Being a church member is an important way to become established in a community.

People should attend religious services together as a family.

Churches and synagogues play an important role in the moral education of children.

Going to religious services is something you should do if it meets your needs.

An individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independently of any church or synagogue.

most Americans do not encounter religious discourse about what is good, moral, and appropriate in family life solely, or even primarily, through news coverage or base their understandings on the pronouncements of religious elites and activists. People encounter religious ideas about the good family in the sermons and parenting workshops and adult education forums in their local congregations.

In a case study of one mainline Protestant church…. [Penny Long] Marler asks whether the current generation of dual-earner parents will bother to stay with the church once their children are grown, and she raises the question of whether the mainline Protestant decline in membership since the 1960s may be linked to an inability to form a better response to changes in women's roles, work, and family. She also argues that the focus on two-parent families with children stems from a nostalgia for the 1950s and leads to the exclusion of the increasing numbers of single parents, long-term singles, and childless couples in our society.

 

Leaders of mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions share Marler's concerns and trace the problem to the historical development that Margaret Bendroth described in her book Growing Up Protestant. From the 1960s on, mainline Protestant denominations have poured energy into developing new ministries around more valued "public" outreach--peace, justice, and poverty ministries. A focus on family ministry is often seen as directly competing with more "public" forms of outreach for members' time, money, and effort. And this, some argue, has contributed to the decline of mainline Protestantism. Religious leaders and sympathetic academics from these traditions have called for members and leaders of mainstream religious groups to rejoin the public dialogue on family issues, which has largely been ceded to evangelical Protestants, who see the family as a central focus of mission, not a distraction from more important goals or activities.

Edgell shows that mothers and fathers seek involvement in congregations for different reasons. Men tend to think of congregations as social support structures, and to get involved as a means of participating in the lives of their children. Women, by contrast, are more often motivated by the quest for religious experience, and can adapt more readily to pluralist ideas about family structure. This, Edgell concludes, may explain the attraction of men to more conservative congregations, and women to nontraditional religious groups.

Four years ago, I found myself going north from Hyde Park on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive at about seven o’clock in the evening, heading for an office in a building near the Hancock Center to visit my therapist. I was in my last year of theological school, in the midst of searching for a job that might take me anywhere in the United States, and I was still dealing with the emotional fallout of a divorce that had been finalized just that summer after a long separation. And as I was driving past all of those beautiful tall buildings, all brightly lit against the mid-November night sky, I thought to myself, If fortune tellers really were capable of seeing the future, we’d probably respond to them the way the Trojans did to Cassandra—no one would believe them. So if a fortune teller had told me eight years ago (when I was still living in Bloomington, Indiana) that in four years I’d be heading north on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive for an appointment with a therapist, I would have said, “Yeah, right.”

 

And if I had happened to have stopped by a fortune teller’s on the way home from that therapy session in November four years ago—and believe me, I really don’t visit fortune tellers, this is just a thought experiment—and if that fortune teller would have said to me, “You will be preaching in a small church in Minneapolis at your son’s dedication…his name will be Henry David and he has beautiful red hair…the name of the church is Faith…I see an m…not Methodist, not Mormon…yes, I see it clearly now—Mennonite. And you’ve promised ‘to bring your child up in the nurture of the Lord and the faith community, preparing him to trust God and choose the way of Jesus.’” Well, I don’t what I would have said.

 

But here we are—you, Julia, me—making promises about how we are going to raise this child. And it doesn’t seem strange to me at all, even though I’m a Unitarian Universalist minister who feels very strongly that Unitarian Universalist parents need to intentionally raise their children as Unitarian Universalists. But life is full of surprises and compromises, and Julia and I have decided to raise Henry David as a Mennotarian. And bringing him up to trust God and choose the way of Jesus is a perfectly acceptable, even desirable, promise for me to make. It is, in fact, a blessing for me in many, many ways. One important way has been the opportunity for me to reassess what I believe it means to choose the way of Jesus. And the place I’d like to start with that reassessment is with the name of this church: Faith.

 

Do you what the most popular name for Unitarian Universalist churches is? All Souls. Do you now what the least popular name is? Trinity. (I went to Trinity United Methodist Church in Elkhart, Indiana when I was growing up, by the way). A close second for unpopular names might actually be Faith. As far as I know, there are no Unitarian Universalist congregations with that name because faith is a difficult concept for many UUs. It implies believing in something unseen, unproven. It implies abandoning one’s ability to reason and accepting what some religious authority tells you is true: the Bible is the literal the word of God…the universe was created in seven days…you are totally depraved and there’s only one way to salvation. Many Unitarian Universalists have fled from churches that insisted their adherents believe these things, things that they in good conscience could no longer believe. So they come out of the religious traditions of their youth and join Unitarian Universalist congregations and feel they are done with all that “faith” business.

 

But part of my job as the Lifespan Program Director of the Prairie Star District of the Unitarian Universalist Association is, I believe, to help people come to terms with this word faith. (Truth is, many of my colleagues who hold a comparable position to mine in other districts are called Directors of Lifespan Faith Development, but the word was too controversial for some folks hear in the more Humanist UU Midwest.) So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what this word means, and I believe I’ve found a way to talk about it that helps many of my Unitarian Universalist brothers and sisters understand what faith might mean in their lives. Here’s my favorite quickie definition (it comes from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the great comparative religionist): “Faith at its best has taken the form of a quiet confidence and joy which enables one to feel at home in the universe.” I really like that. “Faith at its best has taken the form of a quiet confidence and joy which enables one to feel at home in the universe.” It’s something that I want for myself…for my family…especially for Henry David. More that anything else, I want him to feel at home in the universe.

 

Which is, I believe, exactly what Jesus son of Mary—Yeshua ben Maryam—found. I truly want Henry David to understand his teachings. And at the heart of those teachings is, indeed, the key to finding yourself at home in the universe. Here’s what Stephen Mitchell says about those teachings in his introduction to The Gospel According to Jesus: “What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost hearts is already present, beyond longing.” Or as the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi put it, “Lo I am with you always means, when you’re looking for god, god is in the look of your eyes.”

 

This is what I want for Henry David, to find that love which is “already present, beyond longing,” to know that god is always already in the look of his eyes. And I believe that choosing the way of Jesus can genuinely lead one to find the love that makes one feel at home in the universe. I believe it is exactly what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “kingdom of God.” Again, here’s how Stephen Mitchell put it:

When Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, he was not prophesying about some easy, danger-free perfection that will someday appear. He was talking about a state of being, a way of living at ease among the joys and sorrows of our world. It is possible, he said, to be as simple and beautiful as the birds of the sky or the lilies of the field, who are always within the eternal Now. This state of being is not something alien or mystical. We don’t need to earn it. It is already ours. Most of us lose it as we grow up and become self-conscious, but it doesn’t disappear forever; it is always there to be reclaimed, though we have to search hard in order to find it…. Not that it is easy for any of us.

And here is where Jesus has a lesson for us.

If we need reminding, we can always sit at the feet of our young children. They, because they haven’t yet developed a firm sense of past and future, accept the infinite abundance of the present with all their hearts, in complete trust. Entering the kingdom of God means feeling, as if we were floating in the womb of the universe, that we are being taken care of, always, at every moment.

So, what is the best way to help Henry David (or any child) understand that he is being taken care of, always, at every moment, by the kind of loving god Jesus found? Well, I’m not sure what the best way is, but I think I know of one very good way: to bring him up in the faith community. Community can’t do it alone, that’s true, but it sure can help. Here’s a little more of what Wilfred Cantwell Smith has to say about faith (and this from an essay by my fellow Unitarian Universalist minister and religious educator, Barry Andrews):

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, author of Faith and Belief, prefers to view faith as something apart from either belief or religion. Belief is the holding of certain ideas. One does not have faith in a concept, he insists; one has faith in the reality about which propositions are fashioned. Nor is faith religion. For Smith, religion represents a cumulative tradition, including scriptures, myths, symbols, ethical teachings, creeds, rituals, and so forth. Faith, as he understands it, is deeper and more personal than religion. While it may be engendered by a religious tradition, “it is a quality of the person and not the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension.”

Mennonite…Unitarian…Mennotarian. A faith tradition—any faith tradition—in and of itself is not going to help Henry David (or you or me for that matter) feel at home in the universe. It’s up to each and every one of us to find that on our own—which is exactly what I believe “working out your salvation” means. But faith community can help, and today Julia and I have promised bring Henry David up in the faith community. And whether it is here at Faith or over in St. Paul at Unity Church-Unitarian, I hope that the “scriptures, myths, symbols, ethical teachings, creeds, rituals, and so forth” of both traditions will help engender in Henry David what Jesus was able to find in his life: the “grace-bestowing, inexhaustible presence of God.”

 

So what would a fortune teller see in Henry David’s future? A stint teaching English to Unitarian villagers in Transylvania? A Study-Service Term in the Dominican Republic building houses with Habitat for Humanity? A wild celebration at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap after the Chicago Cubs win the World Series? I have no idea, of course. Whatever it would be, I’m sure I would hardly believe it. But I know what I wish for him. It’s the same thing I wish for you and me. That among the joys and sorrows of this, our world, our blue boat home floating in the womb of the universe, we find a way to be as simple and beautiful as the birds of the sky or the lilies of the field, to know the love we all long for in our innermost hearts.
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While our religious movement has experienced slow but steady growth from 1982 to 2002, in 2003 and 2004 we did not grow. The figures I present below are UUA statistics excluding Canadians.

• In 2004 our combined adult membership and RE enrollment was 206,134, compared to 209,172 in 2003 and 212, 783 in 2002.
• In 2004, as in 2003, our adult membership grew while our religious education enrollments dropped.
• Adult membership increased to 150,735 or 0.3% (at the low end of the annual growth patterns since 1982). However, religious education enrollments decreased to 55,399, a drop of 1.7%.

For four years in a row I have written in this report that the declines in religious education enrollments should be “a warning signal for our movement.” In my report in 2002 I wrote: “We need to identify the causes of the slowing growth in religious education enrollments. Is it that our adult membership is aging? Is it that we are becoming less successful in attracting young families and single parents? Is it other factors? Most importantly, this indicator likely predicts a decline in adult membership in the near future.” For the third year in a row, I regret to report that, to my knowledge, there has been no serious discussion within our movement about the implications of this regrettable development.

1. Accept George Lakoff's challenge: make raising "empathetic, responsible adults" the priority for the progressive movement.
2. Acknowledge our part in that movement as "spiritual progressives," which means we value service, compassion, community, empathy, responsibility, and fulfillment in life.
3. Understand that our liberal religious institutions, our communities of faith, our congregations offer the kind support to progressive families they can't find anywhere else in society (at least not all in one place): we are intergenerational, we teach values, and we offer programming for a wide variety of ages.
4. Finally, admit to ourselves that we are raising Unitarian Universalists. Although Channing warned us "not to bind [our children] by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions," that doesn't mean we shouldn't teach them the value of our "particular sect or peculiar notions." And that value is in our inclusive pluralism.

[They] have a nurturant form of religion or spirituality, their spiritual experience has to do with their connection to other people and the world, and their spiritual practice has to do with service to other people and to their community. Spiritual progressives span the full range from Catholics and Protestants to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Goddess worshippers, and pagan members of Wicca.

• Congregations are one of the few institutions where children and teenagers have access to an intergenerational group of people.
• Congregations are also places that are more likely to articulate and teach values.
• Congregations provide a wide range of structured activities for children and youth.