Category: UUA politics

An open letter to the UUMA Board

Dear friends,

When I received my renewal notice from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) this year, I faced a tough choice.

This fiscal year, I had decided to attend both the annual conference of the Religious Education Association (REA), an international, interfaith organization of scholars and practitioners, as well as Religious Education Week at Ferry Beach Unitarian Universalist conference center in Maine. These two conferences each provided me with professional development that specifically addressed my needs as a minister of religious education. The REA conference was especially fruitful for me this year — I had an opportunity to attend workshops and have informal interaction with people like Thomas Groome and Siebren Miedema, scholars with an international reputation in my field, and to spend time with colleagues and former mentors, people who are facing many of the same issues and concerns that I face in religious education. Religious Education Week at Ferry Beach was also very fruitful, as I was able to take a graduate-level class with Mark Hicks of Meadville/Lombard Theological School in an intergenerational setting where we could both learn about religious education for young people, and watch it happening around us.

The basic issue for me is a cost-benefit analysis: as a minister of religious education, the UUMA provides me with very little benefit for the cost. And the cost is very high. My salary is $80K a year. The UUMA sliding scale means I pay $825 (10% of gross salary + housing), minus $100 for my membership in the Liberal Religious Educators Association, yielding a total cost of $725. It’s interesting to compare this to my REA membership: the REA also has a sliding scale, but for the same salary I pay only $105 per year.

You may be thinking that with a salary of $80K a year, I shouldn’t be whining. But I live in Silicon Valley, which has one of the highest costs of living in the United States. According to relocation Web sites that calculate cost of living across the country, $80K in Silicon Valley provides about the same standard of living as $40K in Rochester, New York. So it’s not like I’m getting rich (indeed, according to a recent newspaper article, my salary is below average in Santa Clara County). If I lived and worked in Rochester, New York, and made an equivalent salary providing about the same standard of living, I would pay about $325 for UUMA dues. Continue reading “An open letter to the UUMA Board”

Online petition regarding clergy sexual misconduct

The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville’s “Safety Net” has started an online petition at Change.org, asking that all candidates for the UUA Board and for Moderator to open up a conversation about clergy sexual misconduct in U.S. Unitarian Universalist congregations:

We, the undersigned, are asking the candidates for UUA Moderator and Board of Trustees to publicly indicate their willingness to start a new national conversation on clergy misconduct in the UUA, and to ensure that survivors of misconduct have a real voice in that conversation. We ask them to commit to using the powers of the Board to take ownership of the recommendations of the Safe Congregation Panel, to update them as needed, and to hold the staff accountable for implementing them fully. And we ask them to investigate the accountability relationship between the Board and Ministerial Fellowship Committee, with an eye toward balancing the need to protect institutional interests with a pastoral responsibility to care for victims of misconduct.

I signed it. You bet I did. They provide a space for comments when you “sign,” and here’s what I wrote: “As someone who has served as both parish minister and religious educator in congregations suffering from past clergy sexual misconduct, I have seen the effects such misconduct has on both adults and legal minors. I have also seen first hand a high level of denial about the seriousness of clergy sexual misconduct on the part of UUA leaders. It’s way past time the UUA addressed this more fully.”

Mind you, I have my doubts whether such petitions effect much change. I also have grave doubts about whether the culture at the UUA, or in many local congregations, is going to change; Unitarian Universalists have a tendency to want to solve other people’s problems before trying to address their own problems; we’re great at sending money overseas or working on immigration problems here in the U.S., but we’ve been very unwilling to tackle problems that occur in our own homes and hearts, problems like domestic violence, racism, classism, the overconsumption that goes with upper middle class lifestyles, and so on.

But in spite of my doubts, I signed the petition. It’s easy for me to sign this petition; I’m a minister, I have a vested interest in cleaning up my profession. Now it would be nice if lots of respectable laypeople, good solid institutionalists — people who are pillars of our local congregations, people of impeccable morals — it would be good if many such people also signed the petition.

New District Executive in PCD

Today, Susan Lankford, Acting President of the Board of Pacific Central District (PCD), sent an email message officially announcing the new District Executive of PCD:

“With great pleasure the Pacific Central District Board of Directors announces that Joshua Searle-White has accepted the position of Pacific Central District Executive. Josh will be attending the Pacific Western Regional Assembly later this month, General Assembly in Louisville, KY, and will assume his position in the PCD on July 1. Continue reading “New District Executive in PCD”

What I like at the UUA

After writing a cranky-snarky post about the survey just put forth by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board, I got to thinking about all the good, talented, effective UUA staffers I have seen at work, and whom I admire and respect. In spite of organizational problems, what we might call systemic issues, there are so many people who do so much good work at the UUA that it’s past time I listed some of them.

So here goes, in no particular order: Continue reading “What I like at the UUA”

New UUA survey that you can take

The Unitarian Universalist Association has a new survey they are asking people to respond to. In some of the headers on the survey site, this survey is identified as “The Future of Unitarian Universalism.”

To take the survey yourself, go here.

After you have taken the survey, come back here and summarize or post your responses. I’ll put my responses to the survey after the jump. And let’s hope most of you are less cynical in your responses than I was….

Continue reading “New UUA survey that you can take”

Hurray! New UUA building

According to a post on the UU World Web site, the UUA Board has approved a lease-to-buy agreement for 24 Farnsworth St. in Boston. Ms. M. sent along the posting of the property on Bostonofficespaces.com, which gives the following information:

“The Barkan Companies and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Children and Family already occupy this building. A private courtyard with seating, high ceilings and abundant natural lighting make 24 Farnsworth Street an attractive building. Other amenities include efficient floorplates, handicapped lift, underground parking with 25 covered spaces and card key access.”

From my point of view, this is a much better neighborhood for the UUA than Beacon Hill. You can walk from South Station, and it’s easy to get to from I-90. The Institute of Contemporary Art and Boston Children’s Museum are only a few blocks away, and you can walk to Fort Point Channel and pick up a water taxi (how cool is that?). Admittedly, the neighborhood isn’t quite as cool as it was in the mid-1990s, when it was home to some edgy galleries and artists like the Mobius Artists Group; when I worked as a carpenter, I did a job for an artist in the Mobius building, and it was a more exciting place back then; it was also a lot grungier and less safe. In recent years, rents have been going up and the neighborhood is increasingly respectable, but it’s still interesting. 24 Farnsworth Street will be a much more suitable home for the UUA than stuffy old Beacon Hill.

And what will happen to the UUA’s properties on Beacon Hill? They should sell for a pretty penny. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of the buildings was bought and converted to a single residence — a decade ago I got invited to an event in a building a few doors down from from 25 Beacon Street, and about the same size — all six floors were a single residence for one couple (and their servants, of course). Bet the UUA turns a tidy profit on this deal.

All in all, this is about as good an outcome as we could hope for.

Whining and complaining post

I need to whine and complain about one of my professional associations, the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA). Not everyone likes to read whining, complaining posts; therefore I’m warning you right at the beginning so you can skip this post if you want.

Continue reading “Whining and complaining post”

Pioneers

After services this morning, a visiting Unitarian Universalist from St. John’s Unitarian Universalist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, told me while he was in California he was going to visit Rosemary Matson. He told me that Rosemary Matson’s husband, Rev. Howard G. Matson, had been a chaplain to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and Rosemary herself continued to be involved.

On the Farmworker Movement Documentation Web site, I found more information about Rosemary and Howard Matson. Howard Matson helped found the National Farm Worker Ministry, an interfaith group supporting farmworkers. Together, Rosemary and Howard had created the Unitarian Universalist Migrant Ministry. Both of them worked with Cesar Chavez and other major figures in the struggle to gain rights for Mexican Americans. Rosemary Matson recorded this anecdote about Chavez:

I remember my unexpectedly providing lunch for Cesar and 15 of his delegation at our home in Berkeley. They were between meetings in Oakland. A trip to the deli for pans of lasagna sufficed for all except Cesar, who I found out was a vegetarian, drank carrot juice, and needed a nap.

We have just completed a “Justice General Assembly” focused on immigrants’ rights. Although Rosemary Matson received an honorary degree from Starr King School fo the Ministry, I cannot help but think we should be paying more attention to those Unitarian Universalists who have been working on this broad issue since the 1960s.