On Friday morning, I went to “Global Worship: Celebrating Our Diverse Faith,” led by (among others) Rev. Zsolt Elekes of the Transylvanian Unitarians; Juban Lamar, a member of the Jowai church of the Khasi Hills Unitarians; Vyda Ng, executive Director of the Canadian Unitarian Council; and Liz Slade, chief officer of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (United Kingdom). As I understand it, a couple of other primary worship leaders did not receive visas and were unable to attend General Assembly.
I found this worship service to be very moving. Zsolt Elekes talked about how the Transylvanian Unitarians went through some hard times, particularly under the repressive Ceausescu regime; yet they found strength through their international partnerships. All the speakers used the image of a bridge held up by many pillars — the bridge representing worldwide liberal religion, and the pillars representing the various Unitarian, Universalist, Unitarian Universalist, and Free Christian groups that are spread throughout the world.
What holds all these groups together? What, for example, do the distinctly theistic Khasi Hills Unitarians have in common with some of the fundamentalist humanist Unitarian Universalists in the United States? One of the speakers said, half-humorously, that we’re all heretics — but that remark was only half humorous, because in all seriousness our willingness to be heretics is a unifying factor. We also share the symbol of the flaming chalice, which is used by our co-religionists around the world. Zsolt Elekes also pointed out that the Flower Celebration, developed by Norbert and Maja Capek in the Prague Unitarian Church just over a hundred years ago, is something else we hold in common — a religious celebration that symbolizes how we perceive human unity in our diversity.
I played a very minor part in this service, singing with a ten voice ensemble that Keith Arnold put together for this service; Keith is a past president of the Association of UU Music Ministries. All the other singers were music directors or professional musicians. I did my best to not lower the quality of the performance, and what a treat it was for me to sing with such good musicians.
I ran into two old friends, Jil and E—, outside the exhibit hall. Jil is director of religious education of Community Church of New York, and she showed me a zine the teens in her youth program had put together. Her congregation’s website states: “At Community Church, art and music are valued spiritual pathways and forms of expression.” The teen zine, filled with photos and writing by teens, is a great example of art as a spiritual pathway. And the content of the zine focused on inter-religious encounters. Wow. Plus, Jil attracted teens from outside the church community to participate in this project. Wow again. What a great project.
Our train left at 1:24, giving me time to attend the morning sessions. I overslept and missed the worship service led by the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans — unfortunate, because I was looking forward to that; I haven’t been to a pagan worship service in years.
I went to the “Meeting the Moment” session on administration. Getting there was a bit of a challenge. The only way you could find out the topics and locations for the “Meeting the Moment” sessions was through the Whova app; they were not listed in the downloadable program. But I gave up on the Whova app on Wednesday. (I didn’t see why should I spend an hour of my precious time learning how to navigate a badly-designed app with a poor user interface, that I’m only going to use for a few days.) So I asked one of the volunteers holding an “Ask Me” sign if she knew where the various sessions were going to be, but she said that the “Ask Me” volunteers weren’t given that information. Fortunately, a man who happened to be standing there hadn’t been so dismissive of the Whova app, and he told me where to find the session I wanted. I guess I have to be less cranky about using poorly-designed apps.
As it turned out, I was glad I went. The session was facilitated by Jan Gartner, the associate director of Church Staff Finances at the UUA, and Emily Cherry, Congregational Life Consultant for the UUA’s New England Region — two highly competent people. They listed four approaches to growing administrative capacity:
- Sharing administrative staff: one administrator serves more than one congregation
- Administrative coaching and consulting: skilled administrators train, coach, or consult with congregational administrators or lay leaders
- Interim and/or developmental administrators: modeled after interim and developmental ministry
- UUA facilitates administrative tasks: UUA arranges preferred vendors and/or offers services directly
After laying out these four basic approaches, Gartner and Cherry helped us split into breakout groups depending on our interest. I wanted to talk about sharing administrative staff — I’m convinced that our group of half a dozen small congregations on the South Shore of Boston have to figure out how to share staff, if we’re going to survive financially. There were only four of us who wanted to talk about staff sharing; the other groups were much larger.
Fortunately two of the people in our group, K— and M—, are already doing staff sharing, and furthermore are on the board of the Association of Unitarian Universalist Administrators (AUUA). So I got to listen to them describe in some detail how their staff sharing arrangements work. K— summed up the challenges of staff sharing: first, you have to face up to the “fears that are holding you back” from doing staff sharing; second, you have to prioritize building relationships. As I said to K— and M—, listening to their expertise was worth what I paid to go to General Assembly.
At the close of the session, Jan Gartner offered two more resources on staff sharing. First, there’s the “Sharing Staff” page on the UUA website — lots of great information there. Second, Jan Gartner had led a workshop on staff sharing at the 2024 General Assembly, and she’s willing to share her slides from that session if you contact her.
As I write this, riding the train home from Baltimore, I’ve been thinking about this General Assembly (GA). In many ways, it felt a bit thin. It didn’t feel like that were as many booths in the exhibit hall as there used to be. And with so much of the GA programming now online, it felt like there weren’t quite enough in-person programs to make it worth while.
On the other hand, I feel I did get enough out of this GA to make it worth the time and expense of traveling to Baltimore. The “Global Worship: Celebrating Our Diverse Faith” was a rare opportunity to meet some of our co-religionists from around the world (plus I got to sing with some really good singers). The connections I made with other Unitarian Universalists (like learning how K— and M— did staff sharing, and hearing about Jil’s teen zine) were super helpful — and making those kinds of connections online is much more difficult. Finally, I was glad to be able to see the movie “Why Are You You?” and to talk with some of the people behind that film — admittedly, that wasn’t an official GA event, but because it was associated with GA I was able to go.
So the final verdict is — it wasn’t a great conference, but it was still worth my time.