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A sermon by Rev. Dr. Neal Jones

Minister, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia, South Carolina

Delivered on Installation Sunday, July 25, 2010

On this day when we recognize our committee chairs and install our Board of Trustees and your minister signs his annual contract, it’s a good time for us to ask our congregational leaders, “What’s your job here?”

Some might say, “We represent the members of the congregation. They elected us, and so we should represent their interests.” This would be a political perspective, and it meshes very well with our congregational polity. For those who are new to Unitarian Universalism, I should explain that congregational polity means that the ultimate authority resides in the people of the congregation — a “bottom-up” understanding of authority as opposed to episcopal polity, in which authority flows from the top down. Unitarians, Baptists, and Congregationalists exercise congregational polity, whereas Catholics, Episcopalians, and Methodists engage in episcopal polity. Presbyterian polity is in-between the two. With presbyterian polity, authority “flows up” from the membership and resides in elected leaders, who make decisions for the congregation. While we congregationalists also elect leaders, our leaders are answerable directly to the membership, and important decisions, like calling the minister, approving the budget, and renovating the building, are made by congregational votes.

To say that the job of our congregational leaders is to be representatives of the members, like a city council or the Congress, certainly fits with our polity, but “doing what the people who elected us would do” is no simpler for a Board member than for a legislator. Should a Board do what its constituents want or what they would want if they understood the issues better and had spent more time thinking through the long-term implications? This is the dilemma of every representative in a democratic institution. A problem with all democratic institutions is that future voters do not vote, and since congregations plan to be around for future generations, the Board must represent not only current members but the disenfranchised future members as well. So clearly, the job of a Board member, committee chair, and minister must be more than merely representing the current members.

Some might say, “Our job is to give the members what they want.” I would call this a consumeristic perspective, and it certainly meshes well with our consumeristic culture. It’s the perspective that the “customer is always right,” and it views the members of the congregation as customers and the Board and committees as the service personnel whose jobs are to please the customers. The key measures of success are high attendance, growing membership, larger budgets, more programs, and bigger buildings. If these metrics are growing, they indicate that the service personnel are doing a good job at giving the customers what they want.

Because we live in a hyper-consumeristic culture, these metrics are used almost universally in our society. They are certainly used in judging the fate of a football coach. If he doesn’t rack up more wins than losses and boost ticket sales and build a bigger stadium and increase alumni giving — and do so within a couple of seasons — his days are numbered. Even in counseling practices now, success is measured, not by whether clients experience healing or growth (which can’t be quantified), but by how many clients are seen and how many billable hours are accumulated and by high scores on client satisfaction surveys.

When you live in a consumeristic culture, this perspective is widespread and deeply ingrained. But I would submit that congregations do some of their best work when, instead of giving people what they want, they teach them to want something new. I have heard more than a few of you express appreciation for this congregation’s leading you to read books you wouldn’t have read before and volunteer to help people you wouldn’t have noticed before and working in causes for social justice you wouldn’t have considered before. A consumeristic approach of “giving members what they want” fails to grasp the reality that a congregation should hope to influence, not simply reflect, its members’ preferences and values.

Another answer might be, “Our job is to be ministers.” This is a theological perspective, and it fits well with our Protestant heritage of the “priesthood of the believer,” the understanding of Luther, Calvin, and the other Protestant Reformers that all members of the congregation, not just the ordained minister, have particular gifts for ministry. The Reformers were harkening back to the Bible, specifically to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, in which he asserts that there is a great variety of gifts in the congregation given by the same Spirit, and he lists several of them: the gift of wisdom, the gift of faith, of healing, prophecy, teaching, speaking, helping, administration, and working miracles. Mike Allen and Donald Griggs demonstrate the gift of working miracles whenever they get these damn computers to work. The Catholic and Episcopal traditions have always put a great distance between the clergy and laity, but the Protestant tradition has closed that gap by emphasizing the Biblical assertion that all members of the congregation are ministers. This perspective that Board members and committee chairs have “gifts of the Spirit” certainly adds depth to our understanding of our leaders’ roles, but it doesn’t add much clarity to what their jobs should be.

Perhaps we could rephrase the question and ask, “Who owns this place?” We certainly know the minister doesn’t or the Board of Trustees or even the denomination, the UUA. Most of us would say that the members own the congregation, but remember, the life of this congregation supersedes the lives of its current members.

The old answer given by our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors and the answer I would have given as a child is that God owns the church. I was taught as a child that the church was God’s house and that I shouldn’t run in the church or be loud because that would show disrespect to God. My mother was the choir director of the small, rural, white-framed Baptist church we attended, and she used to take me along to Wednesday night choir rehearsals. My mother and I were usually the last ones to leave the building, so it was our job to turn off the lights and lock up. (I’m still doing that today). I distinctly remember one Wednesday night when I was a little boy. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Everyone had gone, and she and I had gone through our routine of turning off the lights and locking the doors. We got into our car, when my mother realized that she had left her pocketbook in the church. She said, “Son, go back inside and get my pocketbook. It’s on the first pew in front of the piano.”

I did not want to go inside God’s house … in the dark … by myself. I did not want to be alone with God. I was scared of him. It was God who cast bad boys and girls into hell, and it wasn’t that I had done so many bad things, but I had a lot of bad thoughts, and God knew everything, including what we were thinking. I just knew that God would relish the chance to catch that devilish little Neal Jones, creeping around in the dark in his house, and grab him by the scruff of his neck and fling him into the eternal lake of fire. I did not want to go into that dark church by myself. I tiptoed as quiet as a mouse down the aisle of the sanctuary, hoping that maybe God was sleeping and that maybe I could get in and out of his house without rousing him. I gave myself 360-degree coverage as I scanned wide-eyed all around me as I made my way down the aisle to the front pew. When I spied my mother’s pocketbook, I grabbed it and ran as fast as my feet would take me out of the church and to the car. I stand before you today having narrowly escaped with my soul.

Many, probably most Christians today would still say that God owns their church. But we UUs, with our sophisticated humanism, would not say that God is the owner of our congregation. The real owner of our congregation, the owner which your Board of Trustees and your committees and I as your minister and you as a member serve is our mission. The owner, the boss is the congregation’s mission. It is our raison d’etre. Our mission is the reason we gather to worship, read stories to our children, engage in social action, and invite a farmer to sell his vegetables on our front lawn. Our mission is our congregation’s purpose and meaning, and the measure of our success as a congregation is not the balance in our bank account, the average Sunday morning attendance, the shortness of our Board meetings, or the happiness of congregants; our “bottom line” is the degree to which we achieve our mission. The job of our Board and our committees and of me as your minister and of you as a member is to realize our purpose for coming together as a congregation as stated in our mission statement. In case you don’t know what that is, you can find it on the back of your order of service: “The mission of our congregation is to nurture and respect each other in our spiritual growth and pursuit of meaning, to create a welcoming and engaging environment through which we work for positive change in our community and the world.”

You’ll notice that the accent is on change. We belong to this congregation because we want to change … ourselves and our world. Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies put it best: “Life is just a chance to grow a soul.” We participate in this congregation because we want to grow. When life is going well, when we overcome our obstacles and reach our goals and realize our dreams, we UUs characteristically look to the next horizon. And when life disappoints and hurts us, we come to this place to grieve, to heal, to be made whole again. When life has been kind and when it has been cruel, we UUs seek to grow.

More than anything else, I suspect that this is what distinguishes liberal religion from traditional religion. The difference is not whether we have a creed or whether we reference the Bible or whether we use religious or secular language. The main difference between liberal and traditional religion is our attitude toward change. The conservative spirit resists change. The conservative impulse is to keep things ordered, stable, predictable, and settled. The conservative impulse is to preserve the status quo and maintain tradition. This is why conservatives cling to their unchanging creeds and insist on reading a literal Bible that is not open to new interpretations and relish the authority of a Pope or some other protector of the past. The liberal spirit is to embrace change and seek transformation. The liberal spirit is imaginative and creative. The liberal impulse is to have dreams and visions that point to a better way and a better day.

It’s tempting to see these two impulses as either-or, but we would do better if we viewed them as both-and because we need both impulses to be whole persons … and whole families and whole congregations and whole nations. We need the conservative impulse to conserve our energy, protect our boundaries, solidify our gains, and heal our wounds, and we need the liberal impulse to stretch and grow, to venture over the next mountain, to incorporate the new, and to adapt and change in order to survive. The challenge of the spiritual life is to hold the liberal yin and the conservative yang in tension.

Nevertheless, people and congregations and denominations tend to prefer one tendency over the other, and I don’t have to tell you which tendency our congregation and denomination prefer. Which means that our congregation and our way of doing religion are not for everyone. And I hate to say this, but I will because I believe it’s true: I think Unitarian Universalism is predestined to be a minority religion because I believe most people are more conservative by nature than liberal. This is not just my observation of people, but it’s the conclusion of personality tests conducted over decades. I’m afraid that for most people, religion is not a search for transformation but a search for security. Having said that, I will also say that I believe our congregation is poised to grow dramatically because as far as I can see, we are the only truly liberal congregation in this town, so we should have the market cornered on liberal religion.

You’ll notice that our mission statement holds together both personal change and social change, which is as it should be. A spirituality which doesn’t lead you to be concerned for others and for the conditions of our social environment is nothing more than glorified self-absorption. And social activism which is not grounded in personal transformation will become compulsive and moralistic before it eventually burns out. A healthy spirituality embraces both personal growth and social transformation. If you develop greater compassion, then you will insist that our state budget be more compassionate. If you experience forgiveness, then you will expect a more forgiving economy. If you grow in your capacity to respect others and yourself, then you will demand a more respectful work environment. If you learn to be more equitable in your personal relationships, then you will want our laws to be just. Personal transformation leads naturally to social transformation.

And the reverse is true: social transformation leads to personal transformation. If we grow up in a family that accepts us as we are, we learn to like ourselves. If we grow up in a congregation that is patient with us, we learn to be tolerant. If we grow up in a political system that tells the truth, we learn to be honest. If we work in a corporation that treats us with respect, we become less competitive and more considerate. If we structure our economy to provide a safety net and assure the basic needs of everyone, we become less anxious and more trusting and generous. If we pass laws that treat everyone equally, we are more likely to recognize the dignity and worth of each person. Social change and personal change go hand in hand, and I’m grateful that our mission statement recognizes this dynamic.

What is the job of our committees and our Board of Trustees? What is my job as minister and your job as a member of this congregation? It is “to nurture and respect each other in our spiritual growth and pursuit of meaning, to create a welcoming and engaging environment through which we work for positive change in our community and the world.” In short, it’s to change ourselves and our world.

I’ll be the first to admit that change is not easy either on a personal level or a societal level. It’s not even easy to believe that change is possible because life is forever giving us thousands of reasons to give up. That’s why I agree with Sonya Tinsley, a singer, songwriter, and activist in Atlanta, who says you have to pick your team. She says, “It seems to me that there are two teams in this world. And that you can find evidence to support the arguments of both. The trademark of one team is cynicism. They’ll tell you why what you’re doing doesn’t matter, why nothing is going to change, why no matter how hard you work, you’re going to fail. They seem to get satisfaction out of explaining how we’ll always have injustice. You can’t change human nature, they say. It’s foolish to try. From their experience, they might be right.”

“Then there’s another group of people who admit that they don’t know how things will turn out, but have decided to work for change. I see Martin Luther King on that team, Alice Walker, Howard Zinn. They’re telling stories of faith being rewarded, of ways things could be different, of how their own lives have changed. They’ll give you reasons why you shouldn’t give up, testimonials why we’ve yet to see our full potential as a species. They believe we’re partners in God’s creation, and that change is really possible.”

“There are times when both teams seem right. Both have evidence. We’ll never know who’s really going to prevail. So I just have to decide which team seems happier, which side I’d rather be on. And for me that means choosing on the side of faith. Because on the side of cynicism, even if they’re right, who wants to win that argument anyway. If I’m going to stick with somebody, I’d rather stick with people who have a sense of possibility and hope. I just know that’s the side I want to be on.”

Me too. And that’s why I’ve decided to be on this team.