“Roots hold me close/Wings set me free.” Each week we sing these words in our beloved hymn “Spirit of Life.” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what these words mean. They certainly evoke powerful images. The roots of a great old tree, plunging deep into the soil. Roots, whose job it is to absorb nutrients from their surroundings. Roots that connect us to what is and what has been. Roots that provide us with a source of strength and stability. Wings that launch and lift us. Wings that draw us upward and offer us a wider view. Wings, those fragile appendages that can be so easily broken. Wings, that pull us out and beyond the known. Wings, tools for exploration, a source of freedom.
Through these words we proclaim that the Spirit of Life both holds us and sets us free. We proclaim that ours is a faith that simultaneously grounds us and releases us. That as Unitarian Universalists we hold onto tradition while at the same time we allow and encourage our faith and ourselves to grow, evolve and transform. That, my friends, is all a tall order, and I’d like to spend some time this morning unpacking it a bit. Who and how do we decide which traditions to hold onto, which to adapt and which to discard? How do we keep our proverbial feet planted on the ground while we’re seeking to soar? What does it mean to be a “living tradition,” as we often call Unitarian Universalism, and who breathes life into our tradition? To put it in terms of this month’s Soul Matters theme, how, where and when does this faith of ours get renewed, and why?
First, a very brief bit of history. Most of us know that Unitarianism and Universalism both grew out of Christian traditions. If we view our faith as a tree, you’ll see our Christian roots run deep. The Bible, although interpreted differently than Catholic and most main line Protestant denominations, was at one time our holy scripture. If we hold onto this tree imagery, the first major branch of the tree came with the Transcendentalist movement, when our Unitarian forebears claimed that we can find God in places other than Scripture and that we can have an unmediated experience of the Divine outside of church. The next major branching came with the Humanist movement of the early and mid-20th Century, which was embraced by many if not most Unitarians. “Faith without God” and an unbridled belief in our human potential became the dominant theology in our living tradition, and that dominance continued right up through the end of the last Century. Then the “spiritual but not religious” movement emerged, and the UU pendulum of belief began to swing back toward center. We began to acknowledge that our faith needs to respond to the whole person, both the head and the heart. At the most recent turn of the century we (at first tentatively, but then less apologetically) we reintroduced religious language – a language of reverence – into our congregational vernacular, and we saw a return to religious ritual and practice that had once been discarded as anti-intellectual. Throughout all this time, both before and after the merger of Unitarians and Universalists in the early 1960’s, a deeply rooted commitment to social justice held us fast to the ground and to each other.
Today, I often refer to Unitarian Universalism as a “progressive, post-Christian” faith. One whose tradition is grounded in and heavily influenced by our Christian roots, but which welcomes people from all faith traditions and no tradition at all. In fact, while once our congregations were populated primarily by what we called “come-outers” – people who came to us having left another religious tradition, we are now more likely to be populated by the “Nones.” Those who grew up without any religious tradition at all.
You can see where our Christian “roots hold us close,” sitting here today, right now. We’re here in a “church” (virtually or in person), in “worship” on a Sunday morning. We sing “hymns,” send our kids to “Sunday School,” and listen to “sermons.” The primary communal ritual gathering of our congregation, and most UU congregations, is basically Christian in format, liturgy and language. Have you ever wondered why that is, or whether it should be? While many of our congregations have jettisoned the name “church” in favor of a more benign and perhaps less-off-putting title like “congregation” or “society,” when someone walks in the door, grabs an order of service, and sits down in the Sanctuary, they find that what happens within our walls is dripping with Christian practice and tradition.
And, of course, it need not be so. As the song says, we have wings that can set us free from these practices if we so choose. And maybe it’s time to start thinking about what we do, how we do it, and why. Our faith, my friends, is at a crossroads. I would go so far as to say that Unitarian Universalism is facing an existential crisis, a moment in time in which our continued existence is at stake. As we tentatively and hopefully emerge from the Pandemic, we are faced with both the opportunity and the challenge to critically examine the roots we want to nurture and those we would be better off severing. Of stretching our wings to see where they might take us. Of determining how we can and should renew this faith that has renewed us for so long. Right now, every church that is to survive in this post-pandemic moment needs to be asking itself these foundational questions: Who do we seek to serve, and how do we best serve them?
There is good reason to fear that we will never return to the “normal” that existed before the pandemic, and to celebrate that fact as well. Like all crises, the pandemic was an accelerator of trends that we were seeing before it hit. Reduced attendance on Sunday mornings, lower rates of volunteerism, reduced financial support. While all of us here at UUCDC, staff and volunteers alike, were working mightily and somewhat successfully to buck the larger cultural trends, we cannot refute the fact that we have been an outlier, and that the demands on individuals and families have been pulling them away from a consistent, Sunday morning-based spiritual practice for at least a couple decades now. And that means that simply returning to what we were doing and how we were doing it before the pandemic, and praying and keeping our fingers crossed that everyone will come back and all our metrics will return to what they were in the “before” time is like trying to hold back the tide with a teaspoon.
Church consultant Carey Nieuwhof, whom you heard from a few moments ago, has written extensively on the crisis that congregations are facing. In one of his blog posts,[1] he cites five “faulty assumptions” about the future of the church. The first is that “what worked before is going to work again.” He writes, “[I] If the old model of church wasn’t working before, it’s probably not going to work again, no matter how sincere you are, how loudly you shout it, or how desperate you feel.” I, for one, am deeply grateful that you’re all sitting here today, that we’ve returned to in-person services, and that as of today we’ve returned to singing our beloved hymns. I’m grateful that we’ve got our Religious Education programming up and running again. And I’m grateful that we’ve installed the technology that allows us to connect with people remotely and that we’ve got a strong online contingent every Sunday. But, so far, all we’ve done is essentially attempt to resurrect the past, the Sunday morning experience that we enjoyed before the pandemic.
Another “faulty assumption” that Nieuwhof cites is this: “The building will be the center of ministry.” I would add “the building on Sunday morning.” He writes: “At the heart of the broken approach to church is our reliance on buildings as the focal point of all ministry. What if the church has left the building? And by ‘left the building’, I don’t mean that the church has abandoned gathering.” He goes on to write, “But most [people of faith] who are not returning to church are not leaving [the faith]. They may not even be leaving your church. They’re just not coming back to the building, and perhaps they won’t even after the pandemic is a distant memory.” What, I ask, if that’s true for us, for UUCDC?
What is required of us – of every member of this congregation and of every congregation in our association, is nothing short of a comprehensive critical self- assessment, tied to an exercise of radical moral imagination. Here are just a few of the questions I think we need to be asking ourselves right now:
- What is our saving message, where are the people who need it, and how do we best reach them?
- What are the traditions and practices we engage in that reinforce and nurture our values, and which ones do we engage in simply because we’ve always done so?
- If we were to create a Sunday morning experience from whole cloth, what would that look, feel, and sound like? And would it even be on Sunday morning?
- So many of us place a premium on the value of community and a sense of belonging here. How and where – other than here, on a Sunday morning – might we best cultivate those values for ourselves and others?
- How do we foster an ethic of ownership of the church? Not just belonging, which is important, but a deeper investment that compels deeper involvement and commitment.
- What are the reasonable levels of volunteerism and leadership we can expect from people, given our current culture, and how do we equitably spread the work of the church among members and staff?
- How can we sustain ourselves financially other than through an annual pledge campaign and multiple annual fundraisers?
It’s a scary, challenging time for faith communities of all sorts right now. Not all of them will be around ten, twenty, thirty years from now. We are blessed to be a healthy congregation and we are blessed to be part of a living tradition. A tradition whose core values promote adaptability and transformation. Now is our moment to step boldly into that identity. We stand at the edge of a cliff not of our own making. For generations we have trusted our roots. Now, it’s time to spread our wings.
May it be so.
[1] https://careynieuwhof.com/5-faulty-assumptions-about-the-future-church-2/