300th anniversary of First Parish in Cohasset – Dan Harper

Three Hundred and One

Readings

The first reading is from the book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by sociologist Carolyn Chen (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022, p. 209). In this book, Chen shows how work has become religion in Silicon Valley, and she documents how destructive the worship of work can be. She then says:

“How do we break the theocracy of work? The late writer David Foster Wallace observed, ‘In the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism. Everybody worship. The only choice is what we get to worship.’ We can stop worshipping work, Wallace suggests, by choosing to worship something else. But we cannot do it alone, in the private sanctuary of our personal prayers and devotions. Since worshipping work is a social enterprise, choosing not to worship work must also be a collective endeavor. We can do this by intentionally building shared places of worship, fulfillment, and belonging that attract our time, energy, and devotion. These are our families, neighborhoods, clubs, and civic associations, as well as our faith communities. We need to recharge these ‘magnets’ that have grown weak. Contrary to what time management pundits tell us, we do this by letting these magnets attract more and not less of our time, energy, and passion. This is not a call to end work; it’s a call to energize non-workplaces. It’s an invitation to reflect on how we as a society expend out collective energy.”

The second reading comes from Rabbi Howard I Bogot, from his 1979 essay “Why Jewishness?” in the Journal of Jewish Communal Service (vol. 56, no. 1, 1979, p. 108).

“For many years I have carried with me an Emerson-like quote which reads as follows: ‘The gods will write their names on our faces, be sure of that; and man will worship something, have no doubt of that either. He may think that his tribute is paid in secret, in the deep recesses of his heart but it will out. That which dominates his imagination and his thought will determine his life and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.’”

Sermon: “Three hundred and One”

On Tuesday, December 13, First Parish will celebrate its three hundred and first birthday. This past fall, I’ve given a few sermons looking back at the past three hundred years. So today, just before the end of our three hundredth birthday year, I thought I’d give a sermon about the future.

I am not, however, going to try to predict what the next three hundred years will hold for our congregation. I’m willing to try to look ahead for a dozen years, or at most for twenty years — in other words, look ahead for another generation. Think of the youngest child in our Sunday school, and think ahead to when that child heads off to college or to a job: what will First Parish look like then? I’m not willing to look ahead for the next three hundred years, but I’m willing to try one generation.

But even trying to look ahead one generation is difficult. We are in the midst of a major change in American religion. When I started out working in Unitarian Universalist congregations, back in 1994, we could feel pretty confident that in 2014 our congregations would look much like they did in 1994. During the teens, though, we started seeing an increasing number of people who had no religious affiliation at all. Sociologists began to call these people the “Nones,” as in when you asked them what their religion was, they’d respond, “None.”

In the past decade and a half, the number of Nones in America has just kept increasing. Many people assume this is a trend towards increasing secularization, but I don’t think that’s a good assumption. Surveys show that a large percentage of Americans continue to believe in God or in some higher power. (1) It’s not that religious belief is going away; rather, it’s a matter of people not affiliating with religious organizations.

This is partly due to another demographic trend. Since the 1960s, Americans have been disengaging with all forms of community and organizations. Political scientist Robert Putnam popularized this idea back in the year 2000 in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (2) Putnam blamed much of the disengagement on individualized entertainment that was first delivered through television, and later through the internet. Think about it this way: on Sunday morning, it’s easier to stay home and look at NetFlix or TikTok than it is to drive to Cohasset center, find parking, and walk over to this Meeting House. Maybe the quality of interaction is better here in the Meeting House than what you’ll find on TikTok, but for many people the convenience and the ability to individualize one’s interaction makes up for the lower quality of interaction.

Interestingly, right after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the authors Thomas E. Mann, Norm Ornstein and E. J. Dionne, pointed out that many people “rallied to [Donald Trump] out of a yearning for forms of community and solidarity that they sense have been lost.” (3) I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Whether you agree or disagree with Donald Trump’s politics, there is no doubt he was adept at bringing a crowd of his supporters together, making them feel a part of something larger than themselves. In fact, his rallies look to me more like religious revivals than political rallies. Nor is it only Republican candidates who create that feeling: recently, we’ve seen how Raphael Warnock uses that feeling of a religious revival to rally people to vote for him.

Indeed, both the Republican party and the Democratic party have begun to resemble religions. Each party has doctrines and dogmas that they promote; and they are eager to denigrate the doctrines and dogmas of the other religion — sorry, of the other party. Each party has a mythological dimension, myths that they tell about heroic figures. There are rituals specific to each group, including things like chanting and pilgrimages. Adherents of each party can have strong emotional experiences, akin to traditional religious experiences like praying or worshipping in a church. There’s even material culture associated with each party, objects that take on almost religious significance, like MAGA hats or Barack Obama posters. All this looks a lot like religion to me. (4)

But it’s not just political parties that have taken on religious dimensions. Other forms of social interaction are also taking the place of traditional religious congregations. Think about sports events. The World Cup, with the special fan clothing, the fans making long pilgrimages to a distant land, the chanting and sense of identity — this all looks like religion. Or, closer to home, as someone who grew up in the Boston area, I can tell you that around here, baseball often feels like a religion. I found it difficult to explain to people in California how belonging to Red Sox nation was more like a religious affiliation than simply rooting for the home team. I’m told Red Sox fans are quite similar in this regard to Green Bay Packers fans. So you can see that for the true believers, sports looks like religion to outsiders, and from the inside, to true believers, sports feels like religion. (5)

And then there’s work. Over the past few years, sociologist Carolyn Chen of the University of California at Berkeley has focused her research on Silicon Valley workers. She finds that these workers “point to their jobs and careers” when they are asked “what brings meaning to their lives.” That’s the ultimate purpose of religion, isn’t it? — to help us bring meaning into our lives. Instead of turning to sports or politics, many Silicon Valley workers are finding the ultimate meaning and purpose of their lives through their work.

I could go on, and tell you about other social and cultural phenomena look a lot like religion — celebrity worship, humanistic psychology, network Christianity, yoga, and so on. But you get the point. Religion is taking on new forms. No longer is religion confined to local churches and synagogues. Religion can no longer be neatly categorized into denominations and world religions. American religion now includes sports, and politics, and work.

So where does that leave First Parish? How can we compete with a Raphael Warnock rally, or a Donald Trump rally? How can we compete with Red Sox baseball, or with downhill skiing? How can we compete with the jobs of knowledge workers? What we can do is we can offer an alternative.

For there’s a problem with sports, politics, or work as religion. Each of these things asks our devotion, not for our own sake, but for the sake of another. Donald Trump and Raphael Warnock ask us to participate in the religious rituals of their political rallies, not to make us better people, but so that they can win an election. There’s nothing wrong with supporting a political candidate, there’s nothing wrong with helping someone get elected. But when our support of them starts looking like religion — when we start getting our personal meaning and fulfillment out of it — then someone else is using our fulfillment to meet their own ends and goals.

Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with sports. I sometimes worship at the altar of the Red Sox, and will happily tell you about the time I got seats four rows back from the visitor’s dugout when the legendary knuckleballer Tim Wakefield was pitching against the New York Yankees. But we have to remember that professional sports is a business. If when I get my personal meaning and fulfillment in life by boosting someone else’s profit, I’m no longer an end in myself; someone else is using me as a means to their own ends.

Perhaps most troubling to me is when knowledge workers find their entire life’s meaning in their jobs. When you work for a corporation, you are a means to an end. You may get something out of your job, but the ultimate end of your job is to create profits for the company. As important as your work may be, you are more than your job. To be fully human is to be an end in yourself.

In the second reading this morning, Rabbi Howard Bogot talks about a quote he carried around with him for many years, a quote from an anonymous twentieth century source. That anonymous but wise person pointed out that those things which dominate our imaginations and our thoughts have a tendency to determine the course of our lives and our characters. Therefore, concludes this wise anonymous source, “it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

This anonymous quote helps us understand the big change in American religion that’s going on right now. People are leaving the old religious organizations, the churches and the synagogues — leaving the traditional religious groups like denominations. But that doesn’t mean that religion is going away; religion is simply taking new forms.

Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with religion taking on new forms. But there is problem with some of these new forms of religion: they have the capacity to tear our society apart. When politics becomes religion, it can take the relatively benign form of political rallies. In a more extreme, more toxic form, it can turn into something like Christian militias and Christian nationalism. And Christian nationalism has gotten to the point where one proponent is calling for the United States to be governed by a Christian Taliban. (6) Thus, in an extreme form, politics as religion can wind up being dangerous to democracy.

When work becomes religion, it can take the relatively benign form of someone absolutely loving their job, so much so that they’re willing to work more than 80 hours a week and sleep on a couch at their workplace. In an extreme form, as in Silicon Valley where workers are expected to spend most of their lives at work, sociologist Carolyn Chen has documented the the destructive side effects of excessive devotion to jobs: destruction of families, destruction of civic organizations, and disinvestment in public government. Thus, in its extreme form, work as religion can become dangerous to our society. (7)

As I gaze into my crystal ball and try to catch sight of what next ten or twenty years will look like here at First Parish, I spend a lot of time thinking about this big change in American religion. How should we here in First Parish respond to this drift away from organized religion?

First of all, our kind of religion is no longer the norm. We cannot automatically assume that when someone walks into our Meeting House, they will know what we’re doing, what’s going on here. We now have to explain what organized religion is like, what it does. We now have to explain that religious congregations like First Parish are civic organizations, places where we join together both to help ourselves and our families, and to make our communities stronger. Religious congregations like First Parish are cornerstones of democracy. Religious congregations like First Parish exist, not for the sake of the congregation, but for the sake of each person in the congregation. We come here, not to profit someone else, but to profit ourselves.

We used to spend a lot of time explaining to newcomers what we believed. We would tell people that we didn’t have a creed or a dogma, that we search together for truth and goodness. In the past, that was how we differentiated ourselves from other religious congregations. But now, I’ve been finding newcomers are more interested in learning what it is that we do. When I try to explain what it is that we do here at First Parish, a few things come immediately to mind.

First of all, each week in our worship services, we affirm our highest values. We recall ourselves to our deepest humanity. We strengthen ourselves for the week ahead.

Next, we are the leaders of our congregation. While we do have paid staff, leadership is shared among all who are part of our community. We all make the decisions together, we all staff the committees, we are the volunteers.

Next, we join together to make the world a better place. We support charitable causes, we volunteer together, we help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

Perhaps most importantly, we raise the next generation to become moral, joyful, humane people. And this is yet another way in which we help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

As you can see, what we do is quite different from what the new forms of religion do. Again, the new forms of religion — work and politics and sports and so on — are mostly done for someone else’s profit. No one is making a profit from what we do here in First Parish. What we do benefits each one of us, and all of us collectively. What we do benefits the wider community, and ultimately the whole world.

In addition to telling people what we believe and showing them what it is that we do, there’s another way we should be explaining ourselves to curious newcomers. We need to show people that we have a different way of being in the world. Our kind of being is not a selfish kind of being. Our kind of being is being-with-others. As an old prophet once put it, we strive to love our neighbors as we love our selves. (8) Sometimes I like to call this inter-being, or or sometime we might use the phrase “the interdependent web of all life.” When others sense within us this love for neighbor and love for self, they may find that they want to be a part of this community. They may want to feel part of the interdependent web of life.

When I look ahead to the next ten or twenty years at First Parish, this is what I hope we put at the center of our community: loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Or if you prefer, living as if the interdependent web of life truly mattered. These are the permanent center of our religious community. And if we can keep these at our center, if we can show in our lives and in our being that these are of greatest importance to us, we will continue to be a force for good in the next ten years, in the next twenty years, indeed for the next three hundred years of our existence.

Notes

(1) See e.g., Pew Research Center, “Nones on the Rise,” 9 October 2012, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/ accessed 10 December 2022.
(2) Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
(3) E. J. Dionne Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).
(4) To help define define religion, I’m using Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion from his book Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998). Smart’s seven dimensions of religion are: Ritual; Narrative and Mythic; Experiential and emotional; Social and Institutional; Ethical and legal; Doctrinal and philosophical; Material (i.e., objects that symbolize the sacred). According to Smart, different religions emphasize different dimensions of the sacred.
(5) There is a great deal of scholarly writing about sport as religion. For just one example, the book From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Mercer University Press, 2001), ed. Joseph L. Price, contains a collection of essays on this topic, with titles like “The Final Four as Final Judgement,” “The Super Bowl as Religious Festival,” and “The Pitcher’s Mound as Cosmic Mountain.”
(6) Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes has called for this, according to “Who Is Trump’s Dinner Companion, Nick Fuentes?,” Religion News Service, 27 November 2022, religionnews.com/2022/11/27/who-is-trump-and-kanyes-dinner-companion-nick-fuentes/ accessed10 December 2022.
(7) For more about the destructive side effects of work as religion, see the final chapter of Chen’s book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022).
(8) Jesus of Nazareth, as reported in the Gospel according to Mark, 12:31.

First Parish in Cohasset and its ministers, pt. 2

Read Part One (covering 1721-1845)

The photographs, all of ministers who served at least ten years, are from the First Parish archives.

Reading

This morning’s reading is a short humorous poem by Roscoe Trueblood, minister of First Parish from 1945 to 1968:

Congregational Polity

“The minister should lead,” she said,
This she chose to say
Thinking if and when he led
That he would go her way.

But later, when they differed wide,
On points she would not lose,
“The minister should wait,” she cried,
“And let the people choose.”

Sermon

Our congregation was formally organized on December 13, 1721, so we are in our three hundredth birthday year. This is one of a series or occasional sermons I’m preaching this year on the history of our congregation. This morning’s topic is the relationships between the congregation and its ministers from 1835 to the present day.

In 1835, after long-time minister Jacob Flint retired, our congregation called Harrison Gray Otis Phipps to be its next minister. He came to Cohasset directly from Harvard Divinity School, and served for six years until he took ill and died at age 30. Phipps was remembered for his kindness and his good relationships with children. (1)

Black and white portrait photograph shwoing the head and shoulders of an older white man with a full white beard. — Joseph Osgood, minister from 1842-1898

Next the congregation called Joseph Osgood, who began his ministry in 1842 at age twenty-six. He continued as the minister here for fifty-six years, until his death in 1898. This was the longest ministry we’ve ever had, or are ever likely to have. Osgood became intimately involved with the people in this congregation. He presided at nearly one thousand funerals. He officiated at nearly 500 weddings, in some cases performing weddings for two or three generations of the same family. During the first years of his ministry, there was no Catholic priest in town, so Osgood was also called upon to assist with funerals and baptisms among the growing Catholic population in town. (2)

Part of the reason First Parish called Osgood was because of his prior experience as a school teacher. As has been true of many Unitarian congregation, First Parish believed in public education, and they wanted a minister who could help them in that mission. In addition to serving as minister, Osgood devoted significant amounts of time to the Cohasset schools. He served on the Cohasset school committee for thirty years. He helped establish the first high school in town. He served as the superintendent of schools for twelve years; this was a duty of which he later said, “I felt that I had hardly strength to perform or bear.” (3) He served for fifty years on the Board of Trustees of Derby Academy in Hingham. Osgood’s enduring legacy in Cohasset is his work in the schools, and there is still an elementary school in town named after him.

Osgood was able to devote so much time to education, and to people of other religions, because First Parish was not as large as we might think. In the Norfolk County Manual and Yearbook for 1876, First Parish is reported as having just 50 members, with 68 children and teens in the Sunday school. (4) At this time, women were not allowed to vote on parish affairs, so if we include women there were probably about 100 members, roughly the same number of members we have today. Given the size of the congregation and the record of his activities, I’d guess that Osgood spent forty hours a week on his own congregation, and another forty hours a week on community activities. He later wrote that kept his health from breaking under the strain of overwork by working in his garden. (5) He also depended upon his wife, Ellen Sewall, to keep him fed and clothed and to raise their children.

Twenty-five years into his ministry, Osgood wrote: “I have, time and again, felt so dissatisfied with my own work and with my own ministry, that I was ready to lay down the burden and relieve you of my presence; but your forbearance, your consideration, your willingness to overlook all my mistakes and blunders, and to take the will for the deed when I have said and done things which I should not perhaps have deliberately said and sone, have tended very much to preserve this connection.” (6) In spite of his extraordinary accomplishments, Osgood acknowledged his mistakes and remained modest about his own abilities. The congregation for its part was flexible in its expectations, and supported Osgood when he needed support. The relationship between congregation and minister was founded on mutual respect and trust .

Late in life, Osgood began to slow down. First Parish historian Gilbert Tower wrote, “In 1895 [First Parish] was in a weak condition. In his old age, Dr. Osgood had been unable put much life into it.” The congregation hired a young minister named William Roswell Cole to serve as assistant to Osgood. Cole arrived in 1896, and when Osgood died two years later, Cole became the sole minister. Gilbert Tower continues, “Mr. Cole succeeded in starting new projects and fresh ideas so that good health, at least, if not prosperity, was restored to the Parish.” (7)

Head and shoulders portrait of a white man with grey hair and a moustache. — William Roswell Cole, minister from 1896-1919

It is tempting to to agree with Gilbert Tower that William Cole was the one who revitalized the congregation. But I think the truth is more complicated than that. First, the Panic of 1893, a serious economic depression that lasted from 1893 to 1897, caused many Unitarian congregations to struggle. No doubt Cole deserves some credit for reviving First Parish, but the improved economic situation after 1897 also deserves credit. Second, Gilbert Tower credits Cole with starting lots of new programs. But in the period from 1890 to the First World War, most Unitarian congregations were adding new programs: local branches of the Women’s Alliance, the Laymen’s League, the Young People’s Religious Union, and so on. This new programmatic approach, a major change in the life of Unitarian congregations, was a widespread social trend, not the innovation of one minister.

Cole’s leadership style was a good match for the congregation. In Gilbert Tower’s words, Cole was a “quiet, unassuming man, friendly and easy in manner with everyone.” The minister’s unassuming leadership style, probably similar to Osgood’s leadership style, allowed Cole to work smoothly with strong lay leaders.

A white man with white hair and a moustache, standing outdoors in a garden. — Frederic John Gauld, minister from 1922-1937

Cole died very suddenly of a coronary embolism on August 21, 1919, at age 54. The congregation called a young minister named George Archibald Mark, who resigned after two years because “First Parish was not active enough for him.” (8) The congregation then called Frederic John Gauld, who served here from 1922 to 1937. First Parish historian Gilbert Tower accused Gauld of being lackluster minister: “Mr. Gauld was a wonderful man and he was very much loved. However he did not accomplish much in building up the parish membership which would have been a real index of success.” (9) But Tower’s assessment of Gauld is unfair. Most of Gauld’s ministry took place during the Great Depression. Perhaps one third of all Unitarian churches closed their doors during the Depression, including many churches in small towns like Cohasset. It’s not fair to blame Gauld for the effects of widespread social forces. Instead, we should credit Gauld and the lay leaders for managing to keep First Parish alive during the Depression.

Gauld retired in 1938, and was followed by Harry C. Meserve, a talented young minister. After four years, Meserve moved on to a larger, better-paying congregation. He was followed by Walter Pedersen, who within a year needed to take a part-time job at the Hingham shipyards to make ends meet. The congregation did not approve of this, and Pedersen resigned. Then the congregation called Roscoe Trueblood, who came to Cohasset in 1945. He was well-liked, but left after four years for a better-paying position in Seattle.

That made three ministers in eight years who left First Parish because of low pay. It turns out that Frederic Gauld’s wife had an independent income, so the congregation was able to get away with paying a small salary during the Depression. But the ministers who followed Gauld were neither willing nor able to accept low pay. Inadequate compensation had an adverse effect on the relationship between minister and congregation.

After Roscoe Trueblood left, First Parish called Gaston Marcel Carrier, a talented young minister from Montreal. When Carrier asked for a substantial raise in salary in his second year, the congregation refused. The congregation wanted Roscoe Trueblood to return, and took advantage of this request for a decent salary to get rid of Carrier. I imagine there was also prejudice against a French Canadian, a common bias in New England through the twentieth century. Carrier left First Parish and went on to a brilliant career as minister in Burlington, Vermont.

White man in a black preaching gown standing in the pulpit of the First Parish Meeting House. — Roscoe Edward Trueblood, minister from 1945-1949 and 1951-1968

After Carrier’s departure, a handful of big donors pledged gave money to increase the minister’s salary sufficiently to lure Roscoe Trueblood back to Cohasset in 1951. Together, Trueblood and the congregation were able to reap the benefits of post-war demographics. The 1950s was the decade of church-going. It was also the decade of the Baby Boom. Unitarian churches across the United States grew substantially during this time, and First Parish was no exception. While neither the congregation nor Roscoe Trueblood can take credit for the demographic trends that led to growth, both minister and congregation made First Parish a healthy, happy, and welcoming place.

By all accounts, Roscoe Trueblood was quite a person: a good speaker, a good leader, and a good human being. The congregation was a good place to be during this era: friendly, welcoming to children, full of activity. (11) First Parish reached its highest membership level ever in 1969, the year Trueblood retired — 360 members. (10)

White man with a chin beard, wearing a formal business suit, sitting on a stool in front of the pulpit of the First Parish Meeting House, and playing a guitar. — Edward Trivett Atkinson, minister from 1969-1995

After Roscoe Trueblood’s retirement in 1968, the congregation called Ed Atkinson. Atkinson joined First Parish at a time when people stopped going to church, and congregations across the country began to shrink in size. Some Unitarian Universalist congregations lost three quarters of their members in the 1970s. But not First Parish: there was a decline in membership, but it was slow and gradual. Part of the credit for our success at navigating the troubled times of the 1970s must go to Ed Atkinson. He introduced some big changes. He climbed down out of the high pulpit, and began preaching from the floor. He led an effort to make this building accessible to wheelchairs. He connected with the younger generation by playing his guitar in services. During his tenure, we first began lighting a flaming chalice during Sunday services.

The congregation didn’t always agree with Atkinson’s innovations, but the relationships between congregation and minister remained one of mutual trust and respect. So his sudden death of a heart attack at age 60, on July 24, 1995, was a huge blow to the congregation. (12)

Ed Atkinson was followed by two talented interim ministers, Chuck Gaines and Jenny Rankin. This was the first time First Parish had had interim ministers. Interim ministry emerged as a specialty in the 1970s, to help congregations come to terms with the ending of one ministry, and prepare for a new minister to arrive. Jenny Rankin was the very first woman to serve as minister here, and she helped the congregation to believe that a woman could succeed as a minister here.

In 1997, First Parish called one of the most talented Unitarian Universalist ministers of the 1990s, Elizabeth Tarbox. She was well known in Unitarian Universalist circles for her haunting and compelling writing. But within a year she was diagnosed with cancer, decided not to seek treatment, and died in 1999, aged 55. This was a second huge blow to our congregation, following close upon the death of Ed Atkinson. (13)

During this troubled time, the congregation found a new minister, Jennifer Justice. A charismatic and colorful figure, Jennifer Justice had a background in theatre. Her ministry was not a success, and the congregation dismissed her within two years. First Parish was wise to dismiss her so quickly, but her unethical conduct was yet another blow to our congregation. A few years later, she was forced to resign from ministerial fellowship in the face of a denominational investigation into ethical violations relating to finances. (14)

After two years of interim ministry, the congregation called Jan Carlson-Bull, who served here from 2004 to 2010. Jan and First Parish had six reasonably productive years together. Of particular importance, Jan introduced the Circle Ministry program here, which continues to this day. But eventually tension arose between between minister and congregation. This should be no surprise. Think about what this congregation experienced in the ten years before Jan arrived: Ed Atkinson died suddenly; Elizabeth Tarbox died suddenly; Jennifer Justice had to be dismissed suddenly. Events like these strain the relationship of congregation and minister. It is to the credit of both Jan and First Parish that her ministry continued for six productive years. Jan left in 2010, and went on to a long and successful ministry in Connecticut. (15)

After a two year interim ministry with Anita Farber-Robertson, our congregation called Jill Cowie, a new minister just out of theological school. In many ways, Jill was just what this congregation needed: relatively young, with school-age children, dynamic. However, while Jill related well to some people in the congregation, there were others who did not relate well to her. This kind of divisiveness in a congregation is actually a fairly common pattern in congregations who have had unethical ministers in the past. It also appears that Jill had a different vision for her ministry than some in the congregation. She resigned in 2016, and went on to the Unitarian Universalist church in Harvard, Massachusetts. Recently she decided to leave ministry to become a social worker. (16)

In the twenty-one years from 1995 to 2016, First Parish was served by eleven ministers, two of whom died suddenly and one of whom had to be dismissed. Yet in spite of that run of bad luck, the congregation remained surprisingly healthy; for which I give credit to talented lay leaders who held kept things going in spite of frequent ministerial turnover.

Bob McKetchnie arrived as minister in 2016. Bob’s skills and personality proved to be a good match for the congregation, and the congregation started to bounce back. In March of 2020, the congregation was about to begin a major push for new members. Then the COVID pandemic hit. Yet even though the pandemic was another piece of bad luck, because of good relationships between the minister and the congregation, First Parish weathered the pandemic in remarkably good shape.

As we reflect on the relationships between minister and congregation in the past two centuries, this morning’s reading, the poem by Roscoe Trueblood:

“The minister should lead,” she said,
This she chose to say
Thinking if and when he led
That he would go her way.
But later, when they differed wide,
On points she would not lose,
“The minister should wait,” she cried,
“And let the people choose.” (17)

The relationship between minister and congregation requires constant negotiation. We cannot say definitively that the minister should lead, and the congregation follow. Nor can we say definitively that the congregation should lead, and the minister follow. Sometimes the minister is the leader, and sometimes people in the congregation are the leaders. Because this relationship requires constant negotiation, it helps when the minister and individuals in the congregation are — to borrow from Gilbert Tower’s description of William Cole — quiet and unassuming, friendly and easy in manner with everyone.

It also helps if both the minister and the congregation have a shared vision for what they want to do together. When minister and congregation share a vision, then the words of Joseph Osgood apply: there will be forbearance and consideration, there will be a willingness by all concerned to overlook any mistakes and blunders, and “to take the will for the deed” when we have said and done things which we should not perhaps have deliberately said and done. As with any human relationship, a shared vision allows people to live and work together peaceably in spite of our human failings; and a shared vision contributes to strengthening the connection between people so that we may together strive towards goodness and truth.

Notes

General information is taken from the following histories:
Cole, William R. “One Hundred Fifty Years of the Old Meeting House in Cohasset, Mass., 1747-1847.” Boston George Ellis, 1897.
Osgood, Joseph. “A Discourse Delivered in Cohasset … on the 25th Anniversary of His Ordination as Pastor.” Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1884.
Tower, Gilbert. Unpublished manuscript, 1956.

(1) E. Q. S., “Notice of the Late Rev. H. G. O. Phipps,” Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters (Boston: William Crosby and Company, 1842), Feb., 1842, Vol. VI No. 7, p. 92 ff.
(2) “Address of Rev. Joseph Osgood,” Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ordination of Rev. Jospeh Osgood, D.D. (Cohasset: privately printed, 1892).
(3) Joseph Osgood, “Discourse.”
(4) “Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Wedding of Rev. and Mrs. Joseph Osgood, Cohasset, Thursday, May 20, 1869” (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, Printers, 1869), p. 14.
(4) Henry O. Hildreth, compiler, Norfolk County Manual and Year Book for 1876 (Dedham, Mass., 1877), p. 54.
(5) Tower manuscript
(6) Joseph Osgood, “Discourse.”
(7) Tower manuscript, p. 101.
(8) Tower manuscript, p. 118.
(9) Tower manuscript, p. 122.
(10) Membership as recorded in the annual Directories of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
(11) Information about Roscoe Trueblood from First Parish archives, and reminiscences of First Parish members.
(12) Information about Ed Atkinson from First Parish archives, and reminiscences of First Parish members.
(13) Information about Elizabeth Tarbox and interim ministers from First Parish archives, and reminiscences of First Parish members.
(14) Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Association, “UUA Clergy Removed or Resigned from Fellowship with Completed or Pending Misconduct Investigations,” www.uua.org/uuagovernance/committees/mfc/clergy-misconduct-investigations accessed November 21, 2022.
(15) Information about Jan Carlson-Bull and interim ministers from First Parish archives, and reminiscences of First Parish members.
(16) Information about Jill Cowie from First Parish archives, reminiscences of First Parish members, and other sources.
(17) Roscoe E. Trueblood, I Was Alive and Glad (Cohasset, Mass.: First Parish, 1969).

First Parish in Cohasset and Its Ministers

Sermon copyright (c) 2022 Dan Harper. Delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon text may contain typographical errors. The sermon as preached included a significant amount of improvisation. Notes to the sermon appear as end notes.

Readings

In 1892, our congregation celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Joseph Osgood’s ministry. One of the speakers at the celebration, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, described four of Osgood’s most important teachers and mentors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hale then went on to say:

“But there is a greater instructor than either of these four, that has been training [your minister]. That is, the parish and the church to which he came in this town of Cohasset. A man comes as green as grass into a parish, and around him are all sorts and conditions of men and women. But all those men and women are ‘kings and priests.’ That word in the Book of Revelation is not a bit of flamboyant prophecy; it is the living truth of the gospel of Jesus: ‘You are all kings and all priests, and you are all ordained to this ministry.’ Unconsciously, year by year, while the green boy goes up into the pulpit and preaches as well as he can; unconsciously, week by week, all these people are preaching to him and are training him. And you can judge them by him and him by them.”

The second reading is from Leadership for the Twenty-first Century by Joseph C. Rost (Greenwood Publishing, 1991):

“Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….

“…The leadership relationship is multidirectional. The relationship involves interactions that are vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and circular. This means that (1) anyone can be a leader and/or a follower; (2) followers persuade leaders and other followers, as do leaders; (3)leaders and followers may change places … and (4) there are many different relationships that can make up the overall relationship that is leadership. … If a relationship is one-sided, unidirectional, and one-on-one, those are clear signs that the relationship is not leadership.”

Sermon: “Our Congregation and Its Ministers”

Our congregation’s relationships with its ministers proved to be far more complex and interesting than I had originally thought. Today’s sermon will only take us up into the nineteenth century. Then you’ll have to return on November 28 to hear the rest of the history.

As I talk about some of the past ministers of our congregation, I’m going to take a somewhat unconventional approach. Instead of just talking about the minister, I’m going to focus on the relationship between the minister and the congregation. We habitually say, “Rev. Nehemiah Hobart did thus and so.” That’s what’s known as the “Great Man” theory of leadership: things get accomplished by a few Great Men, and everyone else just follows along. But from what I’ve seen, that’s not how it works in real life.

For example, when I was in my teens and twenties, the minister of my Unitarian Universalist church was Rev. Dana Greeley. He had come to our congregation after serving as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, where he had a reputation of being something of a benevolent dictator. However, my church had plenty of strong lay leaders. Those lay leaders influenced Dana Greeley just as much as, or more than, he influenced them. If Dana Greeley had a reputation as a benevolent dictator, perhaps that was only because he was smart enough to know when to follow the lead of the lay leaders.

It is not the minister who rules things in a Unitarian Universalist congregation. The relationship between the minister and the congregation, and the relationships within the congregation — that’s where the actual power lies. With that firmly in mind, let’s look at some of the ministers of First Parish in Cohasset.

Our first minister was Nehemiah Hobart. He was the congregation’s third choice; two other ministers had turned them down before they asked Hobart to become minister of what was then called the Second Precinct of Hingham. Even after we became an independent congregation, both the congregation and the minister kept close ties to the parent church in Hingham. The minister there, Ebenezer Gay, was one of the earliest proponents of the liberal theology that became Unitarianism, and Gay and Hobart had been classmates and remained close friends.

Lay leaders also influenced the close ties between the two congregations. One of the key leaders who formed the Second Precinct was John Jacob, one of the wealthiest landowners in Hingham. John became the first deacon of the Second Precinct, the most powerful position of lay leadership. John’s brother Peter, the well-to-do owner of a fulling mill, was a deacon in the parent church. Both John and Peter Jacob were admirers of Ebenezer Gay and his liberal theology. It was only natural, then, that Nehemiah Hobart should fall into Ebenezer Gay’s theological orbit. And to further cement Hobart’s ties with liberal theology, he married one of Peter Jacob’s daughters, and then named his first son after John Jacob. Historian Robert J. Wilson writes: “The secession of the Cohasset parish provides, in some respects, an illustration of how the Hingham oligarchy managed to assimilate inevitable changes with a minimum of disruption.” (1)

After Nehemiah Hobart’s untimely death from a stroke, at age 43, (2) our congregation called John Fowle. Once again, the congregation had difficulty choosing from among several desirable candidates, but at last they settled on Fowle, who possessed some “considerable genius, and handsome acquirements.” Fowle’s ministry began during the Great Awakening. Theologically, he sided with the so-called Old Lights, that is, those who did not approve of evangelical excesses; in this sense, Fowle, like his contemporary Charles Chauncy, may be considered a proto-Unitarian. In taking this theological position, he was probably generally aligned with his congregation. However, he was nervous, irritable, peevish, and irregular. (3) This turned many in the congregation against him, and the congregation voted to dismiss him in 1746.

It seems possible that Fowle suffered from some kind of mental illness. His later career was marked by ups and downs. In 1751, he went to England, converted to Episcopalianism, and was sent back to Norwalk, Connecticut, as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. He was given a large salary, but spent so lavishly he was soon hopelessly in debt. By 1756, he was dismissed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for selling the mission library. He then became a small-time merchant. He died in jail 1764, and it seems likely he was imprisoned for debt. (4)

It’s important for us to know what happened to Fowle after Cohasset dismissed him. He seems to have had some real talent as a minister, and a genuine religious impulse. But clearly the profession of ministry was not a good fit for him, and our congregation was wise to dismiss him.

Our next minister, John Brown, was called to this congregation in 1747. In 1749, at age 25, Brown got into a squabble with Daniel Tower, a lay leader who was then age 57. The young pastor wanted to introduce a new psalm book, Tate and Brady. But Daniel Tower wanted to stay with the old Sternhold and Hopkins psalm book. Full members of the church (that is, those had signed the covenant and were admitted into communion) voted on the issue, and a close majority favored adopting the new psalm book. Daniel Tower then accused John Brown of taking “improper methods” to induce two members of the church to vote for the new psalm book. An investigation found Tower’s accusation to be unjust, and he was forced to “humbly acknowledge [his] fault and earnestly request the forgiveness of my Make, of my Pastor, and of the Church.” (5) From this story, we can see that the minister at this time was not a benevolent dictator; rather, he was one among several leaders in a democracy. This story also shows how passions could run high, and that democracy sometimes devolved into bare-knuckle politics.

John Brown was one of the earliest ministers in New England to be considered a Unitarian. John Adams recalled that Brown was a Unitarian by the 1750s. (6) I don’t think we can claim, with any certainty, that Brown led his congregation to Unitarianism. Instead, given that there are no stories of divisive theological conflicts in Cohasset during his ministry, I think it more likely that Brown and the congregation moved together towards Unitarianism. I also find it interesting that both Cohasset and Hingham had ministers known for their liberal theology. Ebenezer Gay, the minister in Hingham at this time, was later considered a Unitarian, and perhaps Nehemiah Hobart, had he lived as long as Gay, would also have been considered a Unitarian. For some reason as yet undiscovered, this little corner of Massachusetts proved fertile ground for liberal religion.

By 1775, at the eve of the American Revolution, Brown was a vocal Patriot. According to the Narrative History of Cohasset: “Some of the cynical sort scoffed at the enthusiasm of the patriots. When on one occasion the pastor, John Brown, urged men to enlist, one of these cynics taunted him upon urging others to do what he himself dared not do; but the warlike preacher raised his cane and threatened to thrash the ‘old Tory’ who insulted him.” (7) In 1775, every Massachusetts town had both Patriots and Tories. Clearly, the majority of Cohasset residents were aligned with the Patriot cause, and the minister was aligned with the majority. Did Brown lead the congregation, or did the congregation lead Brown? It seems likely that there was a mutual influence.

John Brown died in November, 1791, and three months later the congregation called Josiah Crocker Shaw as their next minister. He was the son of a nearby minister. Shaw quickly built a large expensive house on Highland Ave. But his was a brief ministry, for the parish records state that on June 12, 1796, “Mr. Shaw left his charge and the ministry.” The next day, Joel Wilcutt recorded in his diary: “this Day the Revnd Josiah C. Shaw went away from this town.” And on June 22, Wilcutt recorded: “Mr. Shaw’s House and furniture sold at auction.” (8)

Why was Shaw so suddenly dismissed? Writing in 1954, Gilbert Tower speculated that Shaw got into financial problems by spending too much on his new house. However, a month later, on July 23, 1796, his aunt Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody wrote about him in a letter, saying his “Conduct is too atrocious to admit of an excuse.” And within a few years both he and his wife were married to other people. Most likely, Shaw was dismissed by the congregation for adultery. (9) This is an example of the congregation taking charge, when a minister does not live up to its standards. This is, in fact, exactly what is supposed to happen in our type of congregation: the congregation has the ultimate authority both to call and to dismiss their ministers.

Jacob Flint was our next minister. Flint was respected and liked by his most of the congregation, but he was not a particularly good preacher. A later minister in Cohasset, Joseph Osgood, reported that Flint’s “manner of delivery in the pulpit was said to be slow and monotonous. He had an excellent ear and voice for singing. His brother, Dr. James Flint [the minister in] Salem, used to say to him that ‘he ought to sing his sermons, and not preach them.’” (10) Every minister has their strengths and weaknesses: Flint wrote well but spoke poorly. The congregation must intervene when a weakness becomes a major failing. As it happened, for Flint the big problem was not his poor speaking but his liberal theology.

In the 1820s, during Flint’s tenure in Cohasset, ours was one of many Massachusetts congregations that experienced conflict between the orthodox Calvinists or Trinitarians, who asserted the truth of predestination and the divinity of Jesus, and the liberals or Unitarians, who firmly believed in the capacity of human will to do good and who firmly disbelieved that Jesus was the same as God. Most Cohasset residents gradually moved towards Unitarianism, but those who were orthodox Trinitarians remained firm.

Jacob Flint was one of those who grew more liberal in his theology, influenced in part by his congregation and in part by his more talented younger brother James Flint. On December 7, 1823, Flint preached a sermon titled, “A Discourse, in which the Doctrine of the Trinity is examined, and some remarks made on Calvinism.” Much of the congregation had a favorable response to this sermon. At the request of some of those parishioners, it was even printed for wider circulation.

But not everyone in the congregation was pleased with liberal theology, and some of them developed a personal dislike for Jacob Flint. The 1895 “Manual of the Second Congregational Church of Cohasset” takes up the story from the perspective of the orthodox party: “The antagonism aroused by [Flint’s] doctrinal attitude was still further increased by personal resentments; until, in the summer of the year 1824, there was an irreconcilable breach in the church. More than a score of disaffected members of the parish were unwilling to worship any longer in ‘Rev. Dr. Flint’s meetinghouse,’ ‘on account’ as the records say, ‘of his heretical Unitarian sentiments.’” (11)

If the stories that come down to us are true, Flint continued to fan the flames of resentment after this breach. Supposedly he would look out the windows from the pulpit and see who was going into the new church. Upon meeting people of the orthodox party on the street, he would ignore them — and they would ignore him.

I am tempted to be gently critical of Jacob Flint for not rising above personal animosities during this bitter conflict. But it is only human to behave the way he did: to stealthily look to see who was going into the new church; to pretend to ignore those with whom he disagreed. We can observe the same kinds of human behavior in today’s great religious controversy, the battle over abortion, same sex marriage, and gender identity. We like to pretend these are political battles, but it looks exactly like a religious conflict to me. And just like the conflict between the Unitarians and Trinitarians in 1824 Cohasset, today’s religious conflict divides families and causes people to snub one another. So while it’s tempting to judge Jacob Flint for not rising above personal animosities, we might listen to the Biblical injunction to judge not lest we ourselves be judged. And I can’t resist pointing out that now our congregation and Second Congregational Church are allies in today’s religious controversies. We have come a long way from the bitter divisions of the 1820s.

The division between First Parish and Second Congregational Church provides a convenient stopping point for this sermon. I’ve only covered a century of the relationships between our congregation and its ministers. You’ll have to wait until November 27 to hear the rest of the story.

Before I close, let me reiterate what I said when I began. I do not believe in the “Great Man” theory of history. This old myth ignores lived experience. In the case of our congregation, we have undoubtedly had some excellent ministers, and we have also had some poor ministers. But the story of our congregation cannot be reduced to the story of its (mostly male) ministers.

To paraphrase Rev. Edward Everett Hale: Year by year, ministers go up into the pulpit and preach as well as they can. Yet the whole time, week after week, the people of the congregation are preaching to the minister, and are training and educating the minister.

The history of leadership within our congregation is actually the story of a web of interdependent relationships encompassing everyone who has been a part of this congregation over the past three hundred years.

Notes to the sermon:

General information is taken from the following histories:

Bigelow, E. Victor Bigelow. A Narrative History of the Town of Cohasset. Cohasset: Committee on Town History, 1898.
Cole, William R. “One Hundred Fifty Years of the Old Meeting House in Cohasset, Mass., 1747-1847.” Boston: George Ellis, 1897.
Flint, Jacob. “Two Discourses Containing the History of the Church and Society in Cohasset.” Boston: Monroe and Francis, 1822.
Osgood, Joseph. “A Discourse Delivered in Cohasset … on the 25th Anniversary of His Ordination as Pastor.” Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1884.
Tower, Gilbert. Unpublished manuscript, 1956.

(1) Robert J. Wilson, The Benevolent Deity: Ebenezer Gay and the Rise of Rational Religion in New England, 1696-1787 (Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2015), pp. 48-50.
(2) Some recent histories have claimed that Hobart died of epileptic fits. “Epileptic” is a misreading of the word “apoplectic,” the term that appears in the early histories. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “apoplexy” as “A malady, very sudden in its attack, which arrests more or less completely the powers of sense and motion; it is usually caused by an effusion of blood or serum in the brain….” Apoplexy is not a precise medical term, but it is most certainly not epilepsy. “Stroke” is probably the closest modern equivalent, so that’s the term I use here.
(3) Using the words of Flint (1822), who may have known Fowle and certainly knew people who remembered him.
(4) Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 9, pp. 151 ff.
(5) This story comes from Tower (1956).
(6) Letter from John Adams dated May 15, 1815, quoted in Samuel A. Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith, vol. I: The Prophets (Boston: American Unitarian Assoc., 1910), p. 2.
(7) Bigelow (1898), p. 288. In 1775, Brown was only 51. I’ve found nothing to explain why he needed a cane at that relatively young age; there were plenty of militiamen in their 50s and 60s. This story may be apocryphal.
(8) These excerpts from Joel Wilcutt’s Diary appear in Tower (1956).
(9) Massachusetts Historical Society, Adams Papers Digital Edition, Adams Family Correspondence vol. 11, “Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody to Abigail Adams,” footnote 2, www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/volume/AFC11/pageid/AFC11p336 accessed 17 October 2022.
(10) Osgood, 1884.
(11) This quote from the 1895 “Manual of the Second Congregational Church of Cohasset” appears in Tower, 1956.