A View from the Hillside

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, May 23, 2010

after a reading of the words we read in unison during our blessing of new members:

“We, the members of the First Unitarian Church of Alton, welcome you to our search for faith and freedom, our work for justice with love, and our practice of keeping an open heart and an open mind. We offer you the counsel and wisdom of the truth we have come to know, as we shall hear gratefully the truth which you bring to us. In our walking together we shall come to find in the power which enlivens us an abiding peace, a sustaining hope, and an enduring love. So may this congregation become for us all a beacon and a refuge, a challenge and a comfort, through all our days.”

Standing on the front porch of the church, you can look out over downtown Alton and on across to the Mississippi River and beyond. As you do so, you may see the city of Alton is sprucing up a little, with a new footbridge over to the relatively new concert arena; some of the old stuff being torn down, like the parking garage next to the Stratford Hotel. Some of the same eyesores remain, however - the abandoned boat on the riverfront, for one. Then again, there are beautiful new loft units in some of the old warehouse buildings downtown. So it’s a mix - depending on where you’re looking from or on how you look at it, you could say the city is improving little by little these days, or you could say there’s an awful lot of work left to do.

Maybe the same thing is true here: depending on where you’re looking from or on how you look at it, you could say the church is improving little by little, or you could say there’s an awful lot of work left to do. Both perceptions, in my opinion, would be warranted. To wit, my annual report:

There have been lots of good things happening here at church lately, no doubt. We’ve had 24 people sign the book and become members this year. We began a two-worship-service format a couple of months ago that seems to be going pretty well. Many of us continue to work in various ways on the Decade of Racial Reconciliation in Alton; Diane Thompson was the featured speaker at a Martin Luther King service of commemoration and by all accounts moved anyone there with ears to hear and hearts to touch.

Our church was on the program at District Assembly in April, and Mary Johnson and Cheryle Tucker-Loewe helped with a presentation about welcoming the changes that come with growth and diversity. Last fall, church leaders held a series of meetings that we dubbed a “Roles & Responsibilities Renegotiation” that resulted in a realignment of committees and in more formality in the reporting structure and job descriptions of staff - our structure is still not perfect, by any means, but may be moving toward something that will be useful as we continue to grow.

The Social Justice Committee is doing great work on a broad front: hosting monthly “4^th Saturday lunches” where we invite people from the neighborhood to eat with us; they’re doing weekly tutoring with the kids from the neighborhood who need a little extra help; they’re partnering with United Congregations of Metro-East and the Alton Cluster to work on racial issues and housing and jobs initiatives with an interfaith group from other faith communities; to name only a few social justice initiatives.

The Care Team Leaders group is working to become more effective in caring for people who fall ill or have other needs. With so many on our rolls now, no one of us can keep up with all the needs that arise, so the Care Team Leaders are trying to reconfigure this very important work of the congregation and get it right.

Last but not least on the good-stuff list, we completed a really arduous and time-consuming and difficult DRE Search process. We had several inquiries and received applications from a number of the inquirers. We hoped to interview three candidates but one dropped out as we were trying to schedule the interview. In the end, I followed the Search Committee’s recommendation that we hire Steven Mead as our new permanent DRE; perhaps you heard his hiring announced earlier this morning.

BUT, lest you think you hear me saying everything’s peachy around here, I want to shift from the good-stuff list to the other list of good stuff mixed with -um - some tough stuff. Concerning the RE program, attendance has been down somewhat in past weeks. Of course, it’s spring and there’s a lot to do on a Sunday morning; to say nothing of the fact that the Dothager family is moving away which has taken four of our regular young attendees right off the top. As our newly-permanent DRE Steven Mead and the RE Committee and I plan for the future, we’ll be looking at attendance numbers, and comments from teachers and parents and children, and fine-tuning the RE program so it’ll be the best it can be for all of us, especially for our kids.

Another tough patch we’ve hit this year has been in the area of stewardship. We thought we had things in hand last year with a Stewardship Committee chairperson in place early on in the process. But as the time to gear up for a pledge drive approached, the Stewardship chair’s abrupt resignation from the church in December threw us into some turmoil. As it happened, we got together a “Bigger, Bolder” Pledge Drive for February and March; lots of people were pivotal in making that happen (notably Ruth Maskow and Dee Evans), and lots of people attended a series of “Neighborhood Desserts.” I thought the Desserts were fun and inspiring and successful, and still, it took many weeks to finish up the Pledge Drive in order to get a budget together for the Annual Meeting later today. Diane Thompson worked long hours on that clean-up, and Diane and Jerry Johnson and Mark Tade all contributed expertise to putting together the balanced budget you’ll see in a little while. All is not rosy - the funding for many line items is not what we’d hoped - but the budget balances, thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people.

The Chalice Circle program could stand to see some tweeking. I believe our Chalice Circles provide friendship and support and an intimacy that you can’t find in other places. Don Allen has begun working toward some changes designed to keep that program on track.

In another area of challenge, it’s taken longer than we thought to get a software system in place for use in church administration, but the Board during this past year purchased an online application called PowerChurch. Once it gets all set up and running - which is one of the things that’s taking longer than expected - it will be accessible to the Administrator, the Minister, the DRE, the Treasurer and Assistant, and whoever else the Board deems appropriate, and will help immensely in information gathering, storing, and sharing, and will help keep all our contact information up-to-date. We’re finally entering the electronic age, but in some ways we’re still kicking and screaming while we’re doing it.

If you think it’s starting to sound as if we have major-league problems, I would ask you to stop and contrast where we are with the other UU churches in the area. Several of our sister churches have experienced some really hard times recently, and my heart goes out to them. First Church Saint Louis, after losing Suzanne Meyer as their minister, has already been through two years of an interim process and is now awaiting the arrival of Marcia Marino to be their interim minister for at least another year of interim work if not two more. Eliot Chapel in Kirkwood MO has an interim minister of some renown, David Keyes, coming to town after the departure of its co-ministers, Daniel O’Connell and Bonnie Vegiard; I understand also that the Eliot congregation has a professional mediator beginning work with them this very weekend to kick-start a long healing process in the wake of the difficult upheavals and turbulent times there over the past few years. Lastly, the UU Church in Columbia is losing their long-time minister and my friend, Bill Haney, to retirement, so they’ll be looking for an interim minister, too. There’s lots of tumult, upheaval, and turbulence out there, so we should count our blessings that we are where we are.

Rather than just reading you a list of all the good things that are happening around here, or simply harping about the tough stuff that’s going on, I wanted to challenge you today to begin thinking about a few broader issues I see us facing together in the near future. As I will outline them today, I see three: one concerns our individual, personal, spiritual growth; another concerns growing in the ways we interact together; and the third concerns growth in how we govern ourselves.

First, spiritual growth. I think one of the primary functions of a church is to provide support for the spiritual growth of its individual members and friends and others who come to us. And I think we ought to be providing more opportunities in terms of classes and programs to help our members and friends develop spiritually. Certainly, the Adult Religious Education programs that happen most Sunday mornings at 9:30 are a good start, but we could offer more programming during the week and in the evening that could help deepen our experience of church and life. One example is the UU&You! orientation class that happens a few times a year - those classes could be reorganized to better help people orient themselves to the spiritual journey and to the life of the congregation. But I also think we could move toward offering programming at least one evening each week that would help individuals and families grow in body, mind, and spirit. Even if we started with only an evening a week for one month the first year, at least we’d get started. (I don’t have a start date in mind, but if you do, let me know.)

Individual spiritual growth is important, but so is the way we express ourselves to one another. Which is my second growth challenge today: growing in the ways we interact together. Being in right relationship doesn’t mean we always agree with one another. We are never going to agree all the time on every issue - there’s too much going on, there are too many of us, and besides, many of us have more than one opinion on each of the issues. If we’re not going to always agree, then we have to find ways to express ourselves that honor both our commitment to our own convictions and our commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of every person. As we work together, we’re gonna feel strongly about issues and sometimes we’re gonna think we have the one-and-only answer to some of the questions we’re faced with. We have to find ways to get our points across that don’t disrespect or diminish those we’re in covenant with. Being in right relationship means that we listen to each other and that we’re honest, if tactful.

Oft times I find us - myself included - erring on either side of such a center: sometimes I hear people holding back, keeping their strong feelings inside for fear of hurting someone else’s feelings or - maybe scarier - holding back for fear of reprisal of some sort. Other times, I hear people express themselves in ways that seem to begin with the assumption that the other person doesn’t know very much, or isn’t entitled to the benefit of the doubt, or is somehow less than whole and deserving of respect and dignity. Neither is appropriate for people like us who claim to stand together on the side of love. The changes we’ve been through as a congregation have been immense; the work we’re doing is important and hard; being honest with each other is important and sometimes hard, and hearing what others have to say is equally important and sometimes equally hard. But getting it right between us has to do both with our own individual spiritual growth and with the strength and solidarity of the community of love and justice we’re building together. So we have to work at getting it right, we have to be in right relationship with each other.

Which brings me to our third growth challenge: learning to act like the larger church community that we have become. It wasn’t too many years ago when you could easily have known everybody who came to church. When there are 30 people in a church, that’s easy enough. But there are no longer just 30 of us, there are 130 with more coming all the time, and in some significant ways, we’ve already begun to act like a larger church. As one example, when I came here as minister, I was asked to be collegial with the staff - not a supervisor, just a colleague. Then a few years ago, after we’d grown past a certain point, the Board handed the task of supervising the staff to the minister, which was a good step in acting like a larger church, I think. This month, the Board decided to remove the President’s signature from the contract with the new DRE - it doesn’t sound like a big deal, except that now I as your minister hire him as your DRE, which is yet another small step in the direction of acting like a bigger church.

As an example in the other direction, members will be asked later today at the Annual Meeting to vote on what time to have our summer services - that’s a vestige of small-church thinking, that such decisions be made by congregational vote. Again, when you have thirty members, it’s easy enough; when you have 130 or 230 or 330, you can’t effectively conduct church business that way. Which is not to say that your input is not welcome or needed - but there are other ways to solicit input and opinion than taking each and every question to a congregational meeting and a congregational vote. (I trust you will feel free to disagree, and I promise I will listen as you are tactfully honest.)

So that’s my annual report. I hope you see from your vantage point, as I see from mine, how well it’s going here at church and much good we’re doing in the world. But I hope you also see, as I do, that we face a number of challenges together in the months and years ahead. If you’ll come to our annual meeting after the potluck lunch today, you’ll hear other reports from other people from other vantage points. You may want to express yourself from your vantage point. That’s the way we govern ourselves in this community - democratically, each person with a voice, all of us listening to each other as well as honestly expressing ourselves.

Yes, it’s going well, but there’s a lot to do, and I have faith that if you find your place here and if everybody pitches in and does what they can, then this congregation can become for all of us as it already has for some, a beacon and a refuge, a challenge and a comfort, through all our days.

So may it be.