I Call That Church Free

February 26, 2006

That's because this is the second year that First Religious Society has given half the loose cash from our Sunday collections to nonprofit institutions that serve people in need in our community, or do other good works. We are digging deeper because we know that our generosity has real impact, that it is an expression of the shared ministry of this church, ministry that reaches beyond our doors to make the world a better place.

Today is our annual Association Sunday, and I stand before you this morning not only as a member of First Religious Society but also as a member of the senior staff of the association in question, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

On Association Sunday, perhaps we should take a moment to savor those 20 unwieldy syllables. So silently mouth the words with me: The U-ni-tar-i-an U-ni-ver-sal-ist As-so-ci-a-tion of Con-gre-ga-tions. The name is scrupulously accurate, but I suspect that the folks from the marketing department failed to show up for the meeting that decided what to call this outfit I work for. I'm sure you'll forgive me if from now on I refer to my employer by its shorthand name, the UUA.

Now you may be wondering what the Sunday collection has to do with the UUA, and therein lies a story. But I'm going to leave you hanging a while before I explore this story, because I suspect that you may be wondering other things as well. If you are like I was for many years after I started attending Unitarian Universalist churches, you may also be wondering what the UUA is and what it does, and what it has to do with the First Religious Society, and why our congregation sends part of the money we pledge to the UUA every year. Let me tackle these questions first.

What is the UUA? It quite literally an association, and, as the 20-syllable jawbreaker says, an association of congregations. I work for this association, but I cannot be a member - only congregations can.

And it is an association of a particular kind of congregations, churches that call themselves free. Since the time of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, free churches have been the exception rather than the rule, and in this dangerous era of unfree churches and mosques and temples that are quick to brand you an infidel unless you subscribe to their narrow and rigid understanding of the truth, free churches are crucial. How I wish there were more churches like this one to show the world that religion need not be rigid, that in a shrinking and pluralistic world, pluralistic religion is crucial!

The UUA is an association of churches that are free of creeds and free of the hierarchies that write them and insist that we contort our religious lives into their strictures; free of elders and bishops and popes and all other kinds of authority outside themselves. It is an association of 1,055 churches like this one, churches where the members together constitute the authority. You, my friends, all of you are the authorities responsible for your own religious journeys and, with the people around you, the authority responsible for the religious journey of this church.

If you're like me, when you come to Sunday services your authority isn't at the front of your mind. But this authority is real. Take a moment now to get in touch with your authority. And look around you - take in all the people who are in charge here.

It's a heady responsibility to be part of the authority that determines the direction of this church. And for our church, it's a heady responsibility to be part of the authority that determines the direction of the UUA.

The UUA is a congregation, too - a meta-congregation composed of 1,055 free churches. This is the "church communion" the Cambridge Platform talks about. In short, what the UUA isn't is as important as what it is. It isn't an authoritative body. It can't tell its member churches what to do; the member churches tell it what to do.

So what do the congregations tell the UUA to do?

The UUA has a very direct charter, three purposes set out in bylaws approved by the authority of congregational delegates to the General Assembly: First, to serve the needs of the member congregations - and that includes us; second, to organize new congregations and strengthen existing ones as well as other Unitarian Universalist institutions; and, third, to implement Unitarian Universalist principles in the wider world.

Now that's pretty abstract. To be more concrete, the UUA provides services to churches whose scope is beyond the capacity of the congregations themselves. So the UUA determines who is qualified to be in fellowship as a UU minister, and while it's always the congregations that vote to call a minister, the UUA helps congregations in the challenging process of searching for just the right minister to call. It helped us to find Harold.

Churches in some denominations receive money from their denominational hierarchies - from the diocese or synod or whatever - but not our free churches. We are responsible not only for our religious journeys but also for every cent we spend. But the UUA does offer lots of help with money - when FRS conducted the capital campaign that resulted in our beautiful lower church space, we worked with a fund-raising consultant from the UUA. Among its many financial services, the UUA offers congregations a chance to pool their endowments along with the UUA's $100-million-plus endowment, thus benefiting from the efficiencies of scale the UUA enjoys in working with investment professionals. This is something the trustees of FRS are considering right now.

The UUA also provides worship materials for free churches like ours - most visibly, "Singing the Living Tradition," the hymnal you have already picked up and read from or sang from several times this morning - but our denominational publishing house also publishes the essays of James Luther Adams and scores of meditation manuals and other useful books. Perhaps the UUA's most distinctive product is religious education materials that do not indoctrinate our children with a particular set of truths. UUA religious education materials help our children learn about all the world's religions, to help them learn to be religious while understanding that there is no one right way to be religious.

The UUA also publishes The Congregational Handbook, which FRS's newly launched visioning committee is finding foundational to its effort to plan the events and conversations we will all be invited to take part in next fall. The last time FRS undertook a process like this, to discern its vision for the congregation's future, was a decade ago; since then church membership has grown dramatically, the Young Church has grown even more dramatically, a successful capital campaign has resulted in the new space in the lower church, and so much more. These widely appreciated changes are a result of a vision that has been realized, so it's time to look to the future again. And given that the membership itself constitutes the authority that determines what FRS is about, this is a process that asks you to exercise not only your imagination but also your authority as this congregation finds out what we are yearning for as FRS's future unfolds.

OK, you may be wondering, What is it that you up there in the pulpit do to get a paycheck from the UUA?

Most visibly, I'm the editor and publisher of UU World, the UUA-owned national magazine of Unitarian Universalism. Every household everywhere who has at least one member of a UU congregation gets a subscription - the congregations go together to furnish the money for the UUA to publish a magazine that's just right for members of our free churches. Now unless you have amazing eyesight, you probably can't see that the headline on the cover of the issue I'm holding up says, "The Wonder of Evolution." Try to imagine another religious magazine with a cover story like that. That's why the UUA publishes this distinctly Unitarian Universalist magazine four times a year in print plus the weekly uuworld.org Internet magazine. These publications are the descendants of Unitarian and Universalist newspapers and magazines that have been published continuously since 1793. It's an honor to be entrusted with carrying on such a tradition, and humbling to think of the people who have written for and read these publications over their history - Olympia Brown, our nation's first woman minister; Emerson and Thoreau; Adali Stevenson, Elliott Richardson, so many fine contemporary minds.

My responsibilities also extend to overseeing the UUA's denominational book publisher, Skinner House Books; the UUA Bookstore, which sells a wide array of books and curricula and other material of use to individual Unitarian Universalists and their congregations; and to some smaller publications, including the piece of my work that's dearest to my heart - InterConnections.

This little newsletter circulates to members of all UU church governing boards - at FRS, we call our board by its historic name, the Parish Committee - and to the professional staff members who work with the governing boards. The mission of InterConnections is to help church leaders in their crucial work to help their congregations grow in health and vitality. Next to UU World, 72 pages with a myriad of features and beautiful art, you may be wondering, what's the matter with Stites that his heart smiles widest at this homely little eight-page newsletter?

Well, it's an embodiment of churches that call themselves free, an embodiment of the Cambridge Platform. If you've not read InterConnections, you may presume that the experts at UUA Headquarters use the newsletter to tell the congregations how best to do things. But that would be hierarchical, so it is not the case. The experts the newsletter seeks out are people like us in UU churches everywhere who have found exemplary ways to deal with the problems that all our churches face. In this process, the FRS administrator John Mercer has been quoted in an article, sharing good practices developed here so other congregations can benefit, and our finance chair Bill Heenahan has been interviewed for an article in the next issue. The newsletter finds wisdom in our congregations and shares it with other congregations. This wisdom sharing is exactly the kind "church communion" the Cambridge Platform had in mind, churches helping one another without the need of centralized authority. The newsletter is the single most popular service the UUA provides for congregational leaders. If you're curious, there are copies in the church office, and it is available online.

And this brings us back to the story that links the UUA to First Religious Society's decision two years ago to start sharing the loose cash in the collection boxes with worthy not-for-profits. We did not originate this idea - after all the Sunday collections of churches everywhere have gone straight into the church treasuries for many centuries - but somewhere another congregations had the nerve to try breaking this ancient mold. It worked, and this found its way to the radar screen of Don Skinner, the editor of InterConnections. He put out a call to his network of contacts around the country and discovered that some other congregations doing the same thing - and that all had found that when the started the practice, Sunday giving had at least doubled. That's how FRS heard about it, and was moved to adopt the idea so that we can better share our ministry with the wider community. Sure enough, giving has doubled, and sometimes Jim and Jack Dyer have so much money to count after church that all the coffee cake is all gone by the time they get to coffee hour.

Let me close with words from the UU minister and scholar Alice Blair Wesley, perhaps our denomination's most fervent contemporary free church theorist.

"[T]his is a rule of commonsense and natural law: When free church people regularly and freely cooperate - elected leaders and members together, in the spirit of mutual love and in healthy patterns - good happens and keeps on happening, in wider circles!

"That is the faith and the hope of every single, distinct free church. This natural law holds, as well, for any association of free churches: When elected ministers and members . . . associate in healthy patterns - all the churches benefit richly from the spirit generated, together."

In this age when unfree churches are so powerful, and seeming to gain power by the day, these are words to heed. May First Religious Society and free churches everywhere radiate our values and our ministry in ever-widening circles to strengthen our ministry of healing and pluralism to our hurting world that needs it so much.

Amen.

Tom Stites