Sleepy & out of it

The chest cold that I’ve had since November has managed to come back again, with a vengeance. I didn’t go back to the church after lunch, just stayed home and took a nap. And then later I took another nap. In spite of the naps, I was sleepy all day.

This has been a bad winter for illness; Ted at church has accurately described this winter as “the winter of mucus.” I heard that more than once this winter, the health clinics here in the city had to close their doors early because they had too many people to manage. Seems like everyone has a cold, and now a nasty version of the flu is going around.

Enough said. Time to go to bed.

What happens when you get to the end of the day, and you haven’t gotten half the things done that you needed to get done? You know the feeling.

Yeah, I know, you’re supposed to be cool about it: hey, it’s not that important if thus and such doesn’t get done, after all you got some important things done.

Or you’re supposed to say: I will be mindful of all the good things in this world, I will be mindful when I do the dishes, and that will keep my mind from jumping around.

But at the end of today, I still haven’t gotten done the things I had hoped to get done: I haven’t paid those bills.

I haven’t answered all the email messages awaiting me. I haven’t cleaned the kitchen, or even done the dishes. I forgot to brush my teeth this morning.

And now it is late, and far past the time I had hoped to go to bed, and I will get up tired in the morning.

That’s what you do, day after day, just hoping that some day something good will come of it. Problem is, mostly when something good does come of it, you’re too tired to notice.

Big donors at church

Dad and I were just talking. Non-profit organizations that rely heavily on individual donations (as opposed to non-profits that rely on grants) typically recognize big donors in some way, e.g., in the annual report there will be listings of donors under categories such as “Platinum Givers,” “President’s Circle,” etc. Indeed, fundraisers tell us that big donors really like to be recognized in this way, and this should be one of the techniques you should use to cultivate your big donors.

Since Unitarian Universalist churches are heavily dependent on individual donations, it would make sense to publish such lists in a congregation’s annual report: “Channing Circle, giving $20,000+” and “Parker Patrons, giving $10,000-20,000,” etc. However, as an essentially egalitarian religion, we don’t want to leave out people with modest who means who happen to give a substantial percentage of their income, so Dad and I thought we’d include that in the categories of giving, e.g., “Channing Circle, those who give $20,000+ or 10%+ of gross annual income,” etc.

Would you implement such a system to reward big donors and stimulate increased giving in your congregation? Discuss.

A poetic politician? Hard to believe….

I try not to write about politics here, but I am always willing to write about efforts to resist the anti-intellectualism that is dominant in the United States today. Columnist Ben Macintyre, writing for the London Times, has uncovered poetry which was written by Barack Obama “for a college magazine at the age of 19.” Macintyre’s assessment of the poems? — “Surprisingly good.” Apparently even Harold Bloom, the critic who is the self-proclaimed guardian of the “Western canon,” likes Obama’s poetry. Hillary Clinton, while not a poet herself, at least has no less than Maya Angelou to write poetry in her defense. Link to Timesarticle.

For the record, Macintyre reprints one of the 19-year-old Obama’s poems:

Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me.

No it’s not Maya Angelou, but yes, Obama’s poem is “surprisingly good” — and, given the current anti-intellectualism of the political scene, I find it utterly surprising that a U.S. politician even cares about poetry. We can only hope that this will start a trend of U. S. politicians aspiring to be smart and well-educated, instead of aspiring to be badly-educated corporate hacks.

Emergence in Chicago

Two posts about the same worship service at Micah’s Porch, a Unitarian Universalist emerging church/ mission in Chicago:

David Pyle’s account here.

ck’s account here.

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.

Correction

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.

About Unitarian Universalist youth ministries

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.