The Future of Our Faith: A 50/50 Chance

Let us pray:

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.

It maketh me to wake in green pastures: it leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses.

It restoreth my buzz: it leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction, I will fear no Equal(tm): for thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.

Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of Sleepy Time tea drinkers: thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.

Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the House of Starbucks forever.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that I need to drink more coffee in the morning. I’m talking, like, maybe four of five cups first thing—right away. It’s not that I’m sleepy and need to wake up. It’s that I’m pretty much a low-key sort of guy, even when I’m talking about things that are very important to me. Now there’s nothing wrong with being low-key, but when it comes to preaching, some folks prefer a more *dynamic* presence in the pulpit. And the only way I know to get myself in a dynamic mood is to drink a lot of coffee.

You see, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what lifespan faith development means for our association, our districts, and our congregations, especially the people—children, youth, and adults—in our congregations. And the thoughts I’ve been coming up with seem pretty important…to me, at least. And I’d like to share them in a way the really grabs people’s attention. And for that, I think I need a lot of coffee. So forgive me if I seem a bit jittery, or if I start talking a little to fast. But I’ve just finished my fifth—scratch that…sixth—cup of coffee. Whoo-hoo!

So I have been thinking about lifespan faith development and what it means for Unitarian Universalism, and I’ve been thinking about how to present this in a way that everyone can hear me, even folks who find the word “faith” a little distasteful. (When I spoke at congregation that shall remain nameless a couple of years ago, I was asked during the talkback why I needed to use the word faith. I don’t think I came up with too compelling of an answer. It might have been because I hadn’t completely worked out my thoughts on the concept. Or it might have been because I hadn’t had enough coffee that morning. Either way, I’m bit more prepared this Sunday!) Here then, is what I mean when I say the word faith.

“Faith,” according to religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Faith at its best has taken the form of a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe.” [REPEAT] I like that definition because it resonates with our Unitarian heritage, most notably with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said in his essay “Nature,”

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Having this original relation to the universe—the right to feel at home in the universe on our own terms—is one of the basic premises of our tradition. Faith is a very personal thing according to this definition. But wait! There’s more.

Barry Andrews, Unitarian Universalist minister and religious educator, again using Wilfred Cantwell Smith, takes things a bit further.

[This is Andrews speaking] 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 the 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, [and he’s quoting Smith here] “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 transcendental dimension.

So when I talk about faith, I’m talking about the basic premises that each and every one of us must come up with in order to build the framework through which we experience reality. “Faith at its best has taken the form of a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe.” And here’s where lifespan faith development comes in. While faith is not synonymous with religion, “it may be engendered by a religious tradition.” I’ll say more about this in a moment. First, I’d like to talk a little about why I think the future of our liberal religious tradition depends upon this engendering of faith.

Growth is a pretty hot topic among Unitarian Universalists these days. The theme for last spring’s Prairie Star District Annual Conference and Meeting was “Growing Season.” And a quick search of the UUA website finds over 2550 matches for the word “growth.” There’s “100 Plus Ideas for Membership Growth,” “Planning for Growth and Vitality for Midsize Congregations,” “Programming for Congregational Growth,” “Growth Brings Changes and Lots of Challenges,” “Best Practices for Growth,” “Leadership Practices for Growth,” “Pathways to Growth,” and (my favorite) “What Does Growth Mean?” Why—all of a sudden—all the interest in growth?

It wasn’t too long ago when you could pretty regularly hear that “the influence Unitarian Universalists have on public policy far exceeds our numbers.” As a force for good in the world, we’ve done all right for a religious group that has remained in the neighborhood of 150,000 adult members for the last 40 years or so. In fact, we’ve actually been increasing in adult membership in recent years—between 1985 and 2000, adult membership was up by 10.9%. Not bad when you consider than most of our mainline Protestant cousin denominations have been declining in numbers over the same period. It looks like we’re doing a pretty good job of growing without trying too hard.

So what’s the problem? Why all the emphasis on growth? Well, as UUA Financial Advisor Larry Ladd has pointed out, although our modest growth “compares favorably to the steady declines experienced by mainline Protestant denominations since the mid-to-late 1960s, [it] should be a disappointment to us all because we have so much to offer.” Ladd finds it frustrating that, despite our modest gains, “the proportion of Unitarian Universalists in the U.S. population has stayed constant at .08 percent for [the last] six years.” What this all means is that we’ve really just been treading water since the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists in 1961. But now the water’s rising. And it’s time for us to sink or swim.

Well, maybe sink or swim is putting it a little too bluntly. There’s no danger that Unitarian Universalism is going to disappear anytime soon. Several things would need to happen before that could occur. First, we’d have to quit growing, period. And while there are some indications that our growth rate is declining a bit, we are still growing. Another thing that would have to happen would be a severe financial crisis that would essentially bankrupt the association. We’ve gone through tough times in the past, however, and there’s no reason to think that the UUA is going to run out of money in the foreseeable future. Finally, another merger like the one in the early sixties could radically change the identity of Unitarian Universalism. But given the wariness with which even the most liberal of our liberal religious cousins treat us, that seems highly unlikely.

We’re not at the point yet where we need to start talking like Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose most famous book is entitled Why Christianity Must Change or Die. No, if I were writing a similar book about our religious tradition today, I guess I’d call it, Why Unitarian Universalism Must Grow or Become Irrelevant, because that’s what’s at stake here, my friends. It’s not so much a matter of survival as it is a matter of relevance. We are rapidly becoming a footnote in the history of religion in America. While Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus have see growth rates of 109%, 170%, and 237% in the United States over the last fifteen years or so, the number of Americans who say they are Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Evangelical or other varieties of Protestantism have dropped from 63 percent in 1993 to 52 percent in 2002. Our 150,000 adult members are barely a bump on this changing American religious landscape, which means our traditional growth strategy of waiting for a few stray liberal religious fellow travelers to stumble over us is going to become increasingly ineffective.

Truth is, folks, even if we continue to grow at the same rate we have over the last 10 to 15 years, that .08 percent Larry Ladd spoke of will become smaller and smaller and smaller until we will be an all-but-negligible religious movement. The general population is getting larger, and our feeder system (the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Evangelicals or other varieties of Protestants) is shrinking. In that regard, I’d say we have less than a 50/50 chance of surviving as a force for good in the world. And that is something that I truly do not want to see happen.

Now, it’s probably a little too late to reach the full potential of our combined religious movements. There were some pretty high hopes for us back in the 19^th century. Some say that the Universalist side of the family was the sixth largest denomination in the United States in 1885. (The sixth largest denomination today, by the way, is Pentecostal/Charismatic with almost four and a half million adherents—they’ve experienced a 38% growth rate since the early 1990s). And in 1822 Thomas Jefferson predicted that “there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” He thought Unitarianism fit so well with the ideals of our country that it would become the American religion by the end of the 19^th century.

We certainly aren’t going to ever see that kind of growth for Unitarian Universalism in the 21^st century, nor do we need to. Remember, it’s not do or die—it’s do or become irrelevant. We’re not trying to become one of the largest denominations in the United States, and we’re certainly not out to convert everyone. We just want to remain a presence at the table, to continue to be a force for good in the world. And to do that, we really only need to grow just a little bit more than we have been over the last few years.

At the Prairie Star District Annual Conference and Meeting I mentioned earlier, the Reverend Peter Morales gave the keynote address, and he presented some rather interesting statistics. If we continue to grow at 1% a year (and some folks say that growth rate has even slowed a bit), the UUA in the year 2013 will have 165, 690 adult members. Not a whole lot larger than we are today. If we were to grow by 3.5%, the number would be over 200,000 adult members. If we grew by 5%, we’d be almost 250,000 strong, and if we grew by 6.5%, we would be on our way to 300,000 members. Now, even the best case scenario here is nowhere near being the sixth largest denomination in the United States, nor does it reflect every young person alive today becoming a Unitarian Universalist. But it does reflect a turning of the tide. If we were to grow just a little bit more than we currently are, we can ensure that our presence on the American religious scene will not become negligible.

And here’s where our 50/50 chance comes in. Morales presented us with what I think to be an intriguing proposal. He’s said that

If every congregation in Prairie Star District were to add two additional members a year and lose two fewer members a year, we attain the five percent target. Two additional new members, lose two fewer people. If we get four additional new members a year and lose two fewer, we get to the 6.5 percent target.

Morales suggests that we can increase our growth significantly (a religious organization of over 200,000 adult members is a significantly different kind of organization than one of 150,000) simply by having every congregation in our district (and the entire UUA for that matter) retain two more current members and attract two more new members.

What I’d like to do is take that proposition one step further. While Jefferson had some pretty high hopes about young “men” living in the early part of the 19^th century eventually dying Unitarian, we—as a general rule—have no such expectations. In fact, we really don’t expect many of the children and youth we raise in our congregations to stay in our faith tradition. We don’t necessarily expect them to be Unitarian Universalists at their 21^st birthday, let alone at the end of their lives. That’s because we’ve applied the same growth strategy we currently have for attracting new members to retaining our children and youth—if you can find us and figure out a way to fit in, then feel free to stick around…if not, tough luck.

The good news is that it doesn’t take much to turn that growth strategy around. Be visible, be welcoming, be inviting. And I believe the best place to start with that new strategy is with our own—our children and youth. You see, when Morales suggests that every congregation tries to retain two members who otherwise would drift away, I take that one step further and say, let’s retain two more of the youth who are currently involved in our congregations. Rather than being a religious tradition that’s content to be made up of 90% converts and 10% lifelong members, let’s work toward becoming a 50/50 religion with half of the adult members in our pews and fellowship halls lifelong Unitarian Universalists.

The reason I think that it’s so important to focus on youth in our growth strategy is because the faith development needs of people that age are acute. And if we can meet the faith development needs of youth, we will become adept at meeting the faith development needs of all our members, no matter what their age might be. By the way, we’re not alone here. I’ve recently discovered that one of the reasons mainstream Protestant denominations are losing members is because they really only retain 10% of their youth as lifelong, active members in their congregations. The children in those Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Evangelical congregations aren’t necessarily sticking around in the faith traditions they were raised in, either. And our Protestant cousins are declining in numbers because of it.

So, what does it take to meet the faith development needs of youth? Roland Martinson of the Luther Seminary in St. Paul has proposed eight key faith factors for developing lifelong members of a religious tradition. (I’ve translated them into UU):

·        Faith integrated into family identity and practice

·        Three or more adult mentors of vital faith

·        Three or more months service in the name of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations

·        Apprenticed early into leadership in their church

·        Engaging, meaningful church experience in which youth are valued

·        Excellent senior high/young adult ministry

·        Encouraged by strong Unitarian Universalist friend(s)

·        Support within an engaging Unitarian Universalist community during a personal crisis

Almost every one of these factors can apply to adults as well as youth, and if we learned how to do them well for the youth we already have in our midst, we might actually learn how to do a better job providing them for the adults who show up at our congregational doors looking for something that will help them feel at home in the universe.

For example, mentors and strong Unitarian Universalist friends—that’s something small group ministry can provide for everyone, children, youth, and adults. Three months of service—a social action program in a congregation that physically engages members in working toward justice, equity, and compassion in human relations on the local level can transform the lives of anyone who participates in it, no matter what their age. Engaging, meaningful church experience—offering opportunities for all to share in the ministry of the church can provide everyone in the congregation with rich and rewarding life experiences. And who among us doesn’t need support during a personal crisis?

But perhaps the most important factor of all is the first one: faith integrated into family identity and practice. That’s something new for Unitarian Universalists to consider. And it’s something I’d like for all of us to reflect on when we think about what it takes to truly feel at home in the universe. I believe we have a duty to offer support to families of all formations in our society—as we work toward justice outside the walls of our congregations and as we work toward building a beloved community within the walls of our congregations. In the words of family ministry specialist Diana Garland, it’s a “shift from conceptualizing individual ego development as the underlying process of ‘faith development’ to conceptualizing faith as a dimension of family life as well as of individual experience.” [REPEAT] I truly believe that our children and youth are going to feel more at home in the universe and in our faith tradition if they can feel at home in their families, in the congregations, and in their communities.

The good news is that is doesn’t take much to bring Unitarian Universalist faith development into our homes. For example, how many of you receive the UU World (our denominational magazine) in your homes? It’s been going through quite a few changes lately, but there was something really new and exciting in the most recent issue…did you notice it? Each issue of the UU World will now contain a colorful four-page insert called uu&me! uu&me! has been around since 1997, but it’s mostly been available to members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, a 2,700-member congregation which serves Unitarian Universalists all over the world who are isolated from other UU congregations. As a feature in the UU World, uu&me! will now reach 125,000 UU households—“and with every new issue grandparents and parents and children will all be able to share conversations about uu&me!’s stories and features and religious message” (at least, that’s what we hope!).

That’s just one example of how we can engender the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition in our families. But there are other ways, too—and they’re really quite simple. In a book published by Beacon Press (the highly-repsected publishing house supported by the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations), Princeton Sociologist Robert Wuthnow discovered that the prime source of faith for self-described “religious” people—that is people for whom faith is an important element in their lives as adults—was the way faith permeated the daily life of their family. Wuthnow says his study showed that religious formation happens when “specific, deliberate religious activities…are firmly intertwined with the daily habits of family routines.” He adds, “Compared with these practices, the formal teachings of religious leaders often pale in significance. Yet when such practices are present, formal teachings also become more important.” What are these “deliberate religious activities?” Simple things like

·        sharing family meals;

·        spending a few moments before bedtime to share the joys and worries of the day;

·        having real conversations about what matters most in life;

·        adorning your living spaces with symbols of your faith tradition;

·        celebrating holidays in ways that the religious significance comes through; and

·        participating in your community of faith in ways that make it part of your family’s emotional support system.

I honestly believe that if we can literally bring Unitarian Universalism home for our families, we’ll start developing children and youth who will become life-long people of faith, and we’ll start seeing our pews filled with individuals who, to use the words crafted by the UUA’s Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group:

·        know that they are lovable beings of infinite worth, imbued with powers of the soul, and obligated to use their gifts, talents, and potentials in the service of life;

·        affirm that they are part of a Unitarian Universalist religious heritage and community of faith that has value and provides resources for living;

·        accept that they are responsible for the stewardship and creative transformation of their religious heritage and community of faith;

·        realize that they are moral agents, capable of making a difference in the lives of other people, challenging structures of social and political oppression, promoting the health and wellbeing of the planet, acting in the service of diversity, justice and compassion;

·        recognize the need for community, affirming the importance of families, relationships and connections between and among the generations;

·        appreciate the value of spiritual practice as a means of deepening faith and integrating beliefs and values with everyday life; and

·        experience hope, joy, mystery, healing, and personal transformation in the midst of life's challenges.

That’s the work we are called to do in our communities of faith. And if we can do that work just a little bit better than we are right now, then I believe the odds of Unitarian Universalism continuing to be a force for good in the world are much better than 50/50. In fact, I’m willing to bet a pound of Kopi Luwak coffee on it.

--The Rev. Phillip Lund