{"id":5421,"date":"2009-10-14T13:46:22","date_gmt":"2009-10-14T22:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=5421"},"modified":"2009-10-14T14:05:44","modified_gmt":"2009-10-14T23:05:44","slug":"two-uu-franchise-scenarios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=5421","title":{"rendered":"Two “UU franchise” scenarios"},"content":{"rendered":"

A number of people have contacted me to ask for further clarification of Mr. Crankypants’s modest proposal<\/a> 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…. <\/p>\n

Scenario One<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Questions for Scenario One<\/em>:
\n(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?
\n(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?<\/p>\n

Scenario Two<\/strong><\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Questions for Scenario Two<\/em>:
\n(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?
\n(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?
\n(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)?<\/p>\n

Final notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

— 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.<\/p>\n

— 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[341],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uua-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5421"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5461,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5421\/revisions\/5461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}