Association Sunday: Growing Our Spirit (October 12, 2008 by James Montgomery Jackson)
Today we are celebrating Association Sunday. Hundreds of our fellow Unitarian Universalist congregations are celebrating Association Sunday with us today, and scores of others have chosen an earlier or later date for scheduling reasons. Today, each of you represents over 1,000 other UUs in our Meeting House. Can’t you feel the ceiling and walls expand to encompass our greater fellowship?
I want to start this morning by giving people a chance to get a little exercise – a little, not much. Let’s see a show of hands of all of you who grew up in the greater Marquette area; however you choose to define that. Okay hands down. Now everyone else raise your hand. Most of you moved here from somewhere else.
Now a speculative question: Assuming no major disasters, like nuclear (or nu-cu-ler depending on your party affiliation) war, asteroids smashing into Lake Superior or a resurgence of bubonic plague, how many of you think you will be living in this area when you die?
Now a fill in the blank question: If you want some additional exercise, you can stand up when you shout out your answer. Otherwise, you can remain seated, and you don’t need to seek my permission to speak. What first comes to your mind when you think of the UUA?
[Await responses.]
For me it’s music. The UUA sponsored the preparation of Singing the Living Tradition (the grey hymnal) and printed it with our own publishing house, Beacon Press. The day I first walked into what was to become my second UU church (MUUC is the third) they were introducing the then new hymnal with a congregational sing – just what I was looking for to help nurture my soul.
If I were to sit back and think about the UUA, I could list a large number of things the UUA has done and continues to do that touch my life. The largest of those is my membership in the Marquette Unitarian Universalist Congregation. You could rightly scratch you head at that, but here is my thinking. The Unitarian Universalist Association is a voluntary affiliation. If not for the choice of MUUC and a thousand other congregations to support the UUA’s work, the UUA could not and would not exist. We do that through our annual fair share contribution to the UUA. For our current fiscal year, that amounts to $56 per member or something a bit over $3,000. When Jan and I started coming up north from Cincinnati, we used the UUA website to determine if there were any congregations near us – and here you were, at the time a mere 60 miles away.
Had we been stuck with trying to find a religiously liberal church to accommodate our spiritual needs without the UUA’s existence, we would have been unlikely to find this congregation, or perhaps my earlier congregations in Cincinnati or in Baptistown, New Jersey. I raised my hand when I said I didn’t expect to die in the Marquette vicinity, so perhaps there will be a fourth UU congregation in my future.
So the UUA gets a chunk of money from this congregation each year, why is it asking for more? Association Sunday is in part about helping strengthen the bonds that join MUUC to the Association and through it to every other congregation, but the other part is a clear request for additional funds from its member congregations. Why a separate ask? If they would like $50 per congregational member, why not change the annual fair share to $106 and be done with it?”
Two reasons, I think. First, the annual fair share is a per capita request. While the UUA would like to receive an average of $50 per member, it recognizes some are not able to give that much and others have the resources to give much more. The second reason is that the request is not for annual ongoing programs. As visioned by President Sinkford, five Association Sundays will each focus on different aspects of Growing our UU religious communities. This year, the second, is Growth in Spirit. The next three years are Growth in Diversity, Growth in Witness and Growth in Leadership.
This is the second year, so what happened in the first year? Over $1.4 million was contributed by the 626 congregations who held Association Sundays last year. What happened to the money? About $334,000 went to the districts for outreach projects and $373,000 for the Diversity of Ministry Initiative. Over $700,000 funded the national awareness campaign. Nurture Your Spirit, Help Heal the World is the rallying cry we have adopted. We placed advertisements in Time Magazine: “Is God Keeping You from Going to Church?” one asked. “Find Us and Ye Shall Seek” another suggested. “When in Doubt, Pray. When in Prayer, Doubt” one said. “My God is Better than Your God” another proclaimed in the headline, only to ask in the regular print, “Is this any way to talk about religion? Maybe you yearn for an open-minded, spiritual community where people respect each other’s beliefs and worship together as one faith. Welcome to Unitarian Universalism.” You can find a copy of that ad on the bulletin board in the back.
Now another raise your hand question: How many of you saw at least one of the ads? How many came here for the first time because of one of those ads?
As I wrote this, I suspect the answer to the second question is not one of you. [No hands were raised.] Wasted money? Ann Stark is our resident expert on marketing, but I’m speaking today and I did get an A on the one marketing course I took for my MBA, so I’ll rely on that for my expert opinion! Although called ads, the placements in Time magazine were part of a marketing program, which has the goal of long-term brand recognition, not immediate sales. It took me at least three brushes with Unitarian Universalism over at least a decade before I checked it out. Those ads may be the first or second brush for someone who will eventually come here. It may be the third for others, just not in our congregation.
This campaign is not without controversy. As I read the UUA presidential candidate positions, it appears to me that one thinks the money was not well spent. I don’t know what academic credentials he has, or whether they compare favorably to my 4.0 average in Marketing courses, but I thought it was worth reminding ourselves that one of our characteristics is to discuss policies, not walk lockstep with whatever comes from the top.
That reminds me, the UUA Committee on Appraisal is still soliciting comments on their draft revision of the Principles and Purposes (Article II of the bylaws.) Comments are due by the 16th and you can do it online from the UUA website. I used the site’s search engine with the string, “Appraisal calls for feedback.”
So that was then, what is now? The Theme is “Growing Our Spirit.” These days we seem to be denizens of the country of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s tale, Through the Looking Glass. The Red Queen said, "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Spiritual wisdom provides a different approach. To get someplace we often must stop what we are doing. Growing our spirit, as William F. Schulz says, is about taking a break from the dashes of life. This year the collected funds will be distributed in four categories. One sixth will go to the UU Ministers Association for new initiatives for continuing education. While we do not currently have (and depending on our final strategic plan may never have) a full-time minister, it is important that we develop fresh ideas for the continued spiritual education of our professional ministers in the Association. Imagine if continuing education were the same as it was fifty years ago: it would be mostly humanist based, targeted to an almost exclusively white male population of ministers. Very limited compared to the make-up of our current ministers.
Another one-sixth is targeted for the Diversity of Ministry Initiatives. We have moved from a scattering of female ministers to a majority. However, while our current President of the UUA is black, he is joined by only thirty other UU ministers of color (black, latino or multiracial.) Our ministers do not mirror the nation at large, nor do they mirror the draw of our message.
A third one-sixth will provide $20,000 scholarships for ministerial students. The number provided will depend on our joint gifts. Those three areas total 50%.
The remaining 50% of the funds will be invested in Lay Leader Education, specifically to fund programs that have a strong lay theological education component (that’s corporate speak for people like you and me, not the professionally trained theological leaders.) The selected programs must be replicatable. This is crucial to congregations of our size. As much as we might want to develop spiritual programs that specifically minister to our congregation’s needs, we can’t possibly have the collective talent or time to accomplish that. We can, however, utilize what the Association develops and we can even participate in beta testing of new programs.
Last week we celebrated Billy’s birth with a dedication ceremony and gg spoke of planting seeds for future generations. These funds will provide the seeds for each of us to continue our spiritual growth. Why bother?
We think we have a winning message in today’s troubled times. A message that unifies, rather than divides. An inclusive message. And we are right. Most people would say that our seven principles “make sense,” or that they “couldn’t argue” about them. Not all for sure, as we were so recently reminded by the shootings in the Knoxville UU church. Yet, despite this general acceptance, the number of UU congregations has not grown in 140 years and the percentage of population that are UUs has markedly declined during that period.
In surveys, roughly three times as many people check the box that says “UU” than are members in our collective congregations. Why is that? For the two out of three who claim our name, but do not support Unitarian Universalism by their active participation in our congregations the answer may be that they intellectually support our principles, but they have not spiritually become attached to us.
Our opening hymn frames questions we all face. “Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, where are you?” “I am empty, time flies from me. What is time?” “Take our hands and let us work to shape our art.”
In the Offering, we sang to each other to “Come, come, whoever you are, wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.” We UUs suggest in our ad that “If You Find Us, You Will Seek.” We need to make good on that commitment, not only for new people attracted to our doors, not only for Billy and the rest of our children as they grow, but for each of us. If MUUC does not fill a member’s or friend’s need for spiritual growth, they will disengage from our congregation and the loss with be theirs and collectively ours. I have said in other messages that an integral part of MUUC’s draw is “community.” The “everyone is so welcoming;” and “people care about me here” aspect. This is true and we should not forget it. However, what makes us different from a social club is our commitment to spiritual development.
This is the core message in the UUA’s request for special funds. They ask us to help “Grow Our Spirit.” That happens one spirit at a time, yours and mine. It happens to our collective spirits; and it happens to the spirit of our congregation as an entity. We cannot do this all by ourselves.
The UUA asks that we make an average gift of $50 for each of us. Those of you who have heard me talk about money before know that isn’t the way I think about giving. I ask you to give an amount that makes you feel good. Is there a need for these funds? Unquestionably yes, and I believe the value to MUUC will be much greater than what we will conceivably contribute. Being able to say to yourself, I believe in this cause and I am supporting it, is and must be its own reward. I’m not into guilt or begging (since you are neither my children nor my pets, where I have been known to try both measures, with limited success.) I am into honesty and it is entirely up to you. Jan and I are both making contributions today.
After the tragedy at our Knoxville church, my heart lifted when Jan and I came across a small memorial tribute outside the Fairbanks, Alaska UU Fellowship’s building. Wasn’t it wonderful that someone left it there – not knowing who would be touched by it – and it happened to be me? So too with your gift to this special UUA campaign. You may meet your gift in the most unexpected way. That is our gift to each other and the 1,000 plus UUs you represent today in our Meeting House.