Compassion and Growth

I have been returning to issues of church growth over the last few weeks. There is much to be said about it - and the gods know that there there has been a monumental amount of ink used to discuss it. Many of these books are worthy and deeply thoughtful and many are premised on notions similar to what follows, but there is a core to church growth that, it seems, too often gets lost in the the techniques and the strategies and the programs and the intake process and all the rest of the machinery that supports a growing congregation.

To begin with the exception, it is important to recognize that every once in a great while someone comes into our communities that really shouldn't be there. They present a danger to the safety and well-being of others or they are so deeply mired in their own psychological dysfunction that the community cannot be of help to them without tearing at its own fabric.

That said, these cases are rare. For the most part, the people walking through our doors - whether members or friends or strangers - are "normal". Yet such normalcy masks something far, far deeper. There is profound beauty and grace that exists in each and every person in our midst. And every visitor to our community contains every bit as much of that same grace and beauty. Each person contains complexities beyond wonderment and profound possibilities for connection and contribution within our communities. This goes far beyond our first principle - it is a declaration not only of the inherent worth and dignity of each human being, but of the almost infinite wonder of actuality and potentiality embodied in each person in our midst.

Every person we encounter in our churches has a story filled with remarkable joy and heartbreaking pathos. Every person bears gifts and ideas. Every person has something to offer us. Every person has aching longings and dreams to be fulfilled. Every person is poetry incarnate. Every person wants to contribute and every person wants to exist in a place where they are seen and heard and, most of all, embraced in love.

Every person who walks through the door is far more precious and valuable than any jewel. To the extent there is divinity in this world, that divinity is reflected in the lives of those we rub shoulders with every day in our churches.

Yet our life together seems so profoundly ordinary. We have committee meetings, we squabble over this or that, we fret about the success of our stewardship campaigns or what someone in the congregation did or said.

It is easily to loose sight of the very big picture. It is easy to loose sight of the poetry and grace and compassion and spaciousness that allow our communities to grow and prosper. And the remedy is so simple. It is to simply listen. To listen with heart. To listen with compassion.

People long to be heard and when they feel heard, they connect and when they connect they contribute of themselves.

We spend so much time on the surface of issues and not enough time simply listening. If that listening starts within our communities and we become centers where people are heard and supported and encouraged to grow and change, our communities will grow. In a culture of profound alienation, what people most want is connection. They want to be seen and heard and understood. They want someone to understand what they bring to the community - both in their neediness but also, and more importantly, in their fullness. They want someone who recognizes their gifts and values them. They want people who will listen to their ideas and most importantly feel that the person behind the ideas was seen and heard and honored.

If our communities become centers of deep compassion, and profoundly compassionate listening, we will not be able to build churches fast enough.

Oprah and Eckart Tole

Oprah understands something that we in the UU church have not yet recognized. She sees not only that millions of us are seeking spiritual truth, but that authentic spiritual experience is much deeper than the mantras of liberal religion can accommodate. Her discovery of Ekhart Tolle, and her drawing millions of people to a webcast discussion of his book is news to which we as UUs should be paying close attention.

Ekhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, reflects the profound insight of a remarkable spiritual teacher. His own personal experience comes into deep context in the teachings of esoteric religion in any number of traditions. Many people confuse his work with the New Age. However, there are profound differences. Tolle’s work is unmistakably transpersonal. The New Age tends to devolve into the pre-rational. Tolle’s work calls us to transcend egoic structures whereas the New Age invites us to wallow in narcissistic impulses. The transrational Tolle speaks of is not irrational – it is consistent with reason, but recognizes that reason is a blunt instrument in truly understanding reality in its immediacy. Reason parses reality beautifully, but it cannot put it back together again. Reason objectifies reality to allow us to understand how it works, but in that objectification it deadens reality, separates us from our own true nature and becomes the cause of our fundamental alienation. Post-modernism is the end result of that rational enterprise – millions upon millions of data points with no wisdom; understanding everyone’s perspective, but endless nihilism. Pre-rationalism or romanticism (the old Romantics are the new New Agers) collapses into moment by moment waves of emotion and impulse. It is a reversion, not an advancement, in human consciousness.1

Tolle, and the teachers before him, point to a way out.

What is profound about Tolle’s work is his ability to allow us to glimpse that place of the transrational – not denying reason but moving beyond it to where we see the whole again, but from a place that is not pushed around solely by emotions and impulses. It transcends reason without descending to pre-rational states of consciousness. This is the place sages from Buddha, to Jesus, to Plotinus, to Nagarjuna, to Sankara, to Ramana Marharshi and hosts of other have gone and have pointed to. Eckart’s work is not new – it is the perennial philosophy re-framed for a modern audience. It is the awareness of our Ground of Being – of Awareness itself – choiceless, unmoved, ever present, always and ever existing, our own true Self.

What was interesting for me in watching Tolle and Oprah was the radical difference in their structures of consciousness. Oprah’s language and approach represented the multiplistic pluralism of liberal free-thinking religion. For us UUs we would have seen nothing new in her articulations and even though she identifies as a Christian, it is as a free thinking Christian that we would find wholly unobjectionable. Her belief structures were evident in the way she discussed Christianity and world religions. We should cheer that such a powerful figure is introducing open-mindedness to those Christians who are unsettled about their faith and seeking their own next stage of development. She can speak to them in ways that we cannot whether we be humanist or post-modern pluralist.

Tolle speaks from a different place. He made categorical statements (just as Oprah did) but did so from a set of transpersonal experiences that Oprah, by her own admission, is only beginning to glimpse. Indeed, the reason Oprah has been so taken with Tolle’s work is precisely because he taps not into a belief structure but into an experience of wholeness that liberal religion simply cannot deliver. We are watching Oprah move from one stage of consciousness to the next before our eyes and it is fascinating to see someone who has one foot in each world. The structures of consciousness that produce the doctrines of liberal religion (all paths lead to the same place, Jesus and Buddha were teaching the same truths, yada yada yada), is at least two developmental steps short of deeper realization of the dissolution of the self in the discovery of the Self. Indeed, if you listen closely to Tolle, he doesn’t say that these religions’ leaders “taught” the same thing – their content varies dramatically – but rather that they experienced something similar (sahaj, samadhi, the kingdom of God) and that they attempted to transmit these experiences to those around them. There are “jewels” of insight in the sacred writings that point to the ultimately ineffable experience. They communicated in the cultural language of their times and so the teachings are different, the exoteric religion is distinguishable, but the underlying mystical experiences, the esoteric religion, are profoundly similar.

What is interesting about most people who follow Tolle’s teaching is that they feel good for a time, but they get caught back up in their lives and the feeling state they experienced passes. Tolle inspires momentary experiences of living in the now. The systematic dismantling of the egoic structures that Eckart talks about is often painful and difficult work. In his case, he came to his awakened state only after years of despair and near suicide. His experience, as is the case with some, immediately rested in semi-permanent state. For most, these states begin as incidents or episodes but must be nurtured through spiritual exercises in community. Rarely does one progress on the spiritual path without a proven practice rooted in a wisdom tradition. And rarely does one progress on the spiritual path alone.

As a UU, I find liberal religion (as an ideology) is radically differentiated from the fundamental experience of enlightenment that Tolle experienced and teaches about. It is this deeper, more authentic teaching that we miss in our churches. And by authentic, I mean time-tested and profoundly proven approaches to spiritual experience. (I will write more about this in the next few posts.)

This fascination with Tolle will pass - it is a fad just like all of the other fads before it. Last year it was "The Secret", this year it is "A New Earth" and next year the pluralistic consciousness, which has difficulty putting down roots in any one place for long, will move on. However, for some, for a few, this will stick because it is rooted in a profoundly human experience. It is rooted humanity's experience of Consciousness itself. Those in our UU tradition who have practices in Zen or Kasmir Shaivism or Dzogchen or Advaita Vedanta, or contemplative prayer, or sufi whirling or any one of a host of other spiritual traditions and practices, get this stuff. If we are there to support those for whom this brings a shift...if we continue to work with this process with people who are seeking this depth, and if those of us who are living the lives of ordinary mystics are there to help, then good things will happen. The trick will be to use upaya (skillful means) to help people find deep spiritual paths that suit their sensibilities and stages of development. As more and more UUs get well and truly turned on to this work – and see it pass from the shallow grid of new age pluralism to the sacred work of grounded traditions– it will be useful for us to stand by and try to catch the attention of those who want to move from having occasional state experiences of transcendence or glimpses of meaning to living lives that rest more or less permanently in the Ever Present. If we are able to do that, we can change the world.

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1. In one of my first posts I suggested that the UU church should be paying attention to those who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. I mentioned that there are those who are rational but spiritual. This post is designed to clarify and explicate some of these distinctions as well as place what I see as this most interesting cultural event of the media phenome and the transperonal pandit sitting down to talk about the fundamental nature of reality, human consciousness, and lasting transformation.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

What are We Missing?

As we reflect on the spiritual marketplace in our modern, secularized world, there is no question that something is afoot. This week in Seattle an innovative trust and financial management company that serves families of extreme wealth rented the symphony hall to have alternative medicine expert Andrew Weil speak to its customers, potential customers, and their advisors on aging in one of its “Thought Forums”. Andrew Weil wasn't always so mainstream. In 1971 he first visited Esalen where he participated in then cutting edge seminars on health and human consciousness. His efforts and the efforts of other physicians and healthcare professionals and researchers who largely gathered under the initial aegis and leadership of Esalen brought alternative medicine to the United States and within a few short decades turned it into what is now referred to respectfully as "complimentary medicine."

The stuff that was on the very outer fringes of cultural acceptability only recently is becoming mainstream in some very important ways. Yet we as Unitarian Universalists are missing this cultural sea-change and dooming ourselves to fundamental and, I suspect, quite permanent, irrelevance. We sit back and dismiss these movements out of hand – this hunger people have for something of significance that feeds their souls. We see it as somehow too “woo-woo” or “New Age”. Yet in our complacency, the world is passing us by very, very quickly. The folks who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”, some of whom are referred to as Cultural Creatives, constitute approximately 20% of our population and probably reflect an even larger percentage of the demographic in more hip, urban and liberal areas where many of our churches exist.

As sophisticated UUs, I have heard us scoff at those who race after chimeric “spiritual” fixes – like The Celestine Prophecy or The Secret or “What the Bleep Do We Know” – and yet people who are seeking comfort in these things, and other ideas that are even stranger, have a deep human longing to become more whole and more loving people whose lives are rooted in something deeper than the shallow materialism of our age. This “pop” spirituality speaks of something much more profound - a human tropism towards the spiritual. It speaks of something that is emerging in our culture that has profoundly ancient antecedents. It runs so deep that it might even be irreducibly embedded in structures of human consciousness or even the fabric of the universe itself. The problem is that these popular forms of spiritual expression are ill-formed, lack depth, and are concocted out of ideas that seem to us rational folk to be patently foolish, confused and magical. In short, a throw-back to pre-rational superstition.

And many of them are. And yet…

While this frothy spirituality oftentimes denies and condemns the deeper wisdom traditions, their ideas are the distant and sometimes barely recognizable relatives of the much deeper truths found in perennial philosophies and the paths of mystics in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu traditions, among others. While the airy ideas of these facile trends lack depth and discipline, they can serve as gateways for literally millions of people to possibilities of real spiritual depth and profound experience. In talking with many UUs, the story is the same. Plenty of visitors, but few stick. Could part of the reason be because we are so very close to what they are looking for on paper, but fall short of embodying that promise in action, particularly with respect to spirituality?

As a faith that ostensibly draws on these well-grounded and respected traditions, we as Unitarian Universalists have the opportunity to deeply explore and live these truths and thereby offer to the world a path of depth, integrity and real meaning. But this way requires that we take our spiritual calling as seriously as we take our political one. It requires that we truly acknowledge the sources, not just with affirmation, but with incarnation. It requires discipline and study and devotion to spiritual practice.

Our denomination runs the risk of being swept into irrelevance. It continues to shrink in most appreciable ways and it is rapidly aging. We live in deadened humanism and narrow definitions of liberal political orthodoxy that have already been dismissed by our culture as fundamentally irrelevant. At this point, we have no voice that is resonating with those around us. Yet in our Sources we have latent depth and profound messages that, if taken seriously and coupled with spiritual practice, can not only revitalize our congregations but drive a new message of relevant political and social transformation.

Many leaders of cultural thinking point to emerging structures of consciousness that profoundly integrate the spiritual, the psychological, the intellectual and the ethical dimensions of life in ways that shape the soul. While this emerging consciousness is clearly not a panacea, and will raise its own problems, we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way ordinary people construct the meaning of their lives. It would be a shame to sit on the sidelines and only watch when we have the very real potential of dynamically participating in the emergence of a new order of human consciousness.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Boomeritis

Ken Wilber and others have put their finger on a very real set of problems associated with late stage pluralism. Wilber calls this complex of issues “Boomeritis”. As I mentioned in my last entry, much of our church reflects a consciousness reflective of post-modern pluralism. We live in a world of diverse cultures, races, and religions and increasingly these coexist in close proximity. From that melting pot comes the intellectual capacity to appreciate differences, deconstruct perspectives, and form identities that are not derived solely from one’s family and traditions. For the first time in human history, entire generations are able to transform the ways that they view themselves and revolutionize their understanding beyond the narrow confines of provincial enculturation. What this has produced is a remarkable mix of political activism and intentional personal development. However, the latter has, in many ways, gotten us into trouble.

The Deeply Subjective Self

The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. By rejecting traditional values and even recognizing the limits of scientific understanding, and by understanding intuitively that we construct reality as we go along, we are left with only our inner, subjective experience as authority. Our truth is relative. We cannot exercise judgment because there is no place to stand to determine validity. We reject the notion that anyone has anything of real value to say because we distrust both authority and hierarchy. And our feelings become the ultimate arbiters of good and bad, right and wrong.

In the end, we evade personal responsibility, because, after all, there are no true standards which can universally govern our behavior. We alternate between terminal “niceness” (because, after all, a person’s feelings are at the core of the truth of their being) to a rampant meanness (because I have a “right” to my opinion and a responsibility to assert myself to avoid giving in to my “victimhood” or to establish appropriate “boundaries”). This is the world of the sensitive self, the “Me” generation, self-righteous political correctness and cultural creativity.

When you strip all of this away, you are left with a very loud mantra: “Nobody tells me what to do!” This, in essence, is a deep form of narcissism and it is potentially quite dangerous. As Elizabeth Debold says in her article “Boomeritis and Me”:

[I]n the context of a world careening out of control precisely because we are so out of control, this is actually no joke. Narcissism is a force in us, built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, which must be renounced in order to make the evolutionary leap to a new way of being. It is a willful, and aggressive, denial of the creative force of the universe, whether we call it the Divine or God or what you will. This core motivation—Nobody tells me what to do!—sounds like the peevish rant of a two-year-old, which it is, but it is not harmless when it provides us with an excuse not to care beyond ourselves, destroys the true nobility of the spiritual quest and the imperative to reach for the highest in human potential, or justifies the rage of the innumerable sensitive selves who feel victimized in contemporary culture.

Boomeritis in the UU Church

I see this in myself and I see it everyday in our church. We UUs participate in this cultural complex without even thinking about it. We see it in our culture of criticism. We see it in our intolerance of conservatives. We see it in our stated commitment to liberal political action but failure to back up that commitment with sacrificial action. We see it in our token environmentalism and our claims to seek diversity (while our churches remain overwhelmingly homogenous). I am the first to admit to my own hypocracy in all of this. I am infected as well. However, for the good of the planet, I have to move on and I suspect we in the UU church have to do the same.

The trick, it seems to me, is to recognize that I am not here to have my way but to serve. I am here to contribute, not to take. I am here to lay my life down. I can no longer afford to say “Nobody can tell ME what to do!” but rather I must fundamentally say “My only hope lies in being of use in this world and what gets in the way of that is my self.” To my mind, that requires that I seek deeper spiritual truth -- that I learn and realize the true nature of my egoic self.

Jean Gebser, Don Beck, Chris Cowan, Ken Wilber and many others claim that we are on the threshold of a new level of consciousness. If we manage to negotiate that process, we open ourselves to new stages of human evolution in which we deeply see and understand the integrative nature of reality. Those perspectives hold promise for our solving some rather pernicious and dangerous problems. But those perspectives require that we let go of myopic understandings of who we really are and begin to understand that all that we think we are is merely a passing emergence in flow of infinite time and space.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Pluralism in UU Churches

On earlier blog posts, I took on humanism, arguing that it is a fundamentally played out moral view of the world resting on assumptions that were conclusively debunked in the late 1700s. I have taken the position that building a faith on a humanistic worldview is doomed to failure and that we, as a movement, have to look beyond mere humanism.

This article takes on the next step of development – post-modern pluralism. If our modern church was founded on humanist values, it is now dominated by post-modern pluralism.

Pluralism Defined.

What do I mean by pluralism? Specifically, pluralism refers to a post-modern understanding of the world that recognizes the relative nature of “truth” and the central reality of human experience. With the breakdown of epistemological certainty ushered in by Hume and later Kant, it became evident that what can be known is extremely limited if, indeed, it is possible to know anything at all with an appreciable level of confidence. As is often the case, it took awhile for humanity to catch up to the implications of these philosophic conclusions. However, by the early 20th Century, the philosophic schools of phenomenology, logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, semiotics, existentialism, structuralism and a few others reflected the full blown attempt to come to terms with the notion that “man” is not the measure of all things. By the 1960s, these intermediate ideas had penetrated the general culture and “post-modernism” in art, literature and social criticism. Representative intellectual apologists of this post modern movement include Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Roty and Jean Baudrillard.

While this is a diverse crowd and any generalizations are bound to oversimplify, for the sake of this blog, it seems the central theme is the general consensus of these schools of thought that our reality is, largely, constructed by human beings. There is no “objective” truth which is out there that we perceive. Rather, we attempt to make sense of a maelstrom of phenomena and in the process construct reality. Schools differ as to whether the primary drives of this construction lie in language, political structures, or cultures. On the positive side, this leads to recognition that no one has a corner on the truth. Truth can be found in all cultures and in all peoples and all cultures and value systems must be honored. This world-centric understanding is profoundly important on the level of political action.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Post-modern Pluralists, at their best, have a deep desire to act politically on behalf of oppressed peoples. being deeply sensitive to matters of race, sexual orientation, gender, poverty and marginalization. On a societal level, this postmodern worldview has accomplished much: the civil rights movement, feminism, environmental protection and ecological sensitivity, the beginnings of health care reform and an awareness of political marginalization in all manner of forms

However there is a very real downside to this world view. Postmodern pluralists share a common and fundamental mistrust of the spiritual, especially when experienced at the individual level. They are also thoroughgoing materialists. Given a lack of any basis for determining validity claims, and a radical mistrust of individual subjective experience coupled with a denial of the notion of transpersonal reality, they end up with a highly relativistic world-view. Because everything is constructed, there is no place to stand to evaluate value systems. You, in your perspectives, are as conditioned by language, society, culture and so on as everyone else and so you have no authority to “judge” the value systems of others. This leads to is a significant distrust of subjective experience, a rabid dislike of hierarchy, and spiritual experience and as a logical consequence, the result is a relativistic moral despair. (In its inevitable extreme, we can’t condemn Hitler because, after all, his value system is just one of many and who is to say, in any absolute sense, that his viewpoint wasn’t valid.) Indeed, it becomes very difficult to ultimately justify actions of liberation and political action – if every system is as valid as any other, then what allows us judge the oppressor’s way as “wrong”. Ultimately, postmodernism ends up becoming form of moral nihilism. Foucault recognized this, rejected his deep constructivist approach in the middle of his career and began working towards a different model.

In response to this moral quagmire, Pluralism hypocrically simply asserts an elitist moral system. All systems that are less broadminded are simply declared to be inferior on the grounds that they are not inclusive. Thus, in the name of inclusiveness, the Pluralists exclude vast swaths of human culture. Their ire is directed towards what are perceived as dominator worldviews – namely mythic religion and rationalist scientism. In self-contradiction to the notion that there is no morally superior worldview, the pluralist sees any moral system that cannot tolerate other systems as intolerable. There is also a tendency to romanticize and exalt cultures that are indigenous or non-Western. These are seen as pure and the victims of the dominator cultures of Europe. Moreover, feminine values are exalted over male values. The former are seen as inclusive and connective while the later are seen as destructive and purely agentic. Thus for all of its vaunted open-mindedness, the pluralistic worldview cannot admit even the partial validity of the moral stance of religious or scientific worldviews.

Consequently, postmodernism tends foster the apotheosis of victimhood. Victims should be rescued from the dominating forces of Western culture (whether religious or scientific/industrial). There is a great deal of anger and judgment against those who are perceived to be seeking the imposition of their value system on others. On an individual level, this leads to a certain degree of narcissim (which I will explore in a different blog entry).

Politically, pluralists tend to have a very difficult time figuring out how to address “evil”. They are deeply conflicted around issues of crime and punishment, terrorism, use of force and other agentic action. They simply don’t have the bandwidth or the categories to figure out how to address such issues from their framework. They recognize that lower tier responses are wanting, but they have nothing compelleing to offer in their stead.

The Fundamental Failure of Open-mindedness

While the entire ethos of this worldview is a purported open-mindedness, the irony, of course, is that this elitist and monoptic view of the world denigrates any value system perceived to be less open-minded. Despite that fact that it has a deeply nihilistic moral fabric, it seeks to impose its view of what is moral on anyone it perceives to be less morally developed. In fact, postmodern pluralism is a very closed system. Political correctness and thought policing are endemic. Straying from relativistic notions is met with fierce opposition and castigation.

If humanists are alive and well in the UU church, so are post-modern pluralists. Our denominational academic institutions are predominately pluralistic (as are most higher level academic institutions). Post-modern pluralism is also easy to spot in our churches. Most Unitarian Universalists claim open-mindedness and tolerance, yet cannot tolerate political or religious conservatives. There are certain things which could not be said in a UU church without provoking a virulent response. There is a stark dualistic thinking that takes hold of many with certain things declared to be good and other things declared to be evil. Our ability to think in nuanced and creative ways is hampered by the fact that we simply write off vast amounts of cultural and intellectual legacy that could be used as fodder for advancing our understanding of the world.

What's Next.

So why do I bring all of this up. A few posts ago, I talked about Jean Gebser and his view that humanity is on the brink of a significant transformation. Pluralism may well be a way station in the evolutionary development, but it is a mistake to linger there for too long. Indeed, post-modernism may represent the final stage of the mental structure with its insistence that material reality is all that exists. Gebser would encourage us to recognize that there are orders of consciousness that are above this worldview.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Corrosive Criticism

When my wife and I joined our first UU church in 2003, it was obvious to us that we had “come home”. We found in our community a group of very congenial folks who cared about the world and were willing to engage with each other and with life in thoughtful ways. We got involved immediately and have never looked back. I have my issues with the UU church as a whole. I am concerned with what I view to be a fundamental failure of the larger church to address the deeper spiritual needs of congregants and capture a cultural trend that could sustain us into the future. However, none of that affects my deep respect and compassion for my fellow UUs, particularly those I know at my church.

It is now three years later. I have sat on and chaired several committees. My wife is now president of our Boar. During that time I have noticed something I have found endemic to the life of our community and, from what I hear, is pretty characteristic of other communities as well. It is the pall of corrosive criticism.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do believe that there is a place for thoughtful and informed feedback and even criticism if it well conceived and designed to build up and improve on what exists. However, this type of criticism takes a lot of work and care. It is almost never an immediate reaction to a fresh set of facts and circumstances. I am not taking about this kind of thoughtful, constructive criticism. Rather I am talking about what might be called “corrosive criticism”.

In my sort tenure with our church, I have seen people leave our community because of the harshness of people’s judgments of their contributions or the contributions of others. I have watched good people who have put in hours and hours of hard work have it torn to shreds by people in seconds who are reacting without any real thought or consideration. I have seen good, thoughtful ideas tentatively put forward by people who have potential leadership skill put down and dismissed without any real understanding of what was being said. The toll of this type of criticism is enormous.

From what I can see, more than any other dynamic in church life, this type of knee-jerk response and lack of restraint in sharing every idea that pops into our heads, demoralizes people and makes it difficult to recruit leaders. Who wants to set themselves up for this kind of abuse? Why would people want to put their heart and soul in the work to have it so cavalierly disregarded?

Personally, I think this is a real problem. I am really trying this year to be a part of the solution. As such I am working on the following:

• Affirming people for the work they are doing and the contributions they are making.
• Using as a mantra: “Those who do the work get to make the decisions.”
• When I don’t understand a decision of some import, I am trying to go to a person who participated in making the decision and ask questions. The types of questions I have found useful include: How did you come to that decision? Did you consider X and how did that factor into your decision? Is the decision final or is there additional opportunity for input? How are you finding that people are responding? Is there anything I can do to help?
• In conversations about decisions, I am trying to acknowledge the hard work of the people involved and the fact that they undoubtedly had more information than I do.

I find that these questions are almost always best prefaced with something like: “This must have been a tough decision. Have you gotten any flack for it? I want you to know that I support your personal work in this community and I know how much you give. I also want you to know that, to the extent the opportunity arises, I will publicly support the decision you all made. It would help me to understand how you got to the decision both for my own sake and also to help me in my conversations with others."

In trying to avoid corrosive criticism, I feel that I can positively contribute to the community. What I have found is that the people who are making decisions have most often very thoughtful reasons for deciding as they did. I may agree or disagree, but these things are rarely so clear cut that there is only one right course of action. And for the sake of my community, and its long term health, I can support people of goodwill who are doing the best they can as volunteers.

Finally, I would note, that if we cannot be civil and supportive of one another, it seems that it will be very difficult to make an appreciable difference in the world. And so, out of compassion and out of a desire to support and strengthen those in my community who contribute, I am seeking to avoid corrosive criticism.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Implementing the Plan

Introduction

This is the final installment on the series Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows. Here we get to the level of implementing our plan. The work of any church can be divided into two basic parts – maintenance and ministry. The maintenance side is all about meeting the needs of the organization. Any organization requires a certain amount of effort simply to keep the organization afloat. In a church this means that you need a finance committee, a building and grounds committee, a stewardship committee and perhaps one or two others. These are important ministries in themselves and should be see as such. Folks in these committees are real servants to the entire community and it is their work that allows the church to continue to exist. However, if you compare the needs you identified in the strategic plan to the committee structure that you have, probably not one of committees on the maintenance side would be reflected. Thus it is important to differentiate between an individual ministry (which may be to serve on the Finance Committee) and the ministry of the church, which is to meet needs of individuals, families and the community at large.

Overhead and Human Capital

If you considered maintenance of the organization as “overhead”, you would almost certainly want to allocate only a small percentage of your resources to that effort. The vast bulk of your efforts would be spent in actually doing the work of the business. Perhaps the most valuable asset that a church has is its people and the commitment, creativity, imagination and hard work that they put into making the church a viable place. These hours of time are a form of “capital” that must be stewarded. Thus a significant goal would be to decrease the volunteer hour “overhead” that goes into maintaining the organization and increasing the amount that goes to meeting the needs of individuals, families and the broader community.

Structural Alignment

So let’s look at your existing committee structure. Take out two sheets of paper and create three columns. Title the first two Maintenance and Ministry, respectively. List your existing committees under each column. Under the third column list the Needs from your strategic plan. (as outlined in the last article). Now draw lines from each need to the committee that is meeting that need. What is the overlap?

On your second sheet of paper, reorganize your church so that each need has a group of people that is meeting that need. Some needs may be subdivided, but the idea is that we are focusing on the needs and the needs are driving structure, not the other way around. On the Maintenance side of the chart, put the minimum number of people necessary to do that job. For example, some churches have found that a committee of 1 is sufficient for finance if it is the right person and there is good oversight. This is an important number to keep in mind as think about all of the work that must be done in the church Many churches are finding that committees work well on the Maintenance side of the chart, but that the committee model carries too much baggage to work well on the Ministry side. One option to consider would be to have Ministry Teams that are focused on a need with a steering committee of a couple of team members who actually meet to discuss the coordination of the work of the team.

Now the ministry teams or committees are charged with meeting the need based on the strategic plan’s statement. The Board can take its hands off and the creativity and imagination of the people on those teams can simply go to town on meeting those needs. These committees or ministry teams can look at the need, at the statement in the strategic plan, go to work to meet that need as it sees fit. The Board exists to monitor issues as they arise and, in rare cases, to intervene if groups need to be called back to task.

Now you have structure that allows for maximization of the chaordic nature of the church. It is now powered from the periphery but unified at the core; it is based on clarity of share purpose and principles; it enables and empowers its constituent parts; it is durable in purpose, but malleable in form and function; it has distributed power, rights and responsibility; it should liberate and amplify ingenuity, initiative and judgment; it is compatible with and fosters diversity, complexity and change; and it restrains power and embeds authority in persons vested with accomplishing the tasks.

A Side Note on Giftedness

In the early Christian church, there was a recognition that people have different roles to play in the life of a church. They saw these roles as "charisma" or "gifts" given by God to individuals and the community. These gifts were part of what made individuals feel special and connected to the community, gave them a sense of purpose and that they were a valued and important contributor. From what I have seen in UU churches, we don't focus on this much. I think that is a shame. Clearly the gifts and talents that we have are diverse and many of us can serve the church in a variety of ways, but my guess is that most of us have a place where we feel most productive and most useful to our community and where the work most fulfills us. Any chaordic organization should take than giftedness into account and, perhaps. as a church, it might not be a a bad idea to a bit more "charismatic" in the sense of empowering people to do what they are good at and what has heart and meaning for them. This sense of giftedness is often what moves our contributions of time and effort from being "work" to "play".

Conclusion

At the end of this process we have come to creating a model that

1. Accounts for the chaordic nature of most UU churches
2. Ties every aspect of the organization in meeting basic needs.
3. Provides clarity to each person in the organization.
4. Creates an empowering and effective construct for meeting the real needs of people.

I hope that this has been helpful. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have.

If you want to start this series from the beginning, go to Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Planning: Undoing the Gordian Knot

INTRODUCTION

The blog has been dark for a couple of days, but not for want of trying. This one has been hard to write. It is all about untying the knot that often exists around mission statements and strategic plans. I have been wrestling with a couple of issues: first the traditional choardic “lenses” used for planning don’t fit the needs of a church quite as well as they do other types of organizations I have worked with; second, they have never been as clear as some other models I have used, and, finally, I suspect that they over complicate the problem. To that end, I am working to integrate the ideas embedded into the chaordic lenses into a workable framework for a church.

PART I: THE MISSION STATEMENT

Why does everyone groan when the topic of a mission statement comes up? One simple reason - it is a paaaain-ful process. The task forces shanghaied to do this work often take an inordinate amount of time and expend great effort, most often based on the unsupportable belief that it a mission statement is so central to the church, it requires painstaking care to develop and create. I have seen committees wrestle for months or even a full year on a mission statement. Often surveys are taken or there are extensive interviews. A lot of research happens. There is lots of wordsmithing and focus on individual words freighted with meaning. At the end of the day, the statement is usually bloodless, it appears in print periodically and most people forget it. Certainly no one ever uses it. Moreover, because new or fringe people didn’t labor over every word, they do not get all of the subtle meanings conveyed by the statement. This same sort of complicated process often occurs with strategic planning. Committees, surveys, church meetings and all sorts of effort can go into creating the strategic plan. A church can spend way to much time talking about what it is going to do rather than doing it. Moreover, the marginal improvement on the mission statement based on this time commitment is mot much better than one that could have been created less than an hour.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be that hard. You can arrive at a mission statement and strategic plan very, very quickly if you have a handle on some basic principles and know how to structure the meeting. If done properly, everyone in the room already has all of the information they need to create the statement and the plan. Church groups are, by their very nature, pretty homogeneous in terms of the attitudes, beliefs and values of the people who have gathered. Not only that, but they know each other and have history together. That type of solidarity makes creating the mission statement and the strategic plan pretty simple.

So here is the recipe for a mission statement:

1. Gather your Board, minister and Committee on Ministry and, if you like, the chairs of your various committees. Do a check in and a brief explanation of the purpose of the meeting -that is: To come up with a mission statement for the church. If any important stakeholder groups are not represented in the group, make sure that you invite one or two from those groups.
2. Identify the ten or so biggest needs that the church meets in the lives of its parishioners and in the world. (Note is is important to figure out what needs the church is meeting in the world beyond its four walls.) Don't spend a lot of time on this - when it seems you are simply refining the list, it is time to stop. Given the people in the room, it will be accurate enough.
3. Narrow that list of ten or so down to at most four. This is usually done by grouping like things together and coming up with a word for each of those clusters of needs. For example, Connection, Significance, and Personal Growth. This part is fun, and now you have a very clear idea as to why your church exists! It is there to meet those needs in your lives and in the life of your community.
4. Craft a simple, simple statement that a reasonably intelligent fourth grader would be able to understand and repeat to tell the world why your church is there. For example based on the above words, you could end up with something like this: “We are a people connected to each other and the world around us, a people who seek to make a significant difference by thought, word and deed, and who seek to fulfill our human potential individually and collectively." Yours will be more artful because it will be a group effort and it will grow organically from your discussion.
5. Congratulate yourself on coming up with a mission statement and break out the champagne. The only trick now is to use it almost ever Sunday – recite it in the words of gathering, the chalice lighting, prior to the offering whenever it makes sense in your community (though it should be ritualistically included almost always in the same spot in the order of service). You should decide as a group where in the service this will go. Get to the point that everyone who is committed to the community has memorized it and everyone who is new hears it when they visit.

PART II: THE STRATEGIC PLAN

If you have time in your meeting, you can go on to do the strategic plan. There are two parts to the strategic plan: the work you must do because of your size and the work that is your own because of the particular nature of your community.

Prior to this phase of the meeting it is important that people understand the different sizes of church (Cell/Family/Pastoral/Program/Corporate/Mega) and the characteristics of each one. You orient them by having everyone read something before they come or have someone prepared to present on these stages and their most important traits. Have some discussion until there is a consensus in the room as to what size of a church you have. It should not be an option to say that you are sort of this size and sort of that size...you have to land in the type that you most closely resemble. (Remember your church type is more like probability cloud than rungs on a ladder - if you are a pastoral sized church, it is likely that 10-20% of your structure and patterns of relating are similar to a family sized church and about the same percentage is reflects a program sized church.)

A. The Work You Have to Do

The work you have to do is based on the size of the church you are. For example if a pastoral sized church is all about communication, leadership and incorporating new people, you have to include a statement in your strategic plan about each of these areas. For more information, click here.

Next you are going to ask yourselves some questions. First you want to know what your church would be like if it was firing on all cylinders in each of the areas you have to be focused on in a church of your size. Here you want to ask 1) What would it feel like? 2) What would it look like? 3) What structures would be in place behind the scenes? 4) What are the values that drive this? These are the questions of the individual, the behavioral, the structural, and the cultural from the last article. Discuss these questions. Everyone should be taking notes at this point to remember important parts of the discussion.

The Goals That Are Your Own.

Now we come to the stuff your church should do.

Looking above, you recall that you identified the three or four basic needs your church meets. In our hypothetical church, the needs were: Connection. Significance. Personal Growth. Again you want to ask what it would be like if the church as firing on all cylinders. Again you want to ask:

• What would it feel like?
• What would it look like?
• What structures would be in place behind the scenes?
• What are the values that drive this?

These are the questions of the psychology, behavior, the structure, and the culture from the last article and can be diagramed like this:



You could even use this diagram in your discussion. Put the major need on top and the observations to each question in each quadrant.

The next question is the hard one: What negative feelings, behaviors, structures or values are we dealing with that keep us from embodying the ideal we just articulated? It is time to get really honest. This is the shadow side of the church community and perhaps even a few individuals in it. Unless you deal with it the plan has no chance of success.

Creating Your Plan.

You should now have 3 or 4 areas that arise from the nature of the size of your church and 3 or 4 that are based on the needs you meet among yourselves and in your community.

After you discuss each area in turn, you can then begin to structure your strategic plan. This a great time to break into small groups and give each group the task of writing up one of the needs that must be met to progress and the one that is specific to your church and the needs your church in particular meets in its current and potential members. Using the area of “Connection” from above, you might come up with the following:

We want each person to feel deeply connected to at least a few others in the church, connected to the mission of the church, and that they are doing something constructive to make the world a better place. We want to have this type of compassion and concern as a core value and will design specific pathways to
that end. We will support a culture that encourages connection by creating structures that allow us to meet in different kinds of settings and cause us to deepen our connections. As much as possible, we, as leaders will commit to modeling behavior that is supportive of creating connection both in terms of what we do and what we refrain from doing. We give one another permission to remind us of this goal. As a community, we recognize that one of the things that tears at our ability to create connection is unkind criticism of others behind their backs. We resolve to change that behavior in constructive ways.

Note that this statement contains what you hope people will feel based on shared values with an eye toward culture and structure and a discussion of behavior. (In other words it address all four quadrants.) It also identifies the shadow and how you hope to deal with it.

It is critical to identify how you want people to feel, because is the connection between their need and the church structure and programing that is absolutely critical to their commitment to and involvement with the church.

The last thing to do is to have each group add a matrix for measuring success for their group's portion of the plan. Every plan must have some tools to measure progress. The measurement tool should have a way of gauging the feelings of the individuals, the behavior of the community, the creation of successful structures and the growth in values. For some of these, before and after questions or surveys are almost always useful. There are other creative ways to do this as well.

To bring this to a close, you would then bring the groups back together to simply share their work. No comments, no judgments, just sharing.

You now have the backbone of your strategic plan. The next step is to get a small group of volunteers together to edit the statements created by the various groups and circulate it for comment to the people at the meeting and others.

Now that was painless and fun and it didn’t take six months. What a relief. Let’s move on to implementing the strategic plan.

If you jumped into the middle of this discussion, you can begin at Bullfrogs In Wheelbarrows.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Of Creed and Covenant*

In 1931, a young theology professor returned to Germany from the United States. He had been doing post-doctoral work at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and ministering to impoverished black youth in Harlem where he regularly worshiped at a African Methodist Episcopal Church. This young man was a brilliant scholar; he could read and write in six languages and was conversationally fluent in two and he was a polished pianist and a poet. He came from a remarkable family. He was one of seven children. His father was a physician and a professor of neurology at the University of Berlin and chief of the Neurology and Psychiatry at Berlin’s most prestigious hospital. The household was incandescent. Regular guests at dinner included leading writers, historians, academics, artists, scientists and professionals. His desire to become a theologian, which he announced at age 14, made no sense to his humanist family – but he excelled in his studies and his doctoral dissertation became a subject for serious comment and discussion among the theologians of his day. He went on to write several scholarly works on Christology, the sociology of the church, and the nature of man. These works placed him as one of the few theologians who as able to bridge the gaps between radical German theological developments and the development of theological liberalism in the in English speaking world. He was widely recognized as a rising star.

While his career was on the rise, it was in the context of what Winston Churchill later referred to as the Gathering Storm. In January 1933, Hitler was elected as Chancellor and in March he was given dictatorial powers. In the face of the increasing Nazification of Germany, the church, as a whole, stood silent. As the church become yet another arm of the state the voices of those who opposed the dominant political and cultural trends were silenced one by one. Only a few brave pastors and theologians resisted. Our young theologian was one of these. He resisted – quietly, but without compromise, he spoke for an independent church – a confessing church that espoused Christian, not cultural, values. An Anglican Bishop commented “He was crystal clear in his convictions; and as young as he was and humble-minded as he was, he saw the truth and spoke it with complete absence of fear.”

In 1935, he planned to go to India to study with Gandhi. He was deeply committed to pacifism and the principles of non-violent resistance. But as he was making the decision, history overtook him - he was asked and accepted the role of leading an underground seminary at Finkenwald to train pastors for a resisting church. Not one of the university theology faculties was willing to side with this arm of church or prepare ministers that would stand in opposition to the state. In no time the Nazis withdrew all of his Berlin professorships. The young pastor calmly replied “I have long ceased to believe in universities.”

It was while instructing students for ministry at Finkenwald that this young theologian and pastor started to seriously explore the notion of community. These young people were banded together in an intentional community – they lived together, ate together, laughed together, learned together, and prayed together and did so because they know their commitment to the church and to their own beliefs would be costly. He started writing a little book entitled Life Together which explored these notions of community. In that book, he argued that community rests on two pillars – commitment to a creed and commitment to those who share that creed and its implications for living. He argued that it was only in community that true religious strength exists. In it he argued that every community is deeply flawed because it is comprised of human beings who, themselves are far from perfect. But he saw that it was in the radical commitment to the whole community that truth is discovered and true religious experience is found. He argued that it was only in community that the church would find the strength to stand in opposition to injustice and cultural arrogance. His teachings were unabashedly Christian, but the truths they contained were profound in ways that transcended their theological trappings. He argued that the only way for truth to endure was for the community of the faithful to be faithful to one another and to their most cherished beliefs.

The seminary was closed by order of Heinrich Himler in August 1937. It was at this time that he wrote an extended discussion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – which I will mention again in a moment. From 1937 until 1939 he traveled secretly from one village to another supporting and encouraging his students who were working illegally in small east German parishes.

In September, 1940, the Gestapo issued an order forbidding him from speaking in public and in the following May he was forbidden from printing or publishing his written works. In 1939, he had begun meeting with elements in German intelligence and other high ranking military officers (including Admiral Canaris and General Oster) and some well-placed civilians who were part of a very serious circle of resistance. Over the course of the next few years, this group slowly and, in many cases reluctantly, came to the conclusion that the only moral course open to them was to conspire to assassinate Hitler. Coming to this commitment to regicide caused the young theologian (who had been deeply committed to a path of non-violent resistance) profound disquiet and pains of conscience. Once convinced, however, he worked tirelessly as a courier and otherwise, to further the plot.

In, 1943, he was arrested for his work in helping a group of Jews escape to Switzerland and was imprisoned, together with his sister and his brother-in-law in the Gestapo’s prison in Berlin. He suffered some torture. In July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was ordered to attend a General Staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair – Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. When he came into the conference room his briefcase was full of high explosives and he placed it under the conference table. After leaving the room ostensibly to take a phone call – the case was moved behind the heavy support of a large conference table thereby barely shielding Hitler from the ensuing blast and allowing him to survive. The ruthless investigation which followed turned up incriminating documents implicating the young theologian.

After summary trial, on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonheoffer was hanged from a gallows with piano wire at the Flosenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated 3 days later.

Why am I telling this story about Deitrich Bonheoffer when our subject this morning is community? I bring him up because it is always easy to look at the upside of community, but not so easy to look at the downside. Dietrich Bonhoeffer looked long and hard at the cost of real, intentional community – he realized that community is not simply about warm and gauzy feelings of closeness. To Bonhoeffer community was about commitment – commitment to a creed (or a set of basic beliefs) - and commitment to others who share that creed and its consequent mission in the world.

Creed

Now the word creed is strange to us as Unitarian Universalists. We are fond of joking about our inchoate faith and that you can believe pretty much anything and be a Unitarian Universalist. I would like to raise the rather heretical possibity that, in fact, do have a creed – a set of beliefs we hold very dear. Like all good creeds, it is a simple one. Our creed is embodied in what we say in this community every Sunday when we gather together and light our chalice as one body. We commit to loving our neighbor as ourselves. We commit to searching for truth with an open mind. We commit to making the world a better place to live.

The words can be cheap to say. But I think we all have all found where it is costly in practice. Indeed, we were confronted with the implications of our creed last Sunday when we voted to welcome Tent City 4 as our guests, despite the potential costs. That vote reflected a commitment of faith in our creed (and I say this for both those who voted in favor and those who voted against). Some of us have been pushed out of our families because of what we believe. Some of us have lost friends or been shunned by coworkers. Most of us feel our voice is crying in wilderness in a culture in the predominating values are contrary to our own. Our creed of tolerance is met with intolerance. Our acceptance of all people is seen as subversive. Our call to equality and peace and justice are seen as hopelessly naïve.

We turn to each other for support in our journey. We provide sanity checks to one another and we remind each other that we are not alone. We turn to each other for inspiration, information, laughter and….ultimately, for community. The term community itself derives from the same root as the word common. It is what we share together – what we have in common - that makes us a community. It is what we have in common that binds us together. And it is this common set of beliefs that is the basis of our community.

We don’t have exclusive beliefs. In fact, we throw our arms open and invite anyone in. And that makes our beliefs are radical. They are counter-cultural and they are more than a little dangerous because they confront deeply held values in the dominant culture. Calls to truly love your neighbor as yourself are fine in theory – but for those who will love you if you are not too gay or too heretical or too homeless or too Islamic or too this or too that, the kind of unconditional love we call can deeply trouble them. For those who think they have stranglehold on the truth, our call to continue to search for truth with an open mind is offensive. It challenges an accepted understanding of the world that brings great peace of mind to many. And for those who like and benefit from the status quo, working to make the world a better place to live is deeply confrontational.

And so we are often out of step with the culture around us. It seems to me that we are in many ways a community of prophets in an age where prophets are not held in high regard. We don’t espouse a doctrine, but I do believe we have a creed that rests in a common mindset - a set of beliefs that sets us apart as UUs. Those beliefs give us our identity and call out to people who are likeminded – we provide a sanctuary for those who need what we need – a community of likeminded people. So we grow in numbers and strength and so we stand firm as a liberal religious presence in Woodinvile.

Covenant.

If Bonhoeffer’s first principle of community was adherence to creed – his second was a commitment to the community. Any serious religious community requires the existence of a covenant: a commitment, and perhaps even a radical commitment, to one another.

A community built on covenant calls for a deeper understanding of individualism than the one held by popular culture. It stands at odds with the notion of religion as an item for consumption – spirituality as something you get as easily as you visit the Gap, as buying into a cheap, uncostly cultural conformity. Our culture, and our civil religion, promote a type of individuality that is conformist, self-centered and ultimately self-serving. Religion in our culture is mostly about feeling good, not doing good. Spirituality is often reduced to a personal “righteousness” on a very superficial and undemanding level rather than a passionate commitment to true justice and a deeper and harder work of cultivating righteousness of the spirit and righteousness of community.

In contrast, our Unitarian Universalst understanding of individuality sees us as part of an interconnected web of all beings and that true individuality exists in our connections with those around us, with the earth, with nature, and even with peoples we don’t know. In our creed, there can be no I without a You. It is in the relationship between the sacred “I” and the sacred “Thou” that we find out who we really are. It is this recognition of the web of being – and its expression in our commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves and to make the world a better place to live – that we come into our own as individuals. We are not islands. We recognize that we cannot truly be an individual alone. Our individuality paradoxically requires that we be in community.

Just as it can be costly to have a creed, it can be costly to be in this type of countercultural community. This type of community is like marriage…it can be the most rewarding thing in our lives or it can be the most exasperating. It requires that we accept one another and hang with one another through it all. It requires that we give in and give up a portion of our lives for the greater good of the whole community. It demands our time, our resources, as we look forward to our stewardship season, our funds, and could, potentially, if things got bad enough, require our very lives in exchange for the ability to claim our beliefs – our creed. That is not likely, but it probably didn’t seem likely in 1930 in Germany either.

Bonheoffer’s book about the Sermon on the Mount, entitled The Cost of Discipleship, begins with these words,

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the church. We are fighting today for costly grace….Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God thought as the Christian “conception” of God. The mere intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself, sufficient to secure redemption. The church which holds the correct view of grace, it is supposed, has that grace. In such a church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no real contrition is required, still less any real desire for transformation. Cheap grace amounts to a denial of the living Word of God….

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field, for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell as his goods. Costly grace is the good news which must be sought continuously. It is a gift which must be asked for over and over again. It is a threshold we must always seek to cross. It is costly because it costs a man his life. It is grace because it gives a man his only true life.

These words, to us as Unitarian-Universalists, may be, at best be odd, and worst a little offensive as laden as they are with the Christian elements of Bonhoeffer’s theology – words like redemption, contrition, and grace are not words we typically use – yet if we take the time to unpack them they contain a profound truth. What Bonheoffer is saying is that spiritual maturity (however you define it) cannot be had on the cheap. While it is infinitely rewarding, it isn’t an easy journey. While it creates true and profound joy, it is not a comfortable journey. Having a spiritual life (having a truly human life) requires being committed to a creed and to covenant with a spiritual community. I believe that we are far down the road of forging that type of profound community here at this church. Our community is here, in this place, and it is now, in this time. And it is in our community – in all its humanness, weakness and goofiness – that we find that we are able to love our neighbors as ourselves, seek the truth with an open mind and make the world a better place to live.

Peace, Shalom, Namaste, Blessed be.

*Sermon delivered at Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church on 2.20.2005

© 2005. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.