Bigger, Bolder

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, February 21, 2010,

after a reading of “Popularity,” by David O. Rankin:

To escape the trap of public acclaim, an authentic church should advertise as follows:

Our worship is not entertainment.

Our congregation is not an audience.

Our music is not a concert performance.

Our preaching is not a trivial comfort.

Our theology is not a marketing strategy.

Our counseling is not a promise of prosperity.

Our church is not a business enterprise.

Our ministry is not a cult of personality.

Our community is not a gathering of sheep.

Our success is not a membership statistic.

In fact, it is probably better to be disliked, offensive, and scandalous. 

Even booing is preferable to mass applause. 

For no vision is worthwhile without the risk of rebuke. 

Every truth is born out of painful criticism. 

Love, itself, is crucifying.

 

 

Bigger, Bolder

My friend, Ian, from the District office of the UUA sent me a very business-looking spreadsheet a couple of weeks ago.  It was membership statistics for the district:  a list of churches, the ones near the top showing net gains and the ones near the bottom showing net losses of numbers of members in churches around the district.  Along with the spreadsheet, he sent a note saying, “What the heck is going on down there?  You are now officially wonderful.”

On Ian’s list, the First Unitarian Church of Alton was listed as having the 4^th largest net gain in membership in the district.  My thought, of course, was, “4^th, not 1^st?”  But here was our little church listed right below three other churches with memberships of 1650, 650, and 300 as having gained the most members in the past twelve months.  Not bad company to be in, not a bad statistic to keep in mind.

Ian, a scholar with keen insights into church matters, had more observations to make.  He said this church seemed to have moved beyond the point where full-time ministry is in limbo  - from where he sits, he said, you should quit worrying about whether you’ll have a full-time minister or not.  From where he sits, he said, it’s apparent that this church is already moving into the next phase of growth, from a pastoral size church (where the minister is central to much of what goes on) to a program-size church (where what the programs that the congregation itself does is central). 

That’s a big deal.  You are to be congratulated.  If you look back over the history, for many years pledge drives here have been all about needing to grow, and for some of that time, it seemed like the desire to grow was really based in worrying about whether or not the church would survive.

But here Ian comes along and says, with what he sees from afar, that we’re beyond all that now, that we have grown to the point where the survival of this historic congregation is no longer at issue.  The issue now is not whether we will survive, but what we will do with what we have. 

Now, I’m going to say something you may not like, that you may find offensive or scandalous.  And you can boo if you want to, but I think it’s true:  this church doesn’t need to grow.  That’s a bold statement and it would have been a loopy thing to say some years ago, but it’s true now: This church no longer needs to grow.  We can put aside all the growth strategies and we can quit reading the consultants’ newsletters about how to attract new members.  This church no longer needs to grow.

For those of you who are not offended and maybe even feeling some waves of relief because you’re tired of all this constant talk about getting bigger and bigger, I have yet another bold statement:  even though this church no longer needs to grow, it’s going to.  It’s going to - not because we’re working at growing, but because we’re working at getting our message out there more effectively and because people need to hear it.

 

There’s a lot going on at this church, and you can’t help but feel the energy flowing when you walk in.  And here are some particulars:

- The Religious Education program for our kids has expanded, we have a strong RE Committee, we have more teachers, we have a better grounding in place for RE, and we’re in search for a new Director of RE who will lead us into the future with confidence.

- We have active chalice circles, film clubs, book clubs, newcomer gatherings and coffee houses and parties of all kinds.  Our women’s alliance, the Anna D’s, has a new-found strength in numbers and is revitalizing itself.  The meditation room set up by the Green Sky Sangha on the lower level is full of people seeking peace on Sunday mornings.  The Pagan group has achieved official status as the Confluence Covenant of UU Pagans, and last December 20^th they organized a Sunday morning Solstice Celebration, our best attended worship service ever, as far as I know.

- We have developed stronger connections with faith communities around the Metro-East, and we’re working with others in the Alton area on racial reconciliation projects in the next decade.

- Officially becoming a ‘welcoming congregation’ for people of non-majority orientations has been an important item in the life of this church.  Being welcoming has increased our presence in the LBGT community and on the SIUE campus.  In fact, this Saturday we’re having another wedding here in the Sanctuary - it happens to be the wedding of two women.  That’s a big deal.  It’s always exciting to have a wedding, but it’s easy to forget, here where it seems like second nature, that other churches don’t do wedding ceremonies for couples of the same sex.  To say nothing of what the state does - even churches won’t marry people.  We will, because it’s the right thing to do.

- With the 4^th Saturday Lunch program, we’re feeding families who really need a meal, but we’re doing more than that:  we’re reaching across all kinds of cultural boundaries that many of us, admittedly, don’t cross very often and we’re inviting into church people who might not normally feel comfortable in places like this.  That’s a big deal.  And it’s led us to begin a mentoring program for the wonderful bunch of kids we’ve met through that Saturday Lunch program, kids we might never have known if you hadn’t felt the call and had the courage to begin the Lunch Program in the first place.

Our internet presence is one of our strengths, too.  Every time I get together with colleagues from other churches, I’m reminded that not every church has the voice this church has that carries literally around the world.  When I listened through our website to the service from last week, I heard, very faintly, a visitor say she didn’t need to come to the microphone to make her announcement because the people sitting around her could hear.  She’s a visitor, and she’s forgiven, but people who come here more often have begun to realize that what we say here matters, that we’re no longer just talking to each other in this room.  What we say here goes out into the ether to people who need to hear, and so we speak into the microphone so people in England and Switzerland and Bahrain and everywhere else can hear what we say.  This is no longer a tiny community whispering to each other in the safety of this sanctuary.  We’re bigger than that now, we’re bigger than that now.

So that’s some of ‘what the heck is going on down here.’  But please don’t get the idea from this golden narrative that everything in this church community is hunky-dory.  We may be officially wonderful in Ian’s estimation, but we have seen and will continue to see our fair share of challenges.  No organism can grow as much as we have and not experience some growing pains. 

Since our preaching is not meant to be a trivial comfort, here are some of the pains I’ve seen:

We’ve had a little bit of a hard time keeping up with each other in a caring sort of way.  Too many of our own people who’ve had troubles have slipped through the cracks in the system and we haven’t known to reach out to them or hold their hand or take them a casserole.  It’s been difficult for everybody concerned, but the Caring Committee is working hard to remedy the situation and to make sure that if you need us, we will know it and we will be there.

In our bigger church, we’ve had communication breakdowns of all kinds.  Sometimes we haven’t listened well enough to each other;  sometimes we’ve talked past one another in our desire to get our own way.  One serious communication issue we face is our seeming inability to openly disagree with each other.  Maybe it’s always going to be hard to express a deeply held conviction when you know your conversation partner holds another opinion just as strongly as you hold yours.  Maybe it’s always going to be hard to confront ideas that need to be confronted, ideas that you don’t think measure up to your standards but that others hear very differently than you do.

But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not important to learn to express your convictions and confront ideas - and to learn to do so not simply for the good of yourself, but also for the good of the church.  Because if we can’t learn to be honest with each other here, then where else can we learn?  And if we can’t be honest with each other here, how will our children learn to be honest in their lives?

I’ve heard people say that there doesn’t seem to be room for anything in this congregation’s narrative other than the good parts, the positive parts, the parts where we’re always nice to each other and where we never disagree.  But we do disagree.  My goodness - we’re not a gathering of sheep.  We all have opinions and feelings and we all have access to pieces of the truth.  As we build our common life together, if we are to build it in full and helpful and healthy ways, then this is how bold we have to be:

we have to be bold enough to tell each other when we have an issue, to get it out in the open, to come either to a place of agreement or to agree to disagree, and then we have to move on.  We have too much to do to waste time disagreeing under our breath or talking about each other in the parking lot.  As part of our growth process and as part of our respect for each other, we have to learn to disagree, deal with it, and get back to getting our message out to people who need to hear it.

 

Our message - what is it?  That we have good parties?  That you can believe anything you want to here?  I don’t think that’s it. 

I think our message is, technically, a bold statement about human freedom -

I think our message is that we believe and we act like each person is free to become who they’re supposed to become.  And if we are free, then we bear a responsibility to exercise that freedom in ways that are helpful to all of Creation.

I think our message is that you have some agency in your life and that you have some power - through your freedom and responsibility - to affect how your life and the lives of your neighbors go.  But you don’t have the ultimate power in your life;  it’s not all up to you - you should do what you can, but you can’t have all the responsibility, because you’re not that powerful.  There is something larger than you, whether you like it or not.

Beyond the technical, though, I think we have a simpler message, a message of invitation, a message of caring, a message of love:

And that message is that you are invited into this community of care, not because of the good things you’ve done or the number of things you know or the amount of things you own.  You are invited into this community of care so that you can grow to be the person you are supposed to be.  You are invited into this community of care so that you will know that you are loved.

 

Because of our beliefs about freedom and responsibility and personal and ultimate power, we have a special sense of how we should manage our resources, a special sense of stewardship.  And we each have a choice to make. 

To grow into full participation in this community means you bring your time, your talent, and your treasure and you place a portion of them on the altar of humanity.  This practice of giving is about your spiritual health, about the way you approach life, about the way you connect with and care for your neighbors and the world around you.  What you do with the resources you’ve been given charge of in this life speaks volumes about who you are. 

If who you are lines up with who we are, then you have a choice to make.

If our message appeals to you, if you see it working in your life and how it can work in the lives of others, then you have a choice to make.

Each of us, in fact, as the sole support of this congregation, has a choice to make. The choice we make is no longer about whether or not the church will survive.  The choice we make is no longer about whether the church will get bigger or not - we’re already there.  The choice we have to make is whether we want to sit back and take it easy and let it slide, or whether we want to be bold and get our message out there to the people out who need to hear it and welcome them when they show up at our door.

The Board of Trustees has proposed changes for next year that are predicated on each of our families giving $300 more than they gave last year.  That’s an increase of $25 a month.  Of course not every family can afford such an increase so some of us will need to do better than that.  In that spirit, Linda and I will raise our pledge by double the suggested amount, or $50/month, to a total of $380 per month, or $4560 for next year.  We share that information with you in a spirit of open communication and to let you know we support this congregation in its important work.

What we are about here is not for the faint of heart.  What we do and what we say here is important, to ourselves and to others.  And we can do and say only as much as you want to support, monetarily and otherwise.  As much as we each need this special place, there are many out there who are lost and lonely and struggling, and who need to hear a message of invitation and caring and love.  Our generosity - YOUR generosity - makes a difference in people’s lives and makes this, in my friend Ian’s words, the officially wonderful place it is.

So may it be.