl was a win/win situation for me! I’m glad the Colts won though: the Dungy/Manning storyline was more compelling). But I’d like to share a long passage from Diana Garland which gets to the heart of why I think building connected community is the place where most of us should start when it comes to family ministry:

The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” became a political slogan pointing to the importance of community for children, but it does not quite go far enough. All persons, both children and adults, need community. Because children are dependent on others for their survival, their vulnerability in the absence of community is more apparent. As James Garbarino has pointed out, children are like the canaries miners used to take with them into mine shafts. Canaries are particularly sensitive to poisonous gasses, and if they succumbed, the miners knew the environment was dangerous. Like canaries in mine shafts without adequate fresh air, children “succumb” without adequate communities of nurture and support. Adults, too, however, need to live in community. Some seem to need community more than others, but even self-sufficient adults seek the company of others and need a community when they become ill, injured, or threatened.

If we start with community, the rest will follow for everyone: children, youth, and adults! Tomorrow, I'll take a look at what's really involved in ministering to children.
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So, this has been a pretty busy couple of weeks for me, and the rest of February is going to be just as busy. But you wouldn’t have known that from my last few posts. Filling you in a bit more on my professional comings and goings is one of the changes I plan on making here as I transform “Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie” into the work-related blog it was originally intended to be. After all, the tag line says this blog is about answering the question: “So, just what does the Lifespan Program Director of the Prairie Star District do?” The answer for this and the last few weeks: I was in Sioux Falls, SD the last weekend in January to do a workshop and preach; I was just in New York City this past weekend, doing the Metro New York District’s Youth Conversation with UUA Youth Ministry Associate extraordinaire Beth Dana at a church we both worked at in previous lives—the Community Church of New York; and I’m currently preparing to make a presentation next Saturday on liberal religious family ministry in Texas (actually, the truth is I’m currently on a plane flying back to Saint Paul from New York, but I’m not going to post this until tomorrow).

Here, then, is what I’d like to do: I want to offer you a few stray thoughts on my upcoming presentation, and I’d like for those of you who are interested and willing to help out to give me a little feedback. Okay? As I noted yesterday, I promise to be much more attentive to your comments, both in responding here to what you say and in using your advice to help me prepare my presentations (and do the other parts of my job, too!). Thanks. I plan on starting the presentation with what I believe are the three main components of liberal religious family ministry: relationships, community, and values. Three nice abstract nouns. Then I want to clarify a little bit by adding some modifiers: family (or primary group) relationships, connected (or authoritative) community, and progressive (or liberal) values. Then, to help us move from theory into practice, some strong verbs to help us make these abstract concepts concrete: nurturing family relationships, building connected community, and sharing progressive values.

Relationships, community, and values—these are the things I believe spiritual progressive families are looking for when they come to our congregations. And unless we are aware of these needs and be intentional about what we offer in response to these needs, we’re not doing everything we can be make each of our communities of faith a spiritual home for progressive families. The rest of the presentation (which I’ll blog more about tomorrow as well as the rest of the week) will be about creating and maintaining programs that help us nurture relationships, build community, and share our values. So, if you wouldn’t mind helping me out a bit, please feel free to offer your thoughts on what I’ve proposed so far. Thanks!
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More and more these days, I like to begin my sermons with a confession. Usually it’s something about how I’m basically lazy and write only one sermon a quarter and preach it at five or six different congregations and that this saves me a lot of time and energy. And usually that gets a bit of a laugh, which is the reason I begin that way. Then I get to the serious part: I write only one sermon a quarter because I believe that what I have to say to 100 people in New Orleans, or 50 people in Sioux Falls, or 400 people in St. Paul—no matter what size the congregation I’m standing before is—I believe that what I have to say should basically be the same thing. Liberal religious congregations need to become real communities of faith. Our children, youth, and—yes—even our adults, need real community in their lives these days. And unless we make this a priority, unless we put it darn near the top of the list of reasons for our existence as Unitarian Univeralist congregations, we are letting people down. We’re letting down the people who are already part of our congregations, and we’re letting down the (literally) hundreds of thousands of people in this country who could benefit from making a liberal religious community of faith a part of their lives.

I’m writing this in today’s post because I’d like to start this week off with a similar sort of confession. This blog has been up and running for almost three years now, and I’ve failed to realize that one of the really great things about blogging is that it can help us build genuine community as well. This revelation comes after reading Brian (Leave It Behind) Bailey’s terrific new book The Blogging Church: Sharing the Story of Your Church Through Blogs. I read Brian’s book because I knew something was missing from my blogging experience, and The Blogging Church has opened my eyes to what that missing thing might be. So to all of the people who’ve taken the time to comment on one of my posts, I’m sorry if I haven’t connected with you in response to your gracious attempts to engage me in a conversation. And to those bloggers who have commented on one of my posts on their blogs, only to be responded to with a stone cold silence on my part, I’m sorry, too.

After reading Brian’s book, I’ve decided to turn a new page in my blogging life—or whatever the appropriate cyber-metaphor should be. Look for "Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie" to move sometime in the next few months to a new location on the Prairie Star District’s website, where I hope it will become more of a professional blog to let folks in PSD know what I’m up to as their lifespan program director. And within the next few weeks, look for a link here to a new blog I’m starting, one dedicated to helping progressive communities of faith (Unitarian Universalist, Christian, Ethical Culture, Jewish, etc.) become more attentive to the needs of spiritual progressive families. In the meantime, I’ll be posting each day this week as I prepare for a conference presentation I’m doing in Texas called RE-Focus on the Family. So once again, my apologies for being an unattentive blogger. I truly have appreciated all of the comments (both here and on other blogs) readers have made. I promise to take you all much more seriously in the future. After all, isn’t having our thoughts and opinions be taken seriously one of the best things the blogging community does?
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