When I was visiting my aunt and uncle last week, Uncle Bob got to talking about A. Powell Davies. You see, Uncle Bob grew up in All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and he was a member there when the legendary A. Powell Davies was minister. Uncle Bob remembers it was an exciting time to be a part of All Souls, with large numbers of newcomers joining the church during this time. And he remembers regularly seeing United States senators and representatives sitting in the congregation, attracted by Davies’s preaching.<\/p>\n
One of the things that Uncle Bob said that grabbed my attention was that Davies had little to do with the general administration of the church;– there was an executive secretary who took care of that. Davies attended some of the key committee meetings, and of course he had a big say in the direction of the church, but mostly he served as a religious leader. (I said that I’d bet that he had at least twenty hours a week to prepare his sermons, and Uncle Bob said that was possible. I added that I’d never be up to Davies’s level as a preacher, but that if I had twenty hours to write a sermon, it would be a lot better than what I produce now, and Uncle Bob laughed and said he’d bet that it would make a difference.)<\/p>\n
Uncle Bob is a retired business executive, and so I thought I’d ask him what he thought of John Carver’s “policy governance” model, which is now all the rage among larger Unitarian Universalist churches, and which promotes the idea of the minister as the CEO of the church. Uncle Bob listened politely, but it was obvious he didn’t think much of policy governance. Neither do I. We both agreed that the All-Souls-Powell-Davies model of having the minister as a religious leader, with an executive secretary (or executive director, or whatever you want to call the position) sounded pretty good to us.<\/p>\n
Uncle Bob said something else that grabbed my attention. He said that Davies typically preached about current events. According to Uncle Bob, Davies would pick a current event, hash out the moral and ethical implications of what was going on, and end up with three or four ways forward. I may not have gotten this exactly right, but the point is that Davies really gave his congregation something to chew on each week. That’s what Uncle Bob said he really liked best about a sermon — he wants something that’s going to keep him pondering over the whole week — and that’s what Davies was able to do. And what Davies chose to talk about was not typically religious:– he talked about current events, not about the Bible (or if he were still alive, things like spiritual practices and Eastern religions).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was visiting my aunt and uncle last week, Uncle Bob got to talking about A. Powell Davies. You see, Uncle Bob grew up in All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and he was a member there when the legendary A. Powell Davies was minister. Uncle Bob remembers it was an exciting time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-administration","category-engaging-worship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966","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=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}