Two “UU franchise” scenarios

A number of people have contacted me to ask for further clarification of Mr. Crankypants’s modest proposal for the Unitarian Universalist franchise system. I’m not sure I want to be in the position of clarifying the fulminations of my evil alter ego (mostly I just wish he’d go away), but perhaps I can clarify things a little by proposing a couple of scenarios to help us think through the issues at hand….

Scenario One

Here I am, the assistant minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto. We currently get somewhere around 2 to 4 newcomers each week.

Suddenly we figure out how to retain all those newcomers as well as increasing the average attendance of current members and friends, and within a year we grow to an average attendance of 250 adults and 125 children and youth each week. Even though we add a third worship service on Sunday evening, and rent additional space for Sunday school from the retirement community next door, we experience serious overcrowding — and we keep on attracting and retaining newcomers. So we decide to do what we did in the 1950s when we experienced similar serious overcrowding — we decide to spin off one or more new congregations to relieve our overcrowding. Maybe we’ll start a new congregation in Los Altos, next door to us, where there is no Unitarian Universalist congregation.

So we take a look at where our people are coming from. To our surprise, we discover that the largest contingent of people is driving down from Belmont and surrounding towns; these people drive past the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Redwood City to get to our church, and they don’t drive north to the Unitarian Universalist church in San Mateo even though it’s closer. So we decide to start a new congregation in Belmont, but when we look we find the best place to rent space is actually in San Mateo.

By now the San Mateo church has heard about our plans. They don’t want us to open another congregation in San Mateo. They want us to keep looking, and find space in Belmont. We tell them that the space we found is near the Hillsdale Shopping Center, at the far south end of the city (the existing church is close to the northern border of San Mateo) — and we are bursting at the seams, we can’t wait any longer. So we open the new congregation anyway, and the new congregation immediately has an average attendance of 125 adults and 50 children.

Questions for Scenario One:
(1.1) In this fictional scenario, do you think it was right for the Palo Alto church to open the new congregation in San Mateo over the objections of the San Mateo church? Why?
(1.2) What if we found a location three blocks away from the San Mateo church — would that change your answer to question one? If so, why?

Scenario Two

Districts are the primary gatekeepers for new congregations — you have to have district recognition in order to for the Unitarian Universalist Association to recognize you as an emerging congregation or a new congregation. So in this scenario, Pacific Central District decides to come up with explicit guidelines about where and how you can set up new congregations. They settle on the following guidelines:

Assume that 0.4% of the total population in California are either actual or potential Unitarian Universalists. Each congregation calculates its average annual attendance (adults and children) for the 12 months of 2008. Then, based on the population density of the surrounding area, they lay out the boundaries of their service area, such that their service area includes a population equal to their average annual attendance divided by 0.004. Then the district sets up a rule that no outside group may start a new Unitarian Universalist congregation within the boundaries of another congregation’s service area (although a congregation could start a branch congregation within its own service area). If your congregation’s average attendance declines next year, you must shrink the boundaries of your service area. If your congregation’s average annual attendance increases, the boundaries of your service area expand. (And yes, we all know that some people will drive right by one UU church to get to another one — but that happens in both directions, so the district is assuming that it will all even out.)

So every congregation in the district goes through this process. The Palo Alto church determines its service area includes the cities of Palo Alto and Los Altos, based on the populations of those cities and the church’s average attendance. The Redwood City church claims most (but not quite all) of Redwood City as its service area. The San Mateo church claims the northern half of the city of San Mateo, and the southern half of the city of Burlingame as its service area.

Now continue with Scenario One — the Palo Alto church grows, it decides to set up a new congregation in Belmont, but winds up with a lease for a building in the southern part of San Mateo. The new congregation falls outside of the San Mateo church’s service area. The district has set up specific rules about determining service areas, everyone knows what those rules are, and no one objects to the new congregation.

Questions for Scenario Two:
(2.1) Would you prefer to have explicit rules for new congregations as we see in this scenario, or would you rather have tacit or unwritten rules as in the previous scenario? Why?
(2.2) Can you state your district’s rule for recognizing new congregations? (District staff and board members — we know you know these rules, don’t be spoilsports and tell us!) If so, what are they?
(2.3) What if we had the district rules above, but discovered that a given congregation had next to no attendance within certain demographic groups (e.g., an all-white congregation, an all-Anglophone congregation, a congregation where the average age is 75 and the standard deviation is 10 years)? In that case, would it be OK to start a new congregation within that congregation’s service area, if the new congregation appealed to an underserved demographic (e.g, a Spanish-speaking congregation, a congregation centered around youth ministry)?

Final notes

— If you think this post is about you, you’re wrong. I’m interested in exploring the fundamental issue of church growth and church planting as it relates to our system of congregation polity. I’m also interested in bringing to the surface some of the problems inherent in congregational polity. But since I really don’t know what you think about this issue, I can’t write about what you think.

— If you think this post is an attack on the Unitarian Universalist Association and its districts, you’re wrong. I’m critiquing widely-held assumptions within our denomination that play out in competitive feeling between congregations and between ministers. I’m also trying to point out that while some Unitarian Universalists still believe in the old parish system (i.e., one church per geographic region), other Unitarian Universalists may have other assumptions — and very few of us have thought seriously about how we might start an ethnic UU church within our existing church’s walls.

10 thoughts on “Two “UU franchise” scenarios

  1. Bill Baar

    [i](1.1) In this fictional scenario, do you think it was right for the Palo Alto church to open the new congregation in San Mateo over the objections of the San Mateo church? Why?[/i]

    I think it was right. I’m assuming the Belomont people skip San Mateo because it’s practice of UUism very different than Palo Alto’s. (And that variance is fine). Having a First UU of San Mateo and a Second UU of San Mateo no problem at all.

    [i](1.2) What if we found a location three blocks away from the San Mateo church — would that change your answer to question one? If so, why?[/i]

    Yes, still no problem with the assumption the styles and practices of the two Churches so different that this makes sense.

    As a footnote, the Grant Works neigborhood of Cicero Illinois once had three Catholic Churches at the same intersection. One on each corner and all ethnic: one Polish, on Italian, and one Lithuanian. That caused the Archdiose some heartburn mostly because the Cardinal wanted American rather than ethnic Churches, but also because of the economics of it. As the neigborhood changed and became largely hispanic, only one Church continued.

    One of the consquences of a Parish model is the Church stays after the community leaves. Catholics to their credit kept many of the Churches and Schools while the Catholics largely left the neigborhoods in Chicago.

  2. Bill Baar

    Re Scenario 2,

    I don’t think geographic service areas have much application for us. Less and less so…. especially as you get into dense urban areas. You can have geographically proximate Churches serving different demographics.

  3. Dan

    Bill Baar @ 2 — You write: “I don’t think geographic service areas have much application for us. Less and less so…”

    I agree with you, although I’m afraid the norm among Unitarian Universalists is to think in terms of geographic service areas. But yeah, let’s say we agree to do away with geographic service areas.

    The next question is — then what are the rules for starting a new congregation? I don’t like tacit rules, because it’s too easy to manipulate them. So what explicit rules should we have? Should we ask for demographic data from existing churches, and then anyone can start a new congregation that doesn’t overlap onto that demographic? Do we have a total free-for-all free market approach, where anyone can start a congregation anywhere?

  4. Bill Baar

    Not demographic data as much as mission statements. I’d look for overlap in mission statements as opposed to overlap in geographic catchments. I’m guessing the issue would be existing Churches seldom have defined missions e.g. we serve a more humanistic population, we have a more traditional litergy, we’re more political / social activist; and instead these differentiations have just evolved. It would take someone really familiar with the local UU Churches and all their variations, to sort it out.

  5. Amy

    Bill wrote:

    “It would take someone really familiar with the local UU Churches and all their variations, to sort it out”

    But it’s not esoteric knowledge. Any church that’s done a search in recent years has this information in writing.

  6. ogre

    Hmmm. Having been on such a search committee, and a growth committee, and a building committee… I remember making the argument that we, based on the population in just our intended cachement area, could very plausibly support a UU congregation of over 1500. We’re at 170–and growing. But no where near fast enough, at this time, to get to 1500… and even the big plans about growth only envision 500. If someone started organizing another congregation within our area, I’d be leading a cheering squad.

    We could use other nearby UU communities to interact with more.

  7. Dan

    Ogre @ 6 offers the best motivation yet for existing churches to promote additional church starts in their immediate area: “We could use other nearby UU communities to interact with more.”

  8. Paul Oakley

    What Bill said.

    Oh, yeah, what ogre said too!

    IMO, it may make good sense for districts to have general formulas or guidelines for the circumstances under which the district will actively promote new church planting in a particular area. But I do not accept that the district should ever position itself to hinder an effort at church planting that they are not being asked to bankroll – especially not simply on the grounds of geographical competition.

    But what do I know? I live in the middle of nowhere. No UU competition here. My congregation is an emerging congregation that was started largely in response to an initial effort of a single individual, with workshop assistance from members of the nearest UU congregation 60 miles away, who also helped us with a Chalice Lighter’s Grant shared with another new congregation they were helping. There was no transfer of populations. And the good offices of that nearby congregation saw to whatever was necessary for the district to recognize us as emerging. We rather naturally have a frontier mentality about new church formation: let those who want it do it. And that is a very different situation from spinning off new congregations because of crowded facilities.

    But my rural small town of 16,000 has 20 Baptist churches of various stripes, and they keep spinning off new ones while growing some of them to the small-town equivalent of megachurch. All without worrying about geography. Geography has little to do with it. People who go to church attend either the church that works best for them or the church they feel obligated to by family, work, or social ties. I don’t see that as much different from anywhere. I mean, even the family of the German exchange student who lived in our home in 2006-7, living in a remote German village of 1,400 where there are only two churches – the Catholic church that everyone but the three local Lutherans belong to and the tiny Lutheran church – when they lost all respect for their priest started driving over the hill to attend mass at a Franciscan monastery. If nothing prevents them, people go where they get something they need.

    Being an emerging congregation in a rural county with no other UU presence and a huge lack of awareness that UU are not Moonies, it will be quite some time before we face these issues. But I for one would love to have sister congregations right here in our little town, a community of churches like the Baptists have.

  9. Dan

    Paul Oakley @ 8 — You write: “But my rural small town of 16,000 has 20 Baptist churches of various stripes, and they keep spinning off new ones while growing some of them to the small-town equivalent of megachurch.”

    I think you sum up what I’m trying to get at. These Baptist churches you’re referring to have a very different mindset than most liberal churches. I’d call it an entrepreneurial mindset, where the assumption is that you should do lots of start-ups in the hopes that some of them really get established. This is the way some of the old Universalists operated — start lots of little churches, in the expectation that some (but not necessarily all) of them would become larger and better established.

  10. David Pollard

    I suspect that this is a lot of hue and cry over (largely irrelevant) tradition.

    Has the UUA ever told a rapidly growing emerging congregation that it could not join the UUA because it was started in the wrong place? Are we REALLY that anti-growth??

Comments are closed.