UUA politics – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

Another one

Well, sadly the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) just sent out another notice of a minister removed from fellowship.

I keep on posting these notices here, just so there’s more of an online record of these events. By posting this, I’m not making any judgement about the minister in question, nor about the MFC’s decision. Since I’m not privy to the facts of the case, there’s no way I could make a judgement. My only purpose in posting this is to hopefully increase transparency just a teeny bit when ministers are removed from fellowship.

Here’s what the email from the MFC said: “The Ministerial Fellowship Committee voted recently to remove the Rev. Kelly Spahr from fellowship for violation of MFC Rule 26, which requires ministers to notify the MFC immediately of any complaint of abuse and/or neglect of a child or any other person brought against the minister, and/or any complaint of domestic violence, harassment or request for a restraining order brought against the minister.”

Of course, the UUA immediately took down Rev. Spahr’s information from the online directory. But the following summary came up when I did a web search, in the summary provided by the search engine: “Ms. Kelly Spahr. Current Positions. 2021 Chaplain Strong Memorial Hospital. 2019 Affiliated Community Minister The First Universalist Church of Rochester … First UU Society of Syracuse Syracuse, NY.” A little more searching showed that Spahr is a Board Certified Chaplain with the Spiritual Care Association, has served as a chaplain with the Rochester (N.Y.) Police Department; inpatient chaplain at Strong Memorial Hospital; outpatient chaplain at the URMC NeuroPalliative Clinic; and has worked in hospice.

Note that Rule 26 doesn’t appear to mean that a minister has engaged in, or been convicted of, abuse, domestic violence, etc.; the rule merely says that a minister must notify the MFC if such a complaint is lodged against them; i.e., even if there’s a false accusation, a minister still has to notify the MFC. This makes sense. But this also makes me realize that I haven’t read the MFC rules in a couple of decades, and if I ever knew about this rule I’ve long since forgotten it. Now I feel ignorant. And it looks like I had better review the MFC rules in the very near future.

Update, 10/23: Another email from the MFC came in at 7:56 yesterday evening: “The Ministerial Fellowship Committee voted recently to remove the Rev. David Kohlmeier from fellowship for egregious violation of the MFC’s rules and UUMA Guidelines, as well as our fundamental Unitarian Universalist values.” Kohlmeier had already been suspended from fellowship in 2022. Online, you can find plenty of news stories about Kohlmeier, but here’s a quick summary: In September, 2022, he was arrested in a sting operation and charged with using social media to solicit sex from minors. In March, 2024, he pleaded guilty to “felony attempted involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child under 16.” To make an obvious point: in this case, the legal facts are clear. Kohlmeier worked at the Falmouth, Mass., UU congregation from 2017 to 2021, and at the Harrisburg, Penna., UU congregation from 2021 t0 September, 2022.

Minister out of fellowship

The Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) just sent an email to congregational leaders saying: “The Ministerial Fellowship Committee voted recently to remove the Rev. Dr. Marian Stewart from fellowship for violating the terms of her probation. These terms were set in 2023 by the Committee based upon a complaint against Rev. Dr. Stewart. Refusal to adhere to those terms violates Rule 21 of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, which requires ministers in fellowship to fully cooperate with the terms of their probation.”

Marian Stewart has already been removed from the online UUA database of professional staff. But her name is not listed on the UUA webpage “UUA Clergy Removed of Resigned from Fellowship with Completed or Pending Misconduct Investigations.” So maybe this is not misconduct? If so, then what’s this all about? Your guess is as good as mine as to why she was removed from fellowship.

Another website says that Stewart is retired from active ministry. So the violation of MFC probation could be anything from she just didn’t bother filling in MFC paperwork (because: retired), to — who knows what.

I understand the desire for transparency has to be balanced with the need for privacy and confidentiality. But somehow this email makes me feel that the balances have tipped well away from transparency in this case.

I also understand how hard it can be to come up with a process that covers all eventualities, so I’m willing to cut the MFC a fair amount of slack. But still, this email feels like it’s aimed at insiders, people who are already in the know — and those like me who are not insiders are left outside wondering what’s going on.

Part of my angst here is that I’ve spent a good part of my career in Unitarian Universalism cleaning up after clergy misconduct (and misconduct by other paid professionals). Clergy misconduct, in my view, thrives in secrecy and ambiguity. Thus when I see ambiguous statements like this one coming from the UUA, it bothers me.

Oh well. Listen to me whining. Heck, lots of things bother me. Just because something bothers me, don’t let it bother you.

Well, that was ugly

I ran into Mary P at the Sunday service here in Cohasset. She’s the other delegate from our congregation to General Assembly. She asked me if I’d been following General Assembly. I said that I had, but added that it was painful to watch at times. She agreed.

We both were repelled by speakers (on both sides of various issues) who were mean-spirited, unkind, willing to mistake opinion for facts, and so on. We both agreed that we were not seeing these kind of behaviors in our local Unitarian Universalist congregation.

I suspect the online format tended to encourage bad behavior. But whatever the cause, I felt frankly embarrassed by some of my co-religionists. Mind you, it was people on both sides of the issues being debated. For example, in the discussion of the bylaws revision, after legal counsel for the Unitarian Universalist Association gave her professional opinion that the bylaws revision would not reduce the freedom of individual congregations, at least one speaker said the bylaws revision would reduce congregational freedom. In another example, one speaker who supported the revision of the bylaws relied on what I considered to be ad hominem attacks; I wound up muting the audio.

This online General Assembly was one of the few times I felt embarrassed to be a Unitarian Universalist. To me, it felt like hyper-individualism had run amok. Sadly, the whole thing was livestreamed on Youtube, so anyone could watch it.

Oh well. Who am I trying to kid? We live in a horribly polarized society. Why should Unitarian Universalists be immune from polarization? And a huge driver of polarization is people doing way too much social interaction online, instead of in person. If we hold General Assembly online, I guess we have to expect the same bad behavior that has driven me from Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, and other social media platforms.

And the problem may well be my problem. These days, the only thing I use social media for is finding out about Sacred Harp singings; I’m no longer accustomed to a daily dose of mean-spiritedness, unkindness, and misinformation. Maybe if you use social media a lot, General Assembly seemed tame and well-behaved. But it’s not for me — and I’m not enthusiastic about ever attending another online General Assembly.

Two brief thoughts on online GA

I was finally able to retrieve my delegate credential for the online General Assembly (GA). Which prompted me to log in to the Whova event management portal for GA.

As I poked around, two things caught my eye.

(1) There’s a friendly prompt to answer an icebreaker question. Great idea for an online space, so I clicked through. The first icebreaker question that appeared was “What’s your favorite place of all the places you’ve travelled?” and you are given a list of countries around the world to choose from. This is a classic question used to establish your your socio-economic class: choosing, for example, Papua New Guinea places you in a higher socio-economic class than choosing, say, Canada or the United Kingdom. There are other icebreaker questions you can choose from, of course, but choosing this question is a good way to establish yourself as being part of the upper middle class.

Anyway, I decided to skip the icebreaker question.

(2) I noticed that there were quite a few online sessions aimed at teens. Given that increased screen time correlates with decreased mental health in teens, I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s great that GA organizers are trying to serve Generation Z. But it’s more screen time….

Actually, screen time has been associated with depression among adults, too. Depression is actually one of the biggest health risks for clergy (substance abuse is another). I check in periodically with a psychotherapist, so I don’t believe I am currently suffering from depression. However, I do find that the thought of spending much time with online GA leaves me feeling — well, depressed.

Dead end

I plan to attend the online General Assembly as a delegate. I received an email with the subject line, “Retrieving Your Delegate Credentials for UUA General Assembly,” which directed me to a web page where I carefully followed the straightforward instructions. I then received an email with the subject line, “Your Delegate Credentials for GA,” which brought me to a web page titled “Welcome to the GA Delegate Participation Platform.” At that page, I once again carefully followed the straightforward instructions. Almost immediately, I received another email with the subject line, “GA Delegate Platform Access Link.”

Which sent me back to the web page titled “Welcome to the GA Delegate Participation Platform,” where I received the same instructions as before: “If you are a GA Delegate but have not received your link to the Delegate Platform, please enter the email address associated with your delegate credential. An email with your new login link will be sent immediately, but may take up to 10 minutes to be received (please also check your email’s spam or junk folder).” This is followed by a box where I can type in my email address again.

I typed in my email address (since there was no other possibility on that page). Nothing happened.

Oh well. Never mind.

Doing democracy in the UUA

I just received email from the folks running the General Assembly business meeting. They say in part:

“The GA business process has begun. It begins early to be more accessible, inclusive, and democratic.”

Um, well, no it’s not more accessible and inclusive to some of us. It’s not very accessible to parents of young children, or to people caring for elderly parents. It’s not especially accessible to people like me who are working more than full time (because that’s the sad reality for many of us these days, we’re expected to work long hours). So I guess this is more accessible for people who are retired, or who only have to work 40 hours a week with no child care or elder care responsibilities.

This, by the way, is one of the major threats to democracy today. Most of us can’t carve out enough time from job and family responsibilities to participate fully in democracy.

Honestly, given how little time I have to spend on democratic process, local government is going to be my first priority, with state and federal government next. And when it comes to Unitarian Universalism, my top priority is keeping my local congregation going. So I’m sympathetic to the folks running General Assembly — they have a minimum amount of time that they feel needs to be spent on the democratic process — but I just don’t have the kind of time they’re asking for.

Year in review, pt. 2

In part 1, I reviewed the year in U.S. religion. In this second part, I’ll review they year in Unitarian Universalism.

How non-UUs viewed us

Let’s start with how others perceived us this past year. Unitarian Universalists are a tiny, tiny group, but we made the news with four stories this year. I’ll start with the lesser stories, and save the big one for the end.

1. Religion News Service (RNS) covered the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back in June, and wrote about two main stories. One story, with the headline “Unitarian Universalism revisits identity, values at 2023 gathering,” talked about the proposed revision to ARticle II of the UUA bylaws. It was the kind of article where you felt the reporter was working pretty hard to make it sound newsworthy. Revising bylaws isn’t going to be of much interest to non-Unitarian Universalists.

2. RNS was much more interested in the fact that the “Unitarian Universalists elect first woman of color, openly queer president,” especially considering the fact that this new president was taking over from the first woman who served as president. They wrote (by my count) four separate articles on this basic story.

Media portrayals

I’m always interested to read a news story on a topic that I know something about. Do the news media get it right? Do they show their bias? What do they miss? What do they show me that I’ve missed by being too close to the subject?

No wonder, then, that I was interested to read Jemima Kelly’s Dec. 9 story from the Financial Times weekend edition, “The culture wars dividing America’s most liberal church: Long a beacon of progressive values, Unitarian Universalism has been convulsed by pulpit politics.”

It’s obvious where Kelly is starting from. Battles of the culture wars represent a major ongoing story in the U.S. today. While the battles between the liberals and the conservatives have been most prominent, increasingly we’ve been hearing about the battles within the two camps, e.g., the fault lines among conservatives, and the fault lines among liberals. Kelly says that recent conflicts within Unitarian Universalism serve “as a kind of microcosm of the way the culture wars can divide even the most politically liberal members of American society.”

Kelly begins her story with a report on the controversy about Todd Eklof’s “The Gadfly Papers” (I wrote about that controversy back in 2019). From what I can tell, Kelly’s reporting on the Gadfly controversy gets the facts right. However, I feel she comes across as being biased in favor of Eklof. She gives a lot of space to Eklof and his supporters, while only interviewing one outright opponent of Eklof.

On the other hand, I give Kelly credit for giving space to Vanessa Southern, who expresses a distinct lack of interest in the whole Gadfly controversy. :Southern said, “There are people who are just letting The Jerry Springer Show play out, are like, ‘Yes and?’” This forces me to admit that I’m a cultural illiterate who has never watched the Jerry Springer Show. According the BBC obituary of Jerry Springer: “Expletives, fists, and chairs were flung across the show’s set over 27 seasons between 1991 and 2018. In the process, it became equal parts ratings juggernaut and cultural reject.” I don’t think there were any fistfights or air-born chairs during the Gadfly controversy. Nonetheless, it’s not a bad analogy.

Kelly frames the Gadfly controversy as a wider controversy engulfing Unitarian Universalism — how to deal with racism. Kelly touches on the resignation of Peter Morales as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, then dives into the current controversies concerning the revision of Article II of the Unitarian Universalist bylaws. I’ll quibble with some details of her reporting, e.g., she claims, “In the 59 years between the formation of the UU church [sic] in 1961 and 2020, nine ministers were permanently disfellowshipped….” — while I count ten. And calling Ralph Waldo Emerson an “abolitionist” is a stretch — “a reluctant opponent of slavery” comes a lot closer. Mostly, though, it seems to me she gets the facts straight.

As I say, I do feel that her story has a slight but definite bias in favor of people who disagree with the Unitarian Universalist party line. Those who disagree with the party line — Eklof, Peter Morales, Thandeka, Sandra Diaz — get the most coverage. Those who support the party line — Sarah Skochko, Carey McDonald — get less coverage. Kelly gives McDonald some fairly hardball questions, where Eklof doesn’t.

Does Kelly’s bias get in the way of the story? Well, the people who get almost no coverage are those of us who don’t, as a rule, pay much attention to denominational politics — people who are just trying to deal with the problems we face in our own communities. And why should we get much coverage? We’re boring. This is a news story in an international newspaper, and grassroots local efforts are of little interest to international news consumers.

However, Kelly may be missing something by catering to the needs of the international news consumer. In Seth Kaplan’s new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One ZIP Code at a Time, he argues that the place to rebuild democracy is in hyper-local efforts. Kaplan even says that in his own neighborhood people don’t spend much time talking politics because they’re too busy dealing with the tasks right in front of them. To her credit, Kelly does touch on this possibility when she quotes Vanessa Southern saying:

“I’m not going to be in a conversation that’s about tearing one another apart for the sake of drama. We are wrestling with how to be in the world and to whom we need to be most accountable. Change is messy. And, meanwhile, I have a city to minister to.”

For me, that last sentence was the best part of the article, because it helped me articulate my own feelings on these ongoing UU controversies. Why should I spend my time on the Gadfly controversy when the local food pantry needs more food, there are homeless people in town, domestic violence continues, the Neo-Nazis are recruiting in our area? To say nothing of other local problems: the teen mental health crisis, the opioid crisis, global climate change in coastal communities, the ongoing effects of the pandemic on children and teens, and on, and on. (I haven’t even gotten to the ordinary problems all human beings face: stresses on families with kids, deaths of people close to us, caring for people with chronic illness….) Come to think of it, this may help explain why young people are feeling disillusioned with organized religion — many of them probably perceive us as focused on abstract issues, rather than on local problems.

Oh well. I already know these kinds of local problems don’t make good news stories. So I give Kelly and the Financial Times credit for bringing them up at all, however tangentially. And thank you to Vanessa Southern for giving the reporter such a good quote.

Update 12/18: Par. 8 rewritten for clarity.

Article II again (sigh)

I received yet another email from someone who is concerned about the proposed revisions to Article II.

On the one hand, we’re merely revising the principles and purposes section of the Unitarian Universalist Association(UUA) bylaws. You have to have a section on principles and purposes in any nonprofit organization’s bylaws to help demonstrate to the regulators that your organization does in fact comply with the requirement for running an organization that doesn’t pay taxes on income.

On the other hand, many Unitarian Universalists have come to treat the so-called seven principles as a profession of faith — after all, they’ve been arranged as a responsive reading in the 1993 hymnal; they’re printed on wallet cards; children are forced to memorize them (which I consider to be a waste of children’s time); they’re responsible for many “conversions” to Unitarian Universalism; and many people have structured their entire experience as a Unitarian Universalist around their reading of the seven principles.

So a problem arises. We’re using a process designed for changing bylaws. Yet for many people, what we’re really doing is changing their profession of faith. And if you’re going to change a profession of faith, you really want to be using a different timeline. Changing bylaws should be a time-constrained process. Changing a profession of faith should take all the time it needs.

The result? From one side, I’m hearing conspiracy theories about UUA leadership and even comparisons between “the UUA” and totalitarian states. On the other side, both lay and professional leadership within the UUA don’t seem to be fully aware of how emotionally fraught this issue has become for a great many people. I’m also seeing both sides digging in their heels — reflecting, I suspect, the wider society where digging in of heels has become the norm in an increasingly polarized society.

Personally, I’ve decided I don’t really support either option, but I can tolerate either the seven principles, or the proposed Article II revision. Ignoring my personal reaction, though, I can see how this conflict has the potential for escalating. I can only hope someone with wisdom and top-notch conflict management skills steps in to do some conflict managment….

Reading list: Search

Bev loaned me the book Search: A Novel (Penguin, 2022), by Michelle Huneven. Search is the story of a ministerial search committee in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in southern California during their year-long process to find someone to replace their retiring minister. Michelle Huneven actually served on a ministerial search committee, and the book is a fictionalized account of her experiences. Bev, who loaned me the book, is a long-time lay leader who has lived through six different ministerial searches in the past quarter century. She told me that I really need to read this book. So I did.

(Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal key elements of the book’s plot. Continue at your own risk.)

Photo of the book lying on a wood tabletop.