Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie

Now that I'm back from this year's General Assembly in Fort Worth, I thought I'd post some of the resources Mary Higgins (district executive of the UUA's Florida District) and I mentioned during our two-part workshop on "Sharing Our Values in Our Families." This week I'll stick to part one. (By the way, you can watch a streaming video of the workshop at the GA05 streaming page--you'll need a RealPlayer to view it).

Mary and I started the workshop with a discussion of what makes liberal religious family values different from conservative and fundamentalist family values. The main difference, we believe, is one of inclusivity. Rather than defining family in a way that values only those families that are comprised of one man and one women with children related by birth or adoption, liberal religious values affirm and promote the worth and dignity of all family formations whose members "commit to be family for one another," to use Diana Garland's definition.

With that as our foundation, we talked about what kind of values we have in our Unitarian Universalist tradition that support this inclusive definition of family. From the Unitarian side of the family we suggested the values of freedom, reason, and tolerance, and from the Universalist side of the family, we offered faith, hope, and love. We also suggested that the first, fourth, and seventh principles of our association strengthen and support these values:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part

Freedom to love whom we choose, respect of each one another in our families, supporting one another as we search for meaning in our lives, affirming the dignity of all people and all families: these values are rooted in our liberal religious heritage, and these are some of the values we seek to share in our families.

The very best way to pass along values, Mary and I suggested, was through stories, specifically, our own faith stories. We offered a couple of stories from our own lives as examples, and then asked the participants to share some of their stories with each other. After ten minutes or so, we asked if there were any volunteers who would like to tell the larger group about their story. The response was amazing! Over the years I've learned that it's not difficult at all to get folks to tell a story or two about their families. And some of the most powerful stories are the ones where someone tells how an event in their family helped them find meaning in life.

A fun way to help parents learn to tell their faith stories is The Un-Class, developed by Liz Jones. It's a great resource for a parenting class in a congregation or for small group family ministry. Another good resource should be coming on line soon: Pat Hoertdoerfer--who has just retired after many years of service to the UUA--has collected the family faith stories of the members of the Family Matters Task Force. As soon as their online, I'll add a link to this post. In the meantime, check out The Un-Class!
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Really, I don't. But something from an article of his entitled "Keys to a Family-Friendly Church" caught my eye. Now we all know that Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, has a pretty limited view when it comes to what constitutes a family, and as you'll probably guess from the following quote, he also has some pretty firm beliefs about gender roles. However, I think he's making an important point here about the role ministers play when it comes to modeling healthy family relationships. Here's what Dobson says:

I once conducted a poll on our radio program, asking people if they felt their churches were supportive of families. We received 1,440 responses: 61 percent were decidedly positive, while 39 percent tended to be negative.

The first group of respondents focused on the pastor himself. People said, "He teaches us about the importance of families." "He is a family-oriented man." "He models good fathering for the men of the church." "He obviously loves his wife."

There's nothing quite so forceful as a pastor getting up in the pulpit and stating, "You won't be able to find me on Mondays or Saturdays, [or whatever day] unless there's been an absolute emergency. I will not be here; my home phone will ring, and no one will answer it. What I'm saying to you is 'Go thou and do likewise.' No one should work seven days a week."

Of course Unitarian Universalists are miles ahead of most denominations when it comes to the number of women ministers in congregations. And our definition of family is much broader than anything Dobson could imagine. But his basic point, that it's the minister who really set the tone for just how family friendly a congregation is perceived, is an important one.

This really isn't a no-brainer for UUs, however. Too often congregations have a get-the-most-for-your-money attitude toward ministers. (And I speak from experience here--I was searching for a pulpit before I was hired by Prairie Star, and I was really aghast at how much work some congregations expected for very little money). And many of the lay leaders in our congregations come from government, business, or academia, where budget cuts and downsizing are routine. Expecting a minister to put in as much time as it takes to get the job done is really just a reflection of the larger culture, isn't it? Problem is, 1.) the work is never done, and 2.) since when is religion supposed to reflect the attitudes of the larger culture?

It's not just ministers' families, either. As Bill Doherty noted in his UU World article "Let's Take Back our Time," while "we expect our ministers to work impossible hours, to come to every committee meeting, and to be available to us off-hours," it is really all of us who "are in the belly of this beast."

We are a largely middle- to upper-middle-class denomination, and our social class group leads the way in the social pathologies of overwork and overscheduling. We work hard and achieve much in our personal lives. We want the best of the best for our children. In our congregations, we lionize those who give the most time to the church, who serve on multiple committees, who spend their evenings and weekends in the service of the community.

In order for our congregations to become more family friendly, our congregants need to start hearing from the pulpit that it's okay to stop overworking and overscheduling and start making time for things that really matter in life, like our relationships with family and friends and even the divine. If you're looking for some tips on where to start, check out Bill Doherty's strategies for reclaiming your family time.
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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here that one of the concerns I've heard around promoting lifespan faith development is how to use language effectively. All three of these words--lifespan, faith, and development--can be useful as we transform how religious education is done in our congregations. They're also prime candidates for ending up on a Unitarian Universalist buzzword bingo card. Just make a table of three rows and three columns and fill in the words: lifespan, faith, development; lifelong, growth, learning; religious, education, etc. Now, say something like, "In order to facilitate a collaborative value-oriented culture of learning, we need our key religious players to leverage their solutions across the lifespan." BINGO! Or you could be really UU and go with acronyms: LFD, RGL, ARE, YRUU, YAC, YAN, DRE, OWL, etc. Yikes! So how do we keep the language of faith development fresh and meaningful? Two suggestions.

First, avoid acronyms. Spell it out. When I first started as a religious educator it took me months to figure out the UU alphabet soup. How was I supposed to know the difference between the YRUU (Young Religious Unitarian Unversalists) group and YUUMS (Young Religious UU Middle Schoolers) group? And then I had to figure out what this AYS (About Your Sexuality) thing was that the YUUMS were doing as part of their COA (Coming of Age). Fortunately, I was getting paid to do this, so I stuck around. Still, I don't remember asking for things to be spelled out because I didn't want to appear clueless, even though I was. No matter what words we use to describe our programs--learning, education, or development--let's make sure people know what it is we're talking about.

Second, make sure we know why we are doing what we do. I mean, why do we even have religious education programs in our congregations? It's not just because Rule 3.3.5. of the Rules of the Unitarian Universalist Association states that "Member congregations shall project and embark upon a balanced program of religious activity including adult worship and/or discussion and when feasible establishment of a church school in the Unitarian Universalist tradition." Congregations that do offer lifespan faith development programming do so for very specific reasons. And everyone--friends, members, and (especially) visitors--deserves to know what those reasons are. Often times those reasons can be found in the congregation's mission statement. Here's what Diana Butler Bass says about the importance of mission statements for guiding adult religious education in the Alban Institute publication "Process, Not Program":

The mission statement is a good place to start learning about the congregation and helping them to become a learning community. In recent decades, many churches have adopted mission statements and posted them on bulletins and Web sites. Not ends in themselves, mission statements serve as platforms of common vision, cornerstones of congregational identity and purpose. They remind congregations of their identity, priorities, and vocation.

Congregational identity and purpose...I like that. No matter what we call it--lifespan faith development, lifelong growth and learning, religious education for all ages--it needs to be grounding in the each congregation's unique mission. Clearly articulating how education is linked to mission is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the best ways to keep lifespan programs fresh and meaningful.
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For some time now--several years, at least--I've had two distinct notions elbowing one another in my mind. One is Olympia Brown's call to "stand by this faith"; the other is Dietrich Bonhoeffer's concept of "cheap grace." And to be honest, when these two start tussling in my head, I begin to feel it in my body--my heart gets heavy and my stomach begins to flutter. Usually when I feel this way, I'm getting close to something of major importance in my life. And I'm pretty sure that is, indeed, important. I'm looking for an answer to this question: Is Unitarian Universalist truly a faith worth working for and sacrificing for (as Brown puts it), or is it merely a liberal religious panacea, one that lets us be comforted and rest assured in our worldliness (to use Bonhoeffer's words)?

Now by worldiness, I mean an uncritical acceptance of all things secular, that the secular world view--as verified by scientific method and emperical evidence--gives us sufficient information to make decisions about what matters most in our lives, as individuals and as a community. I'm thinking here of the original Humanist Manifesto--the seventh assertion, to be specific: "The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained." It seems to me that for a lot of liberal religious folk, this means that the secular has superceded the sacred, and not the other way around. It's the triumph of the worldview Wallace Stevens writes about in his poem "Sunday Morning," where

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

It's a worldview that says staying home on Sunday morning and reading the New York Times is just fine because the New York Times, in all it's multi-sectioned glory, contains everything we need to know in order to lead a sane, sensible, well-informed life. And if you'd rather wait to read the paper until Sunday afternoon because the local Unitarian Universalist congregation is offering an interesting program on water conservation initiatives in Cupcake County, then that's okay, too.

So where's the faith worth working for and sacrificing for here? Or is that the sacrifice--giving up our Sunday mornings? Of course Unitarian Universalism offers much, much more that that. But does it really get anywhere near the kind of "costly grace" that I think Brown's words imply when she says that we "are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost."

Now when Bonhoeffer spoke of "costly grace," he was talking about the traditional Christian view of Christ's sacrifice on the cross (which is what Wallace Stevens is dealing with in his poem, too). Olympia Brown had another kind of cost in mind--but I don't hear much about it in contemporary Unitarian Universalism. In fact, what I'm more likely to hear or read about is just how easy it is to be a UU. For example, Jane Rzepka's recent column in Quest, the publication of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. She presents Unitarian Universalism as a religion that breaks the rules:

Religious Rule Number 1: You have to sign on to a list of beliefs.
How UUs break the rule: We don’t have a list of beliefs—no creed; no dogma.

Religious Rule Number 2: Obey the hierarchy.
How UUs break the rule: We ourselves are the powers that be; there is no hierarchy.

Religious Rule Number 3: You must perform the rituals.
How UUs break the rule: We have no prescribed rituals.

Religious Rule Number 4: You have to believe in God to be religious.
How UUs break the rule: No, you don’t.

Religious Rule Number 5: Your religious beliefs should be based on faith.
How UUs break the rule: Our religious beliefs are based on reason and experience. Faith is optional.

Religious Rule Number 6: Some objects, spaces, and events are inherently sacred.
How UUs break the rule: Nothing—or everything—is inherently sacred.

Religious Rule Number 7: Heresy is bad.
How UUs break the rule: Heresy can be heroic.

Religious Rule Number 8: Religion is not fun.
How UUs break the rule: Religion runs the gamut, and for us the gamut includes fundamental joy, bemusement, and the frequent hearty laugh.

Religious Rule Number 9: Religion is stifling.
How UUs break the rule: Well, we rock.

Now I agree with much of what Rev. Rzepka says here: we don't have a creed, a hierarchy, a set liturgy, or the need to believe in God. Heresy can be heroic and religion can be fun. But...if faith is optional and nothing or everything is sacred, what's the cost?
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