Monthly Archives: February 2006

Community response to last night’s hate crime in New Bedford

I’m posting the following press release, just received from the Marrriage Equality Coalition of SouthCoast. Link to local press coverage of the story. Please come to the vigil if you feel safe doing so. For those of you elsewhere, your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

PRESS RELEASE

Vigil to be held at Puzzles Lounge, 426 North Front St., New Bedford, MA

7 PM Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006

A vigil will be held at Puzzles Lounge, the site of an anti gay assault early this morning. The unprovoked attack by a single individual wielding a knife and a gun left three men seriously injured with face, head and chest wounds.

The Marriage Equality Coalition of the SouthCoast, in conjunction with other community and religious groups, is organizing the vigil to protest not just this horrendous hate crime, but violence of any kind in our community.

The ongoing campaign to deny gay men and lesbians the right to marry has resulted in the portrayal of the gay community as “less than equal” by some, and has included hateful, bigoted rhetoric. When groups of people are characterized as “second class”, they then can more easily become targets of others’ rage and anger.

We deplore violence of any kind in our community. Gay men and lesbians deserve to live their lives peacefully and securely, without being targeted solely because of their sexual orientation.

Contact person: Bev Baccelli
Marriage Equality Coalition of the SouthCoast
Tel. 508-965-3996

Why church administration is important, 3

This is the third part of a series on how church administration can be a ministry.

Early on in this series, I mentioned that I believe there is a fundamental connection between theology and church life. Having said that, it’s worth exploring one or two different theologies and their potential connection to church life. Since I’m most familiar with my own tradition of Unitarian Universalism, the theologies I’ll explore are common in my tradition. Specifically, I’d like to explore feminist theology and ecological theology.

(A parenthetical note to my co-religionists: What usually poses as “theology” in our tradition is really religious ideology. Thus, when hard-line humanists engage in power struggles with hard-line Christians, they are struggling over power, not over theology. We can make this obvious in this particular example by asking two simple questions. We ask the hard-line humanists, “You say your theology is humanist, but what kind of humanist theology exactly? –existential, naturalistic humanist, Renaissance humanist, or what?” Then we ask the hard-line Christians, “You say your theology is Christian, but what kind of Christian theology exactly? –liberation, narrative, antinomian, or what?” As the hard-liners sputter and are unable to articulate a clear theology, it will quickly become clear that the labels “Christian” and “humanist” are smoke-screens to hide naked power struggles.)

Feminist theology poses interesting questions for an administrative ministry. Most obviously, feminist theology asks: why is it that men and boys generally have more power than women and girls, even in congregations where women are in the majority? But feminism also asks us to confront some other issues. There’s the continued existence of clergy sexual misconduct in our churches, almost entirely perpetrated by male ministers, and feminist theology asks why this is so. There’s the continued existence of power structures based upon hierarchical male-dominant models, and feminist theology asks if we can’t find power structures more in line with our professed theology. There’s the marginalization of programs for children, where religious education is treated as “women’s work” and nine-tenths of professional religious educators are women who are paid substantially less than ministers, and feminist theology asks we it is that we devalue children in this way.

Feminist theology poses interesting questions, while at the same time offering hope-filled possibilities in administration. Feminist theology suggests that sexual misconduct thrives on secrecy, and it offers hope-filled possibilities for openness and transparency in administration. Feminist theology implies that we can and should experiment with more equitable power structures within our churches, and to the hope-filled administrator it suggests that management by empowerment is a better administrative model than traditional command-and-control management. Feminist theology calls our attention to the marginalization of children and teenagers in our churches, suggesting to administrators that young people should be at the center of our churches, not the margins, and that so doing will ultimately make our churches healthier, safer places all around.

Turning to ecological theology, we find that it, too, poses some interesting questions for an administrative ministry. For example, if administration is concerned with safety, doesn’t that also imply that we should be concerned with the safety of the whole ecosystem around us? Thus, we should be concerned about the toxicity of our church buildings but also about the toxicity of the surrounding community where our church members live. And like feminist theology, ecological theology also asks us to consider the role of power structures; if the current secular power structures have gotten us into such an ecological mess, why on earth would we want to mimic them in our churches? And since ecological theology has pointed out how people of color suffer disproportionately from ecological disasters, it asks us to consider the role of racism in our churches. I have just begun my own exploration of ecological theology, and can’t say as much about it as I can about feminist theology, but I’m sure as I begin to try to answer its questions in my administrative ministry, I will understand it better.

That is, of course, what happens in an administrative ministry. Rather than simply preaching about theology, an administrative minister puts theology into action. Words are powerful, yes, and my own Unitarian Universalist tradition has “preaching to Word” at its historical core. But actually putting theology into action in a church community turns out to be theologically rich: you try to administer theologically, and in so doing you learn where you aren’t quite clear enough in your theology, so you reflect on your theology some more, and then try implementing it again.

To be continued

Memory

This isn’t really my memory, it’s my father’s memory. But the story has become so much a part of our family’s folklore that I almost feel as if I had been there, and had witnessed the whole thing myself. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly when all this took place. My grandmother, my father’s mother, died in the fall of 1981, so it must have been that summer, the summer of 1981.

The whippoorwills had all left ten years earlier. They used to nest in the hay fields behind our house and call in the evenings — whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will — but then one summer we didn’t hear them any more. Sometimes we’d say, Remember when the whippoorwills used to call at in the summer evenings? And one of us would reply, Boy, we haven’t heard one of them in years. That summer, a whippoorwill returned.

Then what happened to my father must have taken place after I had returned to college. I have this vague memory of him telling me about this over the phone as I sat in the darkness on a hot, steamy Philadelphia evening. His story went like this:

For several nights, he had been awakened by the whippoorwill. It was loud, as if it were right next to the house. That it would be that close was surprising; even more surprisingly, its loud calls didn’t awaken either my mother or my younger sister. My mother tended to be a light sleeper; my sister a little less so; but dad usually sleeps like a log, and only the alarm clock can awaken him. Yet he was the only one whom the whippoorwill awakened.

One night, it sounded unbelievably loud, it sounded as if it were closer than it ever had been before. Dad was awakened by its ceaseless calling — whip-poor-will whip-poor-will whip-poor-will whip-poor-will whip-poor-will — so loud he couldn’t get back to sleep, and no one else was awake. He got up and walked down the hall to the bathroom, and stopped to look out the hall window, over the roof of the porch. The moon shone brightly down, and there it was: the whippoorwill, sitting on the porch roof, right outside the hall window, calling and calling and calling.

He stood there watching it for awhile. They’re shy, nocturnal, well-camouflaged birds and maybe one in a thousand people ever sees one. Dad, who is Pennsylvania Dutch, remembered an old superstition: if you see a whippoorwill, someone close to you will die. He stood there in the moonlight watching and listening to the whippoorwill, with maybe a little chill running down his spine.

You know the rest of the story. Dad’s mother, who was in a nursing home that summer, died in October. As much as I like birds, as much as I’d like to see a whippoorwill, that seems too high a price to pay to see one.

Home Depot in New Bedford

Best commentary yet on Home Depot’s plans for the Fairhaven Mills site in New Bedford is a letter to the Standard-Times by architect Ricardo Romão Santos. After pointing out that Home Depot has made architectural concessions in other communities, he concludes by saying:

Those of us who see a greater potential in the Fairhaven Mills site have been wondering how to engage Home Depot officials in a dialogue that would at least result in saving the historic Fairhaven Mills structures. But they simply won’t do it. It would be fair to say that Home Depot is not in the least concerned with our community. If New Bedford’s relationship with Home Depot is starting on this wrong footing, I wonder how it will end.

Obviously, Home Depot sees New Bedford as a poor, disempowered community who will roll over and play dead, while they do what they want….

Memory

When my older sister and I were quite small — this was before our younger sister was born — our mother used to tell us stories sometimes before bed. I remember one summer, on some hot summer nights, lying in bed in my tiny bedroom, I suppose we were in there because I was younger. My mother sat on the edge of the bed and told us a long, involved story of the Blue City. I wish now I could remember the story, although maybe it’s best I don’t; it may not have been nearly as mysterious and evocative as I remember it to be. My bedroom faced east, and the last light of the sun reflected off the old white Hodgman house across the street and filled the room with gold-tinged light. In those days, whippoorwills still called in the summer evenings; but whippoorwills have long been extirpated as breeding birds in that part of Massachusetts, and the hay fields and apple orchards behind where we lived have been covered by sprawl in the form of low-density starter mansions, and indeed that modest house we lived in was recently torn down and replaced by a three-thousand square foot house. It’s still there in memory: the fading light, the hope that I’d hear a whippoorwill, the Blue City.