There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea. Do you want affidavits? There’s a man in the moon with money for you. Do you want affidavits? There are ten dancing girls in a sea-chamber off Nantucket waiting for you. There are tall candles in Timbuctoo burning penance for you. There are—anything else? Speak now—for now we stand amid the great wishing windows—and the law says we are free to be wishing all this week at the windows. Shall I raise my right hand and swear to you in the monotone of a notary public? this is “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Reading: The Hinterlands, by Robert William Service
You speak to me, but does your speech With truest truth your thought convey? I listen to your words and each Is what I wait to hear you say. The pattern that your lips reveal, How does it measure with your mind? What undertones do you conceal? Your smile is sweet - but what's behind? I speak to you, but do I tell The secret working of my brain? Frank honesty would make life hell, And truth be tantamount to pain. When deep into the mind one delves, Appalling verities we view; If we betrayed our inner selves, Would you hate man and I hate you?
Musical Interlude: Where Everybody Knows Your Name (The theme from “Cheers.”), by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart.
Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot. Wouldn't you like to get away? Sometimes you want to go Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same You wanna be where everybody knows Your name. You wanna go where people know, people are all the same, You wanna go where everybody knows your name.
Sermon: The Illusion of Covenant, by Hank Blakely
In early May the Social Justice Committee hosted the Northern Virginia debut of the Commonwealth Coalition, a group dedicated to the defeat of the Virginia “Marriage Amendment, and to the proposition that there are limits on a government’s power over its citizens. It was a compelling issue and for that reason nearly sixty people showed up for the event, which is generally regarded as a good turnout as these things go.
So why wasn’t I happy?
For one thing because our church, with a congregation of more than 200, constituted less than a third of those in attendance.
But mostly because I didn’t like the theory I had earlier begun to form about why the rest weren’t coming.
This wasn’t the first time I’d puzzled over poor attendance at an event so ostensibly in line with our professed values. Previous to this the church’s Forum for Free and Responsible Discourse had paid for two experts on Middle East affairs to present the results of their seminal fact finding mission in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Despite heavy internal promotion the event drew only five people from UUCR.
And not long ago the Social Justice Committee presented the celebrated--and lavishly publicized-- one-man play, Clarence Darrow: The Search for Justice, which drew fewer than fifty members of this congregation.
I had a hand in creating these events, and I readily confess to initial feelings of frustration and some amount of woundedness over this apparent evidence of my failure to reach the hearts and minds of my congregation. But that admittedly parochial perspective quickly dimmed as I began to consider similar outcomes in events in which I had played no significant part.
In early March, the board presented the first of a series of forums conducted by the Alban Institute’s Rev. Larry Peers, with the goal of giving us the tools necessary to conduct a congregational assessment that would help us improve our church systems. A second such forum was held in late April. Each drew only 30 participants.
Not long after that, the Membership committee and our Religious Education Director held a special forum seeking to define the concepts that constitute church membership—a necessary exercise if we are to grow. Only 13 members attended.
Now, I will grant that social justice and Middle East affairs may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But these latter forums dealt with the sustenance and governance of our church; that is to say with the very heart and soul of our institution, and low attendance at these events seemed less understandable, seemed, in fact, to be ominous.
Two months ago, the Board convened a weekend leadership retreat in West Virginia, consisting of members of the Board, the Leadership Council, and the Lay Ministry. We met to discuss a broad range of church concerns. It quickly developed that the overwhelming preponderance of those concerns had to do with congregational engagement—that is to say, the extent to which our congregants did or did not participate in church activities. And although we did not reach a unanimous conclusion, there was a clear consensus that the congregation inclined toward disengagement, and that steps needed to be taken to correct that inclination. Some of us felt that disengagement was a growing problem.
Institutional disengagement is a sort of chronic condition, and like most such conditions its advancement is slow and subtle, continuing unsuspected until its effects can no longer be ignored, often when it is too late to correct them.
Disengagement is both pernicious and ironic in that it is self-fulfilling. Not attending committee events sends a signal that those events--and by extension the work of their sponsors--is not highly valued. From the sponsors’ perspective, non-attendance is indistinguishable from disinterest. However much you may agree with the sponsors’ intent, your absence says otherwise. If enough stay away often enough, the events tend to dry up. Which leads to greater disengagement.
Low attendance also undermines the church’s democratic foundation. The ten or twenty percent that show up at forums on church issues effectively constitute a virtual oligarchy that controls our policies and courses of action. We frequently bemoan this in our national politics. Why then do we tolerate it in our church? Disengagement is demoralizing and it feeds upon itself. Where it exists it grows.
Now, I know there are those who will tell you that the phenomena I have just cited are common to all houses of worship. I can’t speak to the truth of that assertion, but I emphatically reject it as a model for our conduct. It is both self-defeating and a philosophical capitulation that we can ill afford because our present situation is very precarious.
For one thing, despite Herculean recruitment efforts, we are not a growth church. Our total numbers merely inch forward year by year. Many of those who came to us as a result of last year’s membership drive, coupled with those drawn to us through the public crisis that arose in response to our civil marriage banner, have now melted away. And although we have slightly more members than last year we somehow have fewer pledge units.
And the Membership Committee is presently struggling to quantify what seems to be a significant and continuing loss of long-term members. This phenomenon is reflected in a number of private conversations in which sustaining members of the congregation have told me of their growing dissatisfaction with various aspects of the church, and of their increasing temptation simply and quietly to leave it.
These factors are borne out by the overall history of our congregational size. In a recent analysis of our long-term membership status, Maxine Jaubert reports that over the past twenty-eight years we have sustained a net growth of fewer than 25 members.
You might also consider our membership dilemma from another perspective: in an average year we attract approximately 200 to 250 visitors of which we retain only a relative handful. This last is not a situation unique to us, but one shared by other Unitarian Universalist congregations, to a point where the Unitarian Universalist Association has begun to ask what our churches are doing to repel visitors.
To me these facts hint that low attendance at church events is not alone due to mere oversight or the fact of our overcrowded lives, but to a diminished and continuously faltering connection to the heart of this church. And that speaks to me of a certain degree of brokeness about us.
I believe that these conditions can be traced to our lack of both identity and purpose
As many of you know from your work lives, organizational identity is one of the toughest things to define, and even harder to change. I can more easily tell you what identify is not: it is not unanimity. Similar to human identity it is a complex of attitudes, desires and beliefs that, despite their often contradictory nature nevertheless constitute a coherent presence. And the more coherent the better.
I will argue that we are not a coherent institution. I believe that the nature of our various activities might best—and most charitably—be described as random. Like molecules in Brownian motion we are everywhere at once, and no one seems to know precisely what anyone else is doing.
This is in part due to the fact that as an organization we are, simply put, lousy at communication. But I believe that lack of identity is also a major contributor to our fragmented organizational personality. One of the key attributes of identity is a boundary, an enclosing line of demarcation that separates that which belongs from that which does not. Identity is the “us-ness” of us. It is our uniqueness and ultimately it is the basis of whatever pride we take in our church and in whatever part we play in its progress.
At this moment that pride is not especially evident. Look about you at our surroundings, which a local journalist once euphemistically described as “spare.” Our most important functions are conducted in an atmosphere of genteel disrepair, of dissonant neglect. Pretend for a moment that you are a first-time visitor and look with fresh eyes at the condition of our walls and carpets. Shift uneasily in your uncomfortable and very likely broken chair. And then wonder if a newcomer might not conclude that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit.
Without identity there can be no pride. Without identity there can be no coherent purpose. Again, I refer not to a single purpose, but to a marked degree of intentionality that binds our energies to pursuits aligned with our mission, vision and covenant.
In our Mission and Vision statement we promise this:
“To be a religious community of unlimited opportunities for personal and collective growth, serving as a beacon of free and liberal faith in a changing world. “
Are we that beacon? Are we an example to the community, or, when our events are attended by two to three times as many from outside the church as from within, is it the community that acts as a beacon to us?
This Sunday, as on most Sundays, we spoke of our “Great Covenant”--a promise to seek the truth of love and to offer up our service as a prayer. But is that what we do? As Unitarian Universalists we are justly proud of our intelligence, our awareness and our social conscience. These are the resources required to fulfill our promise of service. But how many of us serve on committees, seek leadership positions, teach Religious Education, participate in covenant groups, take part in worship services or other church activities? If we do not do those things are we not squandering our resources?
Why aren’t these kinds of questions raised more often? I think there are several reasons. The first, I will maintain, is that we are a conflict-avoidant congregation. We just do not like to discuss unpleasant things. Somewhere deep in our history the notion took hold that conflict threatens the stability of the church.
Whereas the exact opposite is true: the real danger lies in the avoidance of conflict. There is no growth without conflict. In fact conflict—not rancor or abuse, but true conflict--is at the very heart of our Unitarian Universalist concept of community. It is where we come together to give voice to our ideas and to refine and modify them as we hear the ideas of others. The true practice of Unitarian Universalism can not occur without that clash of ideas.
Another reason is that we seem to have come to that most desired and yet simultaneously feared state of being: we have become comfortable with who we are.
Comfort is the sworn enemy of growth.
And for another reason, although some of you may already agree with some of the sentiments I have expressed, you may mistakenly have believed that you were all alone in those feelings and said them not at all, or only to a trusted few. Some of you may have yet to admit them even to yourself.
Certainly, that is the problem I faced. I have been told that it takes several years to truly understand our system of faith, and that seems to have been true in my case. In the midst of my delight in finding this church and its people, I gradually began to notice a few disquieting things—some of which I’ve raised here. At first I went into stark denial, then puzzlement, then a steadily growing conviction that I had to give voice to my growing concern.
The conversations I carried on with myself seem funny in retrospect. “Oh great,” I would say to myself, “You’ve finally found an institution that you actually believe in, and it comes with a community that you like and that accepts you, and the first thing you’re going to do is to tell them what’s wrong with it. Even worse, you’re going to advocate something that sounds dangerously close to religious obligation—the very thing that most of them have fled. BRILLIANT! This is why you are not a wealthy man!”
I can’t tell you how many times I thought about not saying any of this—of just keeping quiet and letting things take their course. To run the risk of losing this place I have come to love, of watching it gradually die—oh, yes, churches die—of watching it die of natural causes: of continued disengagement, or the inevitable result of a largely senior congregation. Then too I thought of how unpopular many of the things I had to say would be and I feared your reaction.
But each time I thought of turning my back on the problem I remembered January 29th, when I stood at this podium with six other newly-minted Lay Ministers and promised to do my best to place your welfare above my own. And I thought about what a hypocrite I would be if in this hour I could not do that; if I could not tell you what I believe to be true.
There have been, believe me, many drafts of my words today. And some of those have been shared with others. And whatever their reaction to my words, most asked me two questions: where is the hope in this message? And what is the fix?
Well, the hope, that’s easy. The hope lies in the fact that these ideas can be brought before you at all and that you will entertain them seriously—perhaps agreeing, perhaps not. The hope lies in your intellectual strength and in your ability to put aside understandable feelings of defensiveness to find resonance with whatever amount of truth I may have placed before you.
And there is another hope. If you listen carefully you will hear the faint sound of a wind of change blowing through this church. You will notice new initiatives, new programs, all being formulated with the intention of improving our methods of worship, our communication with each other, our administration and many other aspects of the church. But be aware that these are only changes in our systems, and thus only half of the solution. The other half is the change that must take place at a more personal level—in ourselves.
The fix is harder. Unlike Carl Sandburg I can offer no affidavits to prove the truth of my assertions—though I suspect that some of you will find them no less fanciful than his. I come before you with a few facts and a great deal of nervous speculation, and I ask you to undertake what amounts to a culture change—something that fails almost as often as it is attempted.
And what makes the fix particularly hard is the fact that the reasons for disengagement are as varied as the number of those who are disengaged. Which means a large share of the answer lies within us, requiring us to ask ourselves about our particular degree of engagement and then somehow to deal with the results of that assessment. If, as I have said, you are comfortable with the present situation, why would you want to undertake such hard work?
Perhaps because some part of what I have said resonates with your own concerns.
Perhaps because you recognize an obligation to repay the church for the many benefits you have derived from it, and so that others might benefit as well.
Perhaps because you know that only a very small part of this church is about you. It is also about those who bequeathed it to you, and about those to whom you will bequeath it. We are each of us the stewards of the now and future church, and disengagement is the polar opposite of stewardship.
Perhaps because you see that you are not being asked just to attend meetings, but to celebrate the gift of this church. That you are being invited to play your part in the drama of congregation.
Or perhaps you’ve heard nothing persuasive in my warnings. Perhaps you’ve found a community of love and comfort, a place where everybody knows your name, and that is enough for you.
But I will tell you this: we are more than a garden club.
We are a community of ideas and aspirations. We have been given great gifts of mind and spirit and we can use them to pierce the veil of illusion by which we are confounded. We can be open, honest and fearless in our self-assessment. We can become more than we are.
That is what I came here to say. There are those, I am sure, who will answer that our situation is essentially static—that the church today is much as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. They will say that my concerns are merely another case of the old question: is the glass half full or half empty? But that, my friends, is not the correct question. The correct question is, is the water evaporating?