Click here for the current version of Yet Another Unitarian Universalist.

There is no longer a redirect on the old address to this blog. Therefore, if you haven’t updated your bookmarks or your RSS reader, or if you’re following an old link, you’ll wind up at the old blog. So please update your bookmarks, etc.

Community ministry: Most of our local congregations continue to stagnate and even decline, and they are not very good advertisements for our faith tradition. But our Unitarian Universalist community ministers are out doing all kinds of good work in the world; they serve as hospital chaplains, military chaplains, directors of non-profit organizations, social service providers, etc., etc. These are the people who are out there letting people know who we are. We have to figure out how to support these people without locking them into the weird narrow conception of congregational polity that now dominates us.

Three experiments in new congregation starts:

This coming year, I’ll be watching three very different approaches at starting new congregations. Each of these three new congregations does not fit the typical model of new congregation starts within Unitarian Universalism — no fellowships here, no existing congregation supporting a new congregation, no extension ministry, no support from the Unitarian Universalist Association. One is a project to revitalize a moribund church; another focuses on serving the wider community rather than members and friends; and one an entrepreneurial church start common in other denominations but not within Unitarian Universalism.

1. Scott Wells is thinking about how to do a new church start in Washington, D.C. While there are plenty of UU congregations on the Beltway, it’s clear the District could use another UU congregation (or two, or three). Scott has a good day job, so he doesn’t need to earn money from this project. He doesn’t have a church Web site up yet, so the best way to follow Second Universalist is via Twitter.

What I like best about what Scott is doing is this: he has recognized that many of our major metropolitan areas are grossly underserved by Unitarian Universalist congregations. In many metropolitan areas, we Unitarian Universalists have saturated the suburbs with our congregations, but have ignored the city. I will be curious to see what kind of congregation emerges from Scott’s effort. Although I’d love to see him create another big congregation, I’d be just as happy if the outcome was a house church or a family size church (under 50 average attendance) because I’d love to see him spark the creation of lots of UU house churches in major metropolitan areas.

2. Ron Robinson has been working away in Turley, Oklahoma, for some time now, building up what he calls “A Third Place” — I’ve been reading his blog, formerly titled Progressive Church Planting and now titled The Welcome Table: A Free Universalist Christian Missional Community. Robinson has a different conception of what a congregation can be. In a recent online UU World article, Don Skinner writes: “Robinson identifies A Third Place with the growing ‘missional’ movement in evangelical and mainline Protestant Christianity, which focuses a church’s ministries externally rather than internally.”

Not surprisingly, Robinson doesn’t draw a salary at A Third Place; his wife, a medical doctor, is the primary breadwinner; Robinson also earns some money from a couple of part-time gigs. This allows him to work within a very unconventional organizational structure, and to build a community that isn’t a typical Unitarian Universalist congregation. As Robinson has written on his blog: “The world needs all kinds of churches, or varying manifestations of the church.” I’m watching Robinson because he is willing to think outside the box. We need more people who are willing to try things that are this well thought-out, and this radically different.

3. The new congregation start that I’m most interested in is in Norton Massachusetts. The old Unitarian Universalist congregation in Norton had almost died out when they decided to use their beautiful building and their substantial endowment, and start all over again. Here’s how their minister, Christana Wille-McKnight, describes what they’re doing:

“This church has been around for literally 300 years. But over those years, the congregation has essentially died out. The few remaining members dream that the church will one day grow and thrive again. They have hired me as their full time minister to restart the congregation with a new mission, vision and practice, while still retaining the ideals of Unitarian Universalism.”

If the Norton congregation succeeds in this venture, I hope they will inspire dozens of other essentially moribund congregations to think outside the box, and start something new and vibrant and alive.

Unitarian Universalism overseas: Again this year, I’ll be watching the ongoing emergence of Unitarian Universalism in Africa. Uganda Unitarian Universalists have been standing up for gay rights in a very hostile environment; Kenyan Unitarian Universalists are somehow managing to survive the political chaos in their country; and movements in other countries seem to be hanging on or doing well. There is good stuff happening in African Unitarian Universalism. I just hope that we U.S. Unitarian Universalists can manage to help support the Africans without taking them over. Eric Cherry, Director of International Affairs at the Unitarian Universalist Association, seems to be doing an excellent job of keeping that balance of helping out without taking over, and his office will be well worth watching in the coming year.

The rise of the “nones”: “Nones” is a term popularized recently by sociologist Robert Putnam, and refers to the increasing number of people who, when asked what their religion is, reply “none.” The “nones” tend to be younger. They also may have an interest in religion, but they equate all religion with stereotypical American Protestant evangelical religion, and so decide that all churches are bad.

Every once in a while, I see one of these “nones” come into our congregation here in Palo Alto. Some of them, when they realize that they don’t have to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, actually decide to stick around — and although some of them remain extremely wary of the whole idea of organized religion, others decide to jump in with both feet. Some of them are humanists, but some of them are unconventional Christians or Buddhists or syncretists or something you can’t really name. This coming year, I’m going to be paying increasing attention to the “nones” and trying to figure out how to welcome them in when they show up in our congregation.

More social networking: Already, some ministers are saying that they are more likely to connect with people in their congregations via Facebook than via email. This doesn’t mean that email is going away, but it does mean that communication channels are getting increasingly fractured.

My real question is how are we going to use social networking most effectively? Yes, I use Facebook, and email, and even the phone and paper letters. Yes, I post my sermons on the Web before I preach, and embed links and footnotes into them, so that if you listen and read online at the same time, you get an enhanced sermon. But how can social networking enhance the growth of face-to-face community? — I’ll be watching this year to see how we address this question.

As an extreme example of Unitarian Universalism’s lack of initiative, let’s look at the San Francisco Bay area, where I live. The San Francisco Bay area comprises nine counties, 7,000 square miles, and 7.4 million people. A poll by the Pew Forum in 2008 determined that 0.3% of U.S. adults call themselves Unitarian Universalists, and therefore we’d expect there to be at least 22,000 Unitarian Universalists in the Bay area. Since the Bay area population tends to be liberal, well-educated, and open-minded, however, I would expect there to be more Unitarian Universalists than the national average. Conservatively, I’d guess there should be something like 30,000 to 40,000 Unitarian Universalists in the Bay area — yet there are fewer than 4,000. In all of California, the most populous state in the U.S. with a population of more than 37 million people, there are only 16,089 Unitarian Universalists (according to the 2010 UUA Directory).

If this isn’t bad enough, there is only one so-called “emerging congregation” (that is, a relatively new congregation not yet admitted as a full member of the Unitarian Universalist Association) in the Bay area, and that one new congregation is actually a group of people who left the Oakland church in the middle of a conflict over whether or not the music director should be fired. Because conflicts typically drive some people away from religion entirely, I’d guess that this emerging congregation actually represents a net loss of Unitarian Universalists in the Bay area.

And if that isn’t bad enough… …from what I see here in the Palo Alto congregation, there is in fact a large number of people in the Bay area who would seriously consider attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I estimate that our congregation alone sees well over a hundred newcomers each year — and this with essentially no marketing on our part. Yet our estimates are that we retain only about a fifth of these newcomers over the long term.

If you think the picture can’t get any more bleak, you’re wrong — it can get more bleak. Unitarian Universalism is in decline, but we are unable to focus our attention, energy, and limited resources on growth. A perfect example of this is religious education for children. The U.S. birth rate in 2007, just before the Great Recession, was the highest it had been since 1961, at the peak of the Baby Boom. Yet enrollment in Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools has been dropping since before 2007. Denominational authorities have finally begun publishing a new curriculum series, but it is less than inspiring — much of it is a rehash of older curriculum ideas dating from 70 to 25 years old, recast in “teacher-proof” curriculums, with a veneer of multiculturalism. It has little to attract or excite newcomers with children, especially in an era when religion is increasingly optional. Nor is the situation any better at the level of the local congregation, where we see the same old tired Sunday school programs of twenty and thirty years ago.

In another example of our inability to confront the real issues that face us, we Unitarian Universalists focus our social justice efforts in areas that are not attractive to the kinds of people we need to attract. A few Unitarian Universalists went to Arizona once in 2010 to get arrested in what turned out to be a fairly inconsequential immigration protest, a protest to which basically no one paid any attention but for a few other Unitarian Universalists. But mostly our local congregations continues to focus their local efforts on social justice issues that appeal to the individualistic educated middle class white people who are already members. Thus we put lots of energy into middle class environmental issues like solar energy and hybrid cars — concerns typical of our current members and friends — while ignoring the real distrust that communities of color have towards white middle class environmentalism, and ignoring environmental issues like toxics in the environment, food security, etc., that are of interest to people who aren’t educated individualistic middle class white folks.

I’d better take a deep breath and stop there. I could rant on for hours about the many ways Unitarian Universalism is following a path to irrelevancy. I’ll just mention in passing the way we emphasize social justice to such a great extent that we tend to ignore what many people outside our congregations crave: guidance and support in living sane and humane personal lives that are in accord with principles of goodness and truth. I’ll barely mention the fact that our theology is practically moribund, and many of our religious leaders don’t seem to be aware that we have a serious theological tradition of our own, a tradition which predates the so-called “seven principles,” and (unlike the “seven principles”) contains some real intellectual content.

At all levels — denomination, districts, local congregations, independent UU groups — the trend in Unitarian Universalism continues to be one of digging in our heels and refusing to change, even though by now it’s obvious that if we don’t change things Unitarian Universalism will die off.

More bad news tomorrow — Year in review: Unitarian Universalism in general

Most U.S. media (including news outlets, movies, television, etc.) continue to portray white Protestant evangelicals as normative when it comes to religion; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons are thrown in as amusingly eccentric variations on white Protestant evangelicalism (the Jews are practically Protestant in U.S. pop culture, except that they don’t believe in Christ). The Black church is rarely noticed, except in media offerings aimed squarely at the African American market; other ethnic Christians, including Hispanics and various Asian Christians, are mostly ignored by the media.

As for liberal Christians, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews, and liberal Muslims — U.S. media and U.S. pop culture basically pretend they don’t exist, except when news outlets decide to run yet another story about how mainline Christian churches are declining in membership. Neopagans, many of whom are religious liberals, get even worse treatment by U.S. media — they are portrayed as if they are something out of a Stephen King horror novel. The only religious liberal group that gets some positive mention by U.S. media are liberal Buddhists, probably because the media like the saffron color of the Dalai Lama’s robes.

And Barack Obama is not helping increase understanding of religious liberalism. Here at last we have a liberal Christian occupying the White House, but he doesn’t show much public evidence that he lives his faith; he could at least join a church. And when he calls up a prominent pastor to talk over spiritual matters, he tends to call the same old tired Protestant evangelical types that his white Protestant evangelical predecessors called.

For me, Obama embodies much that is wrong with religious liberalism: he is unwilling to publicly claim his religious liberalism; he seems to think that religion is something you can do in private without being held accountable by a religious community. He went to a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school in the 1960s, when we Unitarian Universalists were mostly teaching kids that religion was private, optional, and not very important — and it looks like he learned his lessons well. Thus it is not surprising that an August Pew poll found that 43 percent of Americans don’t even know that he’s a Christian. Perhaps in response, Obama seems to be fleeing even farther from liberal Christianity towards Protestant evangelicalism by choosing to attend the nondenominational Evergreen Chapel at Camp David, a military church rumored to be steeped in the military version of Protestant evanglicalism.

It’s too bad that mainstream media are ignoring liberal religion, and that Barack Obama seems to be disavowing it. There are some exciting things going on in the liberal branches different religions. Among liberal Christians, I’ve read a couple of interviews of the new president of the United Church of Christ, Geoffrey Black, and have been impressed by his thoughtfulness. I’m interested in what Reform Jews are doing in sh’mirat ha-adamah — their version of religious care for the environment — connecting religion to environmentalism through Torah readings, summer camps for kids, webinars on religious sustainability, etc. I’m also interested in the ways liberal Jews are adapting their religious traditions to the postmodern U.S., and it almost feels as though there’s something of a creative religious renewal going on. Thich Nhat Hanh continues to teach us all about peace from his perspective in engaged Buddhism. I continue to be inspired by the way liberal Neopagans are reaching across class boundaries in their communities.

Religious liberals have gotten pushed so far to the margins of U.S. consciousness that we really can’t go any farther. I’ve begun to wonder if the margins might be a good place for us Unitarian Universalist to be for a while. Acknowledging that we’re in the margins just might jar us out of our complacency and force us to define ourselves more clearly. If we respond by defining ourselves more clearly in religious terms — not in political terms, not in the causes we support — if we can define in a positive way who we are and what it means to be one of us, if we can offer a positive religious alternative to normative Protestant evangelicalism, I think quite a few people will find that our little corner of liberal religion is quite a wonderful place to be.

Tomorrow: Year in review: Unitarian Universalism

How frequently do you attend religious services?
How frequently do you pray outside of religious services?
How important is religion in your daily life?
How important is religion to your sense of who you are?
Are you a strong believer in your religion?
How strong is your belief in God?

Using this scale, I automatically cannot rate at the highest level of religiosity. Why? Because I don’t pray (outside of the pastoral prayers I may say in Sunday services). I also get knocked down the scale because, depending on how you define “God,” I don’t have a strong belief in God. Indeed, if I have to use the word “belief” to express how I know God, then as a non-Cartesian empiricist I would have to say I don’t “believe” in God any more than I “believe” or “disbelieve” any sensory impression.

Putnam and Campbell admit one could raise some possibly valid objections to the way they measure religiosity. In particular, they admit that “readers may wonder whether these particular questions favor one religious tradition over another….” This is an objection that anyone who is a Unitarian Universalist would raise, since probably half of us don’t believe in God, including some of our most religious Unitarian Universalists. Putnam and Campbell go on to say:

…This is a common concern when social scientists study religion, as religiosity is sometimes measured with questions that are normative within Protestantism, specifically for evangelicals. …we acknowledge the concern that perhaps this particular religiosity index is inadvertently biased toward evangelical Protestantism, or some other religious tradition.

From my point of view, their measure of religiosity is clearly biased toward evangelical Protestantism. Which doesn’t make me eager to read the rest of the book. Which also makes me realize the extent to which evangelicals dominate the public conversation about religion in the U.S. And which also makes me want to force Putnam and Campbell to spend some time reading the work of linguist George Lakoff.

* This is an indirect quote because Carol told me I am no longer permitted to quote her directly, adding, “You always misquote me.”