Two posts about the same worship service at Micah’s Porch, a Unitarian Universalist emerging church/ mission in Chicago:
In a comment on ck’s blog, I noted that this sound not unlike what Rev. Hank Peirce was doing in the 1990’s with his punk rock worship services, held at a club in the Boston area. Except that Hank wasn’t “preparing to launch a spiritually progressive church,” he was just holding worship service — oh, and the Ramones are not U2.
In an earlier post, I stated that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board of Trustees cut off funding to the Steering Committee of Young Religious Unitarian Universalists. This statement was incorrect. The cut-off of funding to continental YRUU was not an action taken by the Board, it was taken by UUA staff. A statement on this issue has been issued by UUA staff today: Link.
In emotionally-charged issues like this one, misinformation can be harmful, and I apologize to my readers that I did not check my facts before writing my post.
Update: A denominational politics wonk has informed me that UUA staff makes funding decisions, which are reviewed by the Board’s Finance Committee but rarely challenged in practice. The funding issue should be seen as separate from YRUU’s status as a sponsored organization; sponsored organizations are designated by the Board, not UUA staff; and at this point, YRUU maintains its status as a sponsored organization.
Yikes.
A post by my evil alter ego, Mr. Crankypants, has managed to annoy people. Here’s the situation: The Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) correction, UUA staff has cut off funding for the Steering Committee for the continental Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU). Mr. Crankypants tried to make the point that sometimes organizations have to cut back on programs that are no longer serving large numbers of stakeholders, and he drew an analogy between YRUU and General Assembly (GA), suggesting that maybe funding for GA could be cut as well. In one fell swoop, Mr. C. managed to annoy both the fans of GA, and the fans of YRUU.
But in his fiscally-conservative zeal for budget-cutting, Mr. C.’s post managed to ignore the deeper issues that came into play with the funding cut-off to YRUU. I’d like to list a few of the deeper issues that I see, to try to make it clear how the death-rattle of continental YRUU is merely one symptom of deeper problems among us. So here are just four of these deeper issues:
(1) Compared to mainline and evangelical churches, local Unitarian Universalist congregations have low aspirations in regard to allocating resources (financial, staff, and volunteer resources) to youth ministry. Evangelical and mainline churches aspire to having a youth minister, and often when a church is ready to hire a second minister that minister will have primary responsibility for youth ministries. Contras that with Unitarian Universalist congregations, where the norm is to aspire to a ten-hour-a-week “youth advisor,” and then when a church finally hires a second minister that minister is more likely to have primary responsibility for pastoral care for elders, than to have any responsibility for youth ministries.
(2) Compared to any other denomination in the United States, Unitarian Universalist gives less money to their churches, while at the same time we (on average) have higher incomes than most other denominations. This is appalling enough, but this low level of giving is typically coupled with a high level of self-interested entitlement — we want the local church and the denomination to provide high levels of funding to programs we value. This low level of giving, and this high level of self-interested entitlement means that groups that don’t have much money are most likely to find that ministries aimed at them will be cut first. Put this another way: The UUA Board of Trustees is always caught between a rock and a hard place — they face continual funding shortages, while at the same time they receive demands to provide services that directly benefit those who do give money — it’s no wonder they cut funding for YRUU, it’s just a wonder that our selfish denomination didn’t force them to do so much sooner.
(3) The general culture of Unitarian Universalism is to ignore youth and youth ministries. Compared to evangelical and mainline youth ministers, our paid youth advisors are poorly trained. Compared to evangelical and mainline ministers, most Unitarian Universalist ministers lack knowledge of, training in, and passion for youth ministries (I say this as a Unitarian Universalist minister who has spent some years observing his colleagues!). Lay people are just as bad: our local congregations usually consider youth ministries to be an add-on, not a central function of the church, and so budgets for youth ministries are non-existent, or are the first thing to go in budget crunches. Unitarian Universalists often have the self-fulfillingive attitude that “young people don’t want to come to church,” and so they behave in ways that tend to drive youth and young adults out of churches.
Did you know that the largest church in the United States, Willow Creek Church (ave. attendance 20,000 per week), began in 1975 as a youth ministry? Maybe we don’t like youth ministry because we’re afraid it will make us grow….
(4) In terms of theology, Unitarian Universalism is dominated by second-wave feminism (it is no accident that “Spirit of Life,” a second-wave-feminist anthem, is the most favorite hymn among us). Second-wave feminism did wonders for Unitarian Unviersalism in the 1970s and 1980s. But as we have learned from the critiques of womanist and third-wave feminists, second-wave feminism works best for well-to-do white folks who already have significant amounts of money, education, power — and second-wave feminism has been known to shut out people with less money, less education, less racial privilege, etc. I believe our over-reliance on second-wave feminist thinking has tended to seriously restrict access to power in our churches, allowing mostly white, upper-middle-class, middle-aged and older white folks to have power and influence.
Finally, I’d like to say that while it will be easy to keep on ranting and raving about the death of YRUU, I don’t think it will get us anywhere because it won’t address these deeper problems. Instead of ranting, I’d like to suggest that we all need to get active in the budget process of our local congregations and advocate for increased funding of youth ministries; we need to increase our own personal giving to our church to between 2% (for incomes under US$20,000) and 10% (for incomes over $150,000), or a quarter of your discretionary spending for high school and college students; we need to raise our expectations of how we will reach out to youth and young adults. Above all, we all need to do some serious theological work and reflection, because if we can’t articulate the religious reasons why we do youth work, we’re not going to get anywhere — oh, and by the way, if you try to use the “seven principles” to do your theological work for you, remember that they are a product of second-wave feminism, and thus the seven principles are part of the problem not part of the solution.
OK, I’ll stop ranting now — and go and write a check to my local congregation.
Thinking about UU Emergence (an awkward term, but there it is) means thinking about what will draw emerging generations to our churches. I remember when I was a 20-something attending a UU church, many of the cultural references in sermons had no emotional resonance for me: I didn’t get why the Korean War was fought, I didn’t remember the day JFK was shot, etc. Fast forward two decades: now I read Beloit College’s very useful Mindset List, which attempts to help us older folks understand the worldview of this year’s 18-year-olds:
Beloit College’s Mindset List® for the Class of 2011:
Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead…. [etc….]
Beloit’s list is a little tame. Over on the blog Charlie’s Diary, Charles Stross and commenters offer their own additions to the Beloit College list, often from a U.K. perspective:
Nobody they know expects to ever hold a job for more than three years.
Homosexuality has always been legal. Abortion has always been legal….
Nobody they know who is under 36 and not already a home-owner expects to ever be rich enough to buy a house….
Not that preachers can’t make references to Watergate and Sid Vicious, it’s just that we can’t assume that anyone will know what we’re talking about. Maybe that’s a more general issue with postmodern culture: there are fewer things we can assume that everyone knows….
I’m on study leave this week, and today I’ve been doing a little research on 19th C. Universalism in New Bedford.
There’s some good stories buried in the mass (mess?) of data below: material about the Universalist Hosea Knowlton, who was the prosecutor during the Lizzie Borden trial; about Nathan Johnson, an African American who was a member of the Universalist church in New Bedford c. 1840; about Rev. W. C. Stiles, who converted from Universalism to “orthodox” Congregationalism in 1880; and more.
Since this won’t appeal to everyone, I’ll put the bulk of the material after a jump…. Continue reading
Over on FUUSE, Bart Frost reports that the Steering Committee of Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) have announced that their funding will be cut off as of June 30, 2008. Bart reprints the letter from the YRUU Steering Committee Facebook page which announces the funding cut. Bart adds that this effectively means the end of YRUU Steering Committee; and presumably this also means the end of YRUU as a semi-autonomous entity. Fiscal conservative that he is, Mr. Crankypants is quietly pleased by this announcement.
It’s too bad this had to happen, but Mr. C. has the sense that the continental YRUU hierarchy has made itself increasingly irrelevant over the past decade or so. YRUU-sponsored continental events, such as the now-defunct Continental Conference (ConCon), looked like insider events, restricted to the very few teens who could afford to attend; continental YRUU offered local congregations few or no services; and in general, YRUU has been largely irrelevant to the lives of the teens that Mr. Crankypants has gotten to know in local churches. So it makes sense to cut off denominational funding to YRUU, since that money served only a small minority of all Unitarian Universalists; better to reallocate that money to a line item in the denominational budget that serves more people.
Of course, if you’re a fiscal conservative like Mr. Crankypants, you’ll see some parallels here between the YRUU situation, and General Assembly (GA). GA serves a few people very well, but they are a tiny minority of all Unitarian Universalists. GA can feel like an insider event that is often restricted to those who can afford to attend (very few congregations can afford to send lay leaders to GA every year). Although it often does provide a great experience to the lay leaders who can manage to attend, GA offers little in the way of direct services to congregations (and congregations, not individuals, should be the primary stakeholders, since they are the entities that foot the bill for GA). So it makes sense to cut back on funding to GA, since that money only serves a minority of all Unitarian Universalists.
As a fiscal conservative, Mr. Crankypants is fond of appropriate budget cuts (especially when such cuts are made in conjunction with an increased emphasis on fundraising, and in reference to needs of stakeholders). Shall we be pleased that the denomination’s Board of Trustees is taking a hard look at where they might cut fat in the budget? We shall, as much as we may miss that fat when it’s cut. Perhaps the Board will next turn their attention to cutting fat out of GA….
Update, Feb. 14: Follow-up post here. Before you post a comment, please go read the follow-up post.
In the spirit of thinking out loud…
Today’s New York Times has an earnest article about community singalongs (on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section), which got me thinking. The article, “Shared Song, Cultural Memory” by Ben Ratliff, starts off like this:
EAST LANSING, Mich. They meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian [sic] Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called Rise Up Singing. They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.
From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches, and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voice and bring old songs into common memory.
Anyone who has hung around mainline churches, or folk music circles, long enough will recognize the phenomenon Ratliff describes — although I have heard them called “song circles,” or even “Rise Up Singing” after the book that is commonly used, but not “community sings” (which is perhaps a midwestern term?). The Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in has a monthly song circle they call “Rise Up Singing,” which last I heard was attracting about twenty people a month. Summer church camps of all denominations frequently feature informal group singing sessions. It’s a fairly widespread phenomenon, worth paying attention to.
This is a long post, so I’ll put a break here — read on if you’re interested! Continue reading
I’m giving a talk on Puritan-era gravestones this Thursday, and I’ve been obsessing over the slides I’m going to show during the talk. So I had this idea of doing a sort of music video with death’s heads and cherubs and other images from gravestones, all jumping around to the music. Well, I don’t have the time to do something like that, so I made this video instead… which I admit is a little quirky.
[For you gravestone geeks out there, the stones were photographed at Old Hill Burying Ground in Concord, Mass. (most of the ones in the first third of the video, including those carved by the Lamson family and the Worcester family), the old burying ground in Acushnet, Mass. (many of the broken stones are from there, including the one that appears to be carved by one of Stevens family from Newport), the Naskatucket graveyard in Fairhaven, Mass. (including another possible Stevens stone and the phenomenal sunrise stone towards the end), and Westport Friends burying ground (the granite stone marked “R.B” comes from there).]
2:13.
Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.
This must have happened when I was in fourth or fifth grade; my older sister Jean would have been in sixth or seventh grade, and my younger sister Abby would have been a baby. We had all finished dinner, and we were sitting around the dinner table talking. We must have been talking about school and our teachers, because somehow we asked dad about the teachers he had had when he was a kid. (Mom didn’t get involved in this conversation; perhaps she was dealing with Abby.) Dad said he could only remember a few of his teachers. Jean and I said we could remember all of our teachers, and then we each proceeded to name them all. And I have a vivid memory of sitting there at one end of that dining room table thinking to myself, “How can Dad possibly forget his teachers? I’ll always remember my teachers.”
Here I am, now about the same age as Dad was at the time of that dinner table conversation. Can I remember all my elementary school teachers now? Here are the ones I can remember: Miss Sheehan (whom I didn’t like one bit), Mrs. Blanchard (whom I adored, and who read to us from the “Twilight Animal Series” books every day), Mr. Hoffman (whom I had two years in a row, and whom I liked, but who failed to teach me arithmetic). But who was my first grade teacher? was her name Mrs. Witcher? or was that my kindergarten teacher? — So much for always remembering all my elementary school teachers.
How old was I when I began to forget my teachers?