rethink church

…is a new and compelling spin on church presence being promoted by the United Methodists; most recently “Ten Thousand Doors”. I clicked the ad. What are we about?

http://www.10thousanddoors.org/site/c.ruI4KbMRIvF/b.4877557/k.BF1F/Home.htm?gclid=CMq24c-UsJ4CFYdd5Qod3iPYog

 

fascinating discussion

…about the meaning and purpose of worship at Real Live Preacher. He is a liberal Baptist who chose to worship at Orthodox churches during his sabbatical. This is worship that is physically demanding and intellectually rigorous in ways that we UUs don’t usually encounter. That conversation in the comments is rich and beautiful; I was particularly interested by the idea that worship which is not about the worshipper at all could be profoundly meaningful.

How would worship be different for us if we designed it around something other than ourselves, and what would the center of our worship be?

 

race: we have to start somewhere

I’m really sick right now and can’t do much of anything, but this is too much to set aside and then forget.

I think about race and racism a lot. It’s in my bones. It’s in my skin. It’s in my daily experience. Even, or maybe especially, here in Maine. But in the church context it can’t be about me, because if it’s about me then not only is any conversation happening for the wrong reasons (like quitting smoking because your best friend said so) but anything bad that happens becomes about me (continuing the smoking example, it’s like blaming your best friend for the fight you got into with your spouse because you were irritable from nicotine withdrawal), even if it’s not really about me. It makes starting the conversation hard. It’s why white allies are so vital to the process, especially in churches, especially when the blatant racism is muted and what’s mostly left is subtle, systemic, invisible-to-most-people racism.

And common wisdom is that even this kind of speaking up is a risk, that I shouldn’t say anything precisely because it should be about the community, started by the community, supported by the community.

Okay, but I have a resource. So I’m not organizing any conversations at church. You can do that if you want, and it is my personal belief that the church is an excellent place to make these conversations happen for us and for the whole community. I am suggesting you read this elegant, gentle, true, informative, and accessible piece by Mary Anne Mohanraj–a writer I know a little and respect a lot–because, people? We all have to start somewhere.

 

the wide arms of technology

The internet is a funny thing. It makes that of our imaginations real; it shrinks distances to the length of a fingertip. It makes contact wildly easy, and true intimacy easy to forget. It makes careers and whole industries, and occasionally it destroys them. It breeds a kind of pseudo-anonymity that makes it easy to forget that the whole world is watching and that that world is composed of real people with real feelings and real faces. Years ago, chat rooms and email lists pioneered new language to describe the unbearably cruel barbs that became surprisingly common: flames, flame wars, flaming. And then the beginnings of a cure: emoticons (sideways smilies made with punctuation marks), which give us a shadow of facial cues to go with our language. We can smile, wink, laugh, stick out our tongues, even put on sunglasses for a cool look. They help. We also learned, in the early days of email, to keep the emotional conversations off the computer as much as possible. When things get tough the best course is to get together as soon as you can.

For a geographically dispersed congregation like ours, scattered across at least five different regions and many more communities, technology can be an incredible grace. We can email, social-network, even video chat our way into a kind of daily intimacy formerly only available to next-door neighbors. We are working on developing our online presence: website, Facebook page, sermon podcasts, and more. If we use these tools wisely, they can build exactly the kind of strength we need in our community; if we forget that we are people talking to people, if we forget appropriate boundaries, if we use them for hard conversations instead of for scheduling the hard conversations, if we let them depersonalize us, then we are in trouble.

But we can’t let fear of a conflict keep us from connection. These tools could have been custom-made for us. The technology has matured at last, and we are in exactly the right place to reap the benefits: very much wanting to know each other better, and too busy and dispersed to get together twice a week for coffee. We literally have the technology. Let’s use it.

 

getting the word out

The UUA has been working hard to get Unitarian Universalism into cyberspace, both as an institution and as individuals. UU Planet collects all kinds of video related to or produced by Unitarian Universalists. The Reverend Shana Lynngood, associate minister at All Souls church in Washington DC, was interviewed for an “I Believe” segment several years ago. Now the show is available here:
I Believe (Shana Lynngood).

 

we are everywhere

you know the funny thing about openness is you never know what’s going to come next. And that’s really, really important to remember. So when you finally get to that place where you say, “Yes God, I am open to myself and to my story and to learning about myself,” you kind of have to let go because you really don’t know what comes next. –Rev. Lea Brown

Sometimes people call Unitarian Universalist churches “gay”, as in, “Oh, the UUs? Aren’t they that gay church?” And while it’s true that we have a long history of supporting LGBT/queer rights, including full inclusion in our communities of faith, ordination, and ministries, we haven’t ever been focused enough on sexual orientation to qualify for that title. The Metropolitan Community Church, on the other hand, did (as I understand it) really start as a gay church. They are a Christian denomination which understands their ministry as one of inclusion and welcome to Christian faith practice, with the emphasis on the queer/glbt community. Read more here.

Much of what they do is a lot like what we do–they have services about being religious, they have social gatherings, they have fundraisers. But because of their focus, their origins, and their population, they have some perspectives that would be harder to explain from a UU pulpit.

The full practice of religion, and a faithful understanding of our every day, can be found everywhere, and lessons on how to do it better can be found everywhere. There’s a sermon from an evening service at the San Francisco MCC church during the Folsom Street Fair that is an elegant example.

The sermon is out there for anyone to read, but I’d encourage parents to pre-read it before sharing it with your children; it uses some edgy sexuality as an extended example. Although it never gets explicit, your children might have questions that you’d rather know about ahead of time. If you’re easily shocked or offended, under sixteen or so (everyone is different) and definitely if you’re under 14 you should talk to your parents or a trusted adult before looking it up.

I don’t want anyone accidentally clicking through if they’d rather not, so rather than linking I’ll just give you the information you need to find it on your own. Look for “Radical Relationships in Beloved Community; Radical Openness: The Spirituality of Leather” by Rev. Lea Brown. It was delivered in 2003 at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco.

 

technology and balance

These are not new ideas, but I’m mulling anyway.

After years and years (and years) of anticipation and speculation, the future of my childhood has arrived. We have video phone calls and virtual reality surround-rooms; we have 3-D video games and robots who mow lawns and vacuum floors. We have instant transfer of most kinds of data to many, many places around the world. It’s incredible.

But the technology that was supposed to free our hands for more interesting work and more leisure has instead sped us up. If we can transfer a letter in ten seconds, then we need not drink tea while we wait for a reply. We need not go for a walk, pick up our mail at the post office, pet the dog, kiss our sweetheart, cook dinner, go to bed. We can just stare at the computer until the reply comes through.

So the arrival of the technology they warned us about is calling us, I think, to mindfulness, to stillness, to resist the rush. What if the standard reply time were still five days? What if we didn’t change things at the spur of the moment because there was no way to get in touch with people? And where is the balance between efficiency and sanity?

Just wondering.

 

equal marriage in the media

Last Thursday, religious leaders supporting marriage equality in Maine held four simultaneous press conferences to make public our position on the issue. We got coverage in the Bangor Daily News, the Ellsworth American, the Portland Press Herald, and a few other papers. But media is no longer confined to print and broadcast. A friend recently wrote to me on Facebook to congratulate me on being quoted on Pam’s House Blend, an “online magazine in the reality-based community”. Read it here. Thanks, Pam! With blogs and the internet, anything that really matters can become national news.

 

sad news

We had some sad news on Sunday. Dear friend of the congregation and pillar of the Hancock Point community Daphne Crocker passed away on Sunday morning. She had been quite ill but was still sweet and joyful and wise and friendly, and lived determinedly until she was done. We will be among many who miss her. Read tributes here and here.

 

defending marriage

I try to avoid major politics here; I know we all have different approaches to things. But this song is funny and well-written.