Category Archives: Liberal religion

30 sec. GA update #3

In this episode, I ask three people why they are attending General Assembly, and get three different answers. (55 sec. — yes, I know it’s over 30 seconds….)

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Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

UU Bloggers meet

Chris Walton, editor of the UU World magazine, and Deb Weiner, Director of Electronic Communications, both of the Unitarian Universalist Association, hosted a reception of Unitarian Universalist bloggers.

I was fascinated to hear about the different ways Unitarian Universalists (UUs) participate in the blogosphere — including writing a personal blog, writing a blog as a religious professional, political blogging, Live Journal blogging, and writing as a regular contributor for someone else’s blog.

Below you’ll find a list of the bloggers who showed up….

Continue reading →

Social enterprise software

The Social Enterprise Alliance sells business plan software for non-profits that include earned income ventures:

Business Plan Pro-Social Enterprise Edition was developed in partnership with Palo Alto Software specifically for nonprofit organizations as an easy-to-use blueprint and interactive planning tool for successful earned income ventures.

The wizard-driven software produces a social enterprise plan that includes market analysis, strategy and implementation description, social return on investment, sales forecast, personnel plan, and financial statements.

Link.

(Not useful for most churches, I know, but I’m associated with a couple of organizations that might find this useful. Looks like it’s Windows-only.)

General Assembly 30 sec. update #1

Tomorrow I’ll be on a plane headed to Portland, Oregon, to attend General Assembly, the big annual denominational gathering. I’m going to try to do thirty second updates each day of General Assembly, along with written posts. In this first update, I talk about how I hate traveling.

uuaga07

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

How big is our church?

It’s notoriously difficult to accurately measure how big a church is.

Official membership may be defined differently from one church to the next, thus not allowing accurate comparisons; criteria for what constitutes a member or standards for membership may vary widely not just from church to church, but over time within the same church; and membership can be affected by outside factors such as denominational dues being pegged to membership (which tends to lower the number of members counted). I believe official membership has an unacceptably high margin of error, perhaps as high as 50%, and so I tend to discount it as a useable metric.

Other measurements have been devised, and the most common in mainline and liberal Protestant congregations is “active membership.” Active membership is determined by counting the total number of people present in the building during weekend worship services each week, and taking the yearly average. Margin of error is usually under 10%, as long as records are taken every week. However, active membership does not count other people who might be active in the congregation, e.g., people who are active with the Women’s Alliance but who do not come to worship services regularly.

Given the often gross inaccuracies of these two methods of determining congregation size, my feeling is that we need additional metrics. Since congregational size is such a slippery concept, I suspect it is best determined by using several different metrics together.

One obvious additional metric might be to determine the number of volunteer hours people contribute to the congregation. This would take into account all the people who seem to feel that the church’s mission and goals are important enough that they are willing to devote their precious volunteer hours to the church — and it would include those who may not come to the worship service. It will be difficult to accurately measure volunteer hours, and the best we could hope for is an approximate measurement. However, it should be possible to come up with some basic techniques to make a reasonable estimate of volunteer hours, e.g., determining the number of people who volunteered in any capacity during the year, and estimating the average number of hours per volunteer. Even counting the number of volunteers alone would provide useful information.

Another obvious metric for determining church size is obvious:– determine the size and sources of operating budget. The size of the operating budget should tell us the potential impact the church could have on its members and on the wider community. We would also need to know the sources of the operating budget, broken down into member contributions, endowment income, rental income, and grants — a smaller percentage of operating budget coming from member income would most likely indicate low member commitment and/or fewer members.

One or two additional metrics would be very useful for those of us who want to take organizational development and growth seriously. It’s too easy to say, “Oh, there’s just such a good feeling around this church so we must be growing.” Good feelings are important, but in my experience there is not a strong correlation between good feelings and growth — good feelings may (or may not) be a necessary precondition for growth, but in most cases good feelings do not lead to or cause growth.

Just thinking out loud….

In the June 12, 2007, issue of Christian Century magazine, I was particularly struck by the opening paragraphs of an essay titled “Unqualified Christians” — you may find it hard to get through the first three sentences, but see if you can keep reading:

You may find it strange that I, an African American, do not believe in interracial marriage. I do not believe in interracial dating or even in having friends of other races. I do not espouse trying to understand racial differences or promoting awareness of other races. I can say all of this unabashedly because I do not believe in race!

Race is a relatively recent construction conveniently created at precisely the moment when nations from the European continent were setting out to colonize the world. The construction is a precursor to an economic policy, not a result of scientific study. It came from the desire of some people to legitimate the taking of land from others. Because of perceived “racial” differences, people could be set on a hierarchical ladder of superior and inferior types; those declared “superior” then had an “obligation” to tend to the interests (natural resources and labor) of the “inferiors.” With this thinking, the “enlightened” peoples of Europe colonized the “primitive” peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Such scriptural passages as Genesis 9 (the “curse of Ham/Canaan”) and Genesis 10 (the “table of nations”) gave theological significance to theories of subspecies variation and to a God-ordained system of enslaved peoples and a “master race.” Because the genesis of the word is spurious, I suggest that the concept of race is problematic. Even the most innocuous use of the concept perpetuates the notion that perceived differences in appearance relate to actual differences in intellect, criminal potential, and sexuality. Hence, to suggest that the theory of race is legitimate is a racist proposition, one that leads many to conclude that perceived differences in appearance are consequential for human valuation.

Towards the end of the short essay, the author, Rodney S. Sadler Jr., writes:

In the church we are too often isolated in segregated communities as “qualified Christians.” We are “black” Christians, “white” Christians, “Korean” Christians, and “Latino” Christians worshipping in separate sanctuaries….

Within Unitarian Universalism, it can be risky to state that race is an invalid construct. If you say that even the most innocuous use of the concept of race is a problem, there’s a good chance you’ll be accused of racism. For good reason — saying that “race” doesn’t exist makes you sound like the people who try to gut affirmative action and civil rights legislation by saying “race” doesn’t exist. Yet at the same time, I think maybe Sadler is right — even though to admit that Sadler is right might be to question the legitimacy of such beloved anti-racism strategies as breaking into racial identity groups.

“Race” may not exist, but we are still left with the problem that the effects of racism are quite real. So how do we address the real effects of an unreal construct? Sadler’s answer, from his Christian perspective, is to affirm the primacy of the Christian’s identity as a Christian: “Christ’s death has radically altered the nature of our identities so that who we are from the world’s point of view is no irrelevant as a determinant of power.” I don’t share Sadler’s theology, so that won’t work for me.

But Sadler also points out how his theology plays out in real life:– he claims that his theology forces us to question “persistent inequalities in our nation that are often seen but rarely examined.” Here’s how I’d put it in my theological language:– my religious perspective, which claims that all persons are equally worthy of love, requires of me that I understand and address persistent inequalities between persons.

In other words, it is possible to ask hard questions like — Why do certain persons get paid less just because they have darker skin? — without falling into the trap of using the suspect concept of “race” to frame the question. Sadler’s essay raises some interesting possibilities for new ways to address the persistent inequalities that exist among us.