Category: Religion

What, Christmas carols already?!

There are some good carols that don’t appear in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal. One of my faves, “O Tannenbaum,” isn’t in the hymnal, and I realized that I had made a PDF file of the sheet music (with a decent English translation of the original German words), sized to fit on a half-sheet, perfect for an insert in an order of service. There’s probably someone out there who could use this PDF, so here it is:

“O Tannenbaum,” PDF file

Creating a sustainable youth ministry

Many youth groups go through a boom-and-bust cycle: you have a few good years of youth ministry, and then things seem to fall apart and the kids all stop participating in any youth ministries. After a few years with a struggling youth ministry, things seem to miraculously get better, and you have a few more good years of youth ministry. That’s what we’re going through right now, here in our church. We’ve had a strong high school youth ministry for a while, but this year the program has gotten small. Meanwhile, our middle school youth ministries have been slowly growing for the past three years. Boom and bust.

So how do you create a sustainable youth ministry? According to the book Sustainable Youth Ministries by Mark DeVries, most congregations try the wrong approach to building up their youth ministry. They may look for that superstar youth director (or other paid staffer, e.g., DRE, MRE, etc.), or the young charismatic youth advisors. Or maybe they try to build or renovate dedicated space for youth ministries (a youth room, a basketball court, etc.). DeVreis says all these approaches are bound to be unsuccessful.

Instead, DeVries advocates taking a systemic approach to building a sustainable youth ministry. This is not as exciting or sexy or razzle-dazzle as hiring a superstar staff person, or building a new building. But it’s more likely to work in the long run, providing year after year of stable, sustainable youth ministry. There are no magical solutions; instead, you have to work steadily at building up board-based systems which will support your youth ministry.

I’ve been studying DeVries’s approach, and what he says makes sense to me. And I’ve slowly been working on applying his approach to our youth ministry here in Palo Alto. Here’s what I’ve been working on most recently, as I try to apply his concepts…. Continue reading “Creating a sustainable youth ministry”

Ballou on the brain

After spending something like 36 hours editing Hosea Ballou over the Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve got Ballou on the brain. So I can’t resist posting one more Ballouvian quote. This time, I’ve edited and updated the language somewhat. You shouldn’t go reposting this and attributing it to Ballou, but I think my edited version does capture the essence of his meaning for early twenty-first century readers:

The ideas that sin is infinite, and that it deserves an infinite punishment; and that God took on a natural body of flesh and blood, and actually suffered death on a cross to satisfy God’s infinite justice and thereby save human creatures from endless misery; — these are ideas which appear to me to be unfounded in the nature of reason, and unsupported by the Bible. Such notions have, in my opinion, served to darken the human understanding, and have rendered the Bible a subject of discredit to thousands who, I believe, would never have condemned the scriptures had it not been for those gross absurdities….

Online Treatise on Atonement finally complete

Back in 2005, on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement, I decided to put the entire text of the Treatise online. Although I thought it would take me about a year to complete this project, it proved more time-consuming and more difficult than that. But, after spending twenty or so hours on it over the long weekend, I’m finally done, the full text is now online, and you can find it here. Continue reading “Online Treatise on Atonement finally complete”

The search for wisdom

I’ve been working my way through A Treatise on Atonement by Hosea Ballou, the great Universalist minister and theologian of the early nineteenth century. I like Ballou’s commitment to the use of common sense and reason in religion, as exemplified in passages like this one:

We feel our own imperfections; we wish for every one to seek with all his might after wisdom; and let it be found where it may, or by whom it may, we humbly wish to have it brought to light, that all may enjoy it; but do not feel authorized to condemn an honest inquirer after truth, for what he believes different from a majority of us.

This could be a central motto for religious liberals.

Religious liberals and the Occupy movement

I’ve been reading Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition, the new book by Dan McKanan, the professor of Unitarian Universalist studies at Harvard Divinity School. McKanan points out that although we think of abolitionism, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement as separate movements, they are actually part of one continuous tradition of American leftist politics. McKanan also points out that religion has always been intertwined with the American tradition of radicalism — not that established religious institutions have embraced leftist politics in America, for no denomination or broad religious institution has done that, but rather that many American leftists have been deeply religious, and have drawn on their religious tradition for support and inspiration.

With that in mind, I was not surprised to learn that when Occupy Oakland was broken up by the police yet again last week, most of the 32 people who got arrested were at the Interfaith Coalition tent — including Unitarian Universalist ministers Jeremy Nickel and Kurt Kuhwald, and seminarian Marcus Liefert. (Jeremy even made the news in a small way: AP photographer Paul Sakuma snapped Jeremy’s photo as he stood handcuffed and surrounded by three police officers near the Interfaith Coalition tent.) Jeremy has been blogging about his participation in the Occupy movement, and his posts offer a good example of the connection between liberal religion (especially Jeremy’s Unitarian Universalist commitment to democratic process) and his leftist politics — just what Dan McKanan is talking about. Here’s Jeremy’s post about getting arrested — and here’s a follow-up post.

Free will and wickedness

Historically, religious liberals have affirmed the presence of free will in humans. For example, Unitarians reacted against the predestination of Calvinism by affirming that humans could choose whether or not to do good, and their choice would affect whether or not they would go to heaven; and, being optimistic folks, chose to believe that humans would mostly choose to do good. In another example, Universalists reacted against Calvinism by declaring that all humans would get to go to heaven — a kind of radical predestination, or determinism, if you think about it — but nevertheless here in this life humans still have the capacity to choose goodness or wickedness; and some Universalists also affirmed that those humans who chose wickedness while alive would undergo a limited period of punishment after death. The details may vary, but religious liberals have long affirmed that humans could chose freely between goodness and wickedness.

During the Social Gospel era, religious liberals came to understand that wickedness could exist outside of the individual in social structures and wider society; sometimes humans do wicked things not because they freely chose to do those wicked things but because they were embedded in a social structure that was wicked. However, the Social Gospelers had no intention of doing away with the possibility of individual wickedness; they merely wished to point out another possible locus of wickedness; they pointed out that there is even more wickedness in the world than we had previously thought before.

Under the influence of the Social Gospel, and later the influence of humanistic psychology, and then liberation theologies, we religious liberals have become increasingly aware of the wickednesses that exist in society. We have been so attentive to social wickedness that we sometimes neglect the possibility for individual wickedness. But wickedness must still exist in individual humans: as long as we affirm a belief in in free will, we humans will have the option, as individuals, to be wicked.

Another stupid church joke

The finance committee of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Aipotu was trying to develop a budget that would finally pull the church out of the red. One member of the committee presented a severe austerity budget. “If we follow this budget,” he said, “we can cut our operating expenses in half.”

The chair of the committee said, “I have an idea how we can live on less than that.”

“How?” everyone asked.

“Live on two budgets.”