A Recently Resigned UU Speaks

This comment appeared recently in response to this old post. I think it’s worth sharing with you all:

I discovered Kevin’s posts and this thread after I resigned my UU membership recently. I found Kevin’s views a bit cynical but interesting and noteworthy nevertheless. Maybe some UU congregations are beter than others. In recent years, the Sunday Services at my UU church had degenerated into a carnival-like atmosphere with antics such as guess the minister’s weight, someone turning cartwheels on the stage, and songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Every week there skits with people dressed in silly hats or animal costumes. One Sunday morning they had a belly dancer on stage. During one service members were invited to come up on stage and show off their tattoos. On a couple of Sundays, the minister tossed a beach ball into the audience and invited parishoners to bat it around during the service.

When I wrote the check for my pledge, I thought, I’m paying for THIS??? NOT! The church had become a spiritual wasteland and my soul was sad and starving for nourishment. I decided to get past my “Christophobia”, which originally drew me to the UU faith almost 20 years ago. The situation at my UU church made Christianity seem so much more appealing. My spouse is still a UU but is considering becoming a Quaker. There is only one UU church in our town. The UU minister was not open to input and there was little use of the democratic process. Members who dared to offer criticism were labeled “anti-clerical” and extruded from participation. It became a toxic, embittering place for me. I recently joined a Protestant faith community that feels like a spiritual home to me. What a breath of fresh air. I was reluctant to leave the UU church because it was my chosen faith of my adulthood, but I just couldn’t take it anymore.

First of all, I’m dumb-struck by the description of what is going on in this worship service. While joy and humor are, I think, essential to the healthy spirit of congregational worship, I believe these antics denigrate the very word “worship” and sound to me like excruciating efforts to be hip/cool/relevant in an entertainment-addled culture. In short, I’m horrified. Having heard recently about a congregation that collects its stewardship pledges in a so-called “Ark of the Covenant,” which is a big ark festooned with spray-painted Barbie dolls*, this was not news of our worship life I was ready to hear.

People resign from UU and other congregations for many reasons. We are too political for some people. Sometimes we are too traditional or “too Christian” (a comment I’ve gotten at my congregation by those who were too turned off by our traditional liturgical structure to realize that the content is highly non-traditional). We fight or discuss too much for some folks. Other are dissatisfied with our religious education programs. All legitimate, all understandable complaints. It’s all part of the balance: for every elated new member who proclaims with teary eyes that we are the spiritual home she’s been looking for, one goes away still seeking. But this report of beach balls and cartwheels and inane carnival routines… this is a really big bummer.

I’d like to speak a bit about the writer’s comment that she is “paying for THIS.” She’s right, but I want to speak a bit more about her decision to cut her pledge and to resign from the congregation. First of all, our pledges to our congregations do support the minister’s salary and the worship program. Beyond that, however, our pledges are made and fulfilled to support institutions that exist to uphold and incarnate our most cherished values for individual members and within the wider community. I sense that if our writer had felt that the democratic process worked in her congregation, she might not have quit the church and withdrawn herself and her financial support. Bad programming happens. It happens when a congregation loses its way, makes an honest mistake, tries something innovative that isn’t well-executed, or trusts people with leadership roles for which they may be ill-suited. Failure happens. However, when the congregation is not allowed to reflect on failure, to express when they feel it is occurring, and to feel a welcome part of casting a new vision (and an improved program), we cannot and should not blame them for leaving.

I haven’t paid my church pledge yet and I’m doing some nail-biting about it. This was an expensive year. Not only did I have doctoral tuition to cover, I traveled the world on a wonderful five-month sabbatical! But I’ll make sure that pledge is paid. Beyond my role as minister in the congregation, I am a member. I am in covenanted relationship with its people and our God (however we express that Ultimate). I am well satisfied that my most cherished values are being supported, promoted and lived with sincere intent by this generation of the Church, and if I have to scrape the bottom of my savings account to fulfill my financial commitment to this coming year’s programs and ministries, I’ll do it. And when I do, I’ll do it with extra gratitude that I can do so with a contented heart, and in sorrowful memory of this writer and others who have left our communities spiritually hungry and insulted in their souls.

The Church is a human institution and is prone to human error. May we be big enough to hear those who leave us on the way out the door and to consider what they have said.

* It’s not the campiness or the Barbies that I object to. It’s the co-opting of one of the most holy relics in the Jewish religion for cheap giggles that offends me and, I think, makes a mockery of our claims to be a respectful, mature people.

Seeker Perspective: Bad Websites, Bad Topics and Bad Preaching

I knew I wanted to attend church this morning somewhere fairly nearby, so I began looking at UU web sites to see what the offerings were.

First of all, I shouldn’t have to search and search through a church website to find the Sunday service information. Let’s make that easy, folks.

Second, please don’t provide directions to your church but fail to note its address or what STATE it’s in (some of us have GPS systems — we don’t need directions, we need an address).

Please include pertinent dates on your site. What year am I looking at? And why direct me to a February calendar full of your church’s activities and meetings but no worship information when I click the Worship link? I’m a seeker, not a member. I don’t care if AA meets on Monday nights and the Knitting Circle on Wednesdays. I want to know what’s happening on Sunday morning — when and where.

Preachers, we need to remember how uninteresting it is to someone who hasn’t been to church in a long time to see that the sermon of the day is about someone we’ve never heard of, or dedicated to a friend of the congregation’s we’ve never met. This kind of insider approach keeps me, the seeker, away from your church. Consider framing the sermon in a broader way and then using [insert admirable dead Unitarian here] as your chief illustration. Something like, “The Spiritual Strength and Suffering of Individualism” rather than “Emersonian Individualism: Two Views.” (At least most people have heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson!). I, the seeker, don’t care to hear a book report or a historical lecture. What application will your sermon have to my life, relationships, work, meaning-making? Don’t tell me what book you read to prep your manuscript — tell me what I can look forward to learning for the good of my soul!! *

Snark and negativity do not make for inviting sermon titles for this seeker. Am I going to a college debate or a worship service? Cognitive dissonance; please avoid it and I promise to do so as well in the future.

When I finally did find a service (not a UU church) this morning, I wound up walking out after half an hour. Why? First, one of the ministers was, in a word, simpering. While I certainly support all worship leaders using the quotidian grace of our lives to enrich our liturgical illustrations, I am deeply uncomfortable when parents use their children or family lives to provide cutesy — I’m sure they intend them to be accessible — analogies for God’s presence in the world. Cutesy theology is insipid theology. As an intentional non-parent, I am especially intolerant of this transparent ploy for my warm understanding. Any prayer that could be fairly described as “darling” by a kinder set of ears is no prayer for me. It isn’t that I don’t honor parenting, it’s that I know damned well that parenting and family life is not darling. It’s intense, it’s exhausting, it is blood and guts real life and radical love. I want to say to the minister I saw this morning, Don’t you dare get up there and nervously flip your bangs out of your face like a teenager and diminish your own and God’s grandeur like that.

A student minister gave the sermon. He badly needs a diction coach to correct his sloppy, muckle-mouthed enunciation (a slight lisp is not the problem: a lazy mouth is the problem). He even more urgently needs a lesson in how to structure and deliver a religious message, and a solid dressing down for insulting the congregation by ascending the pulpit unprepared and with a heavy reliance on flippancy. When a preacher invites the congregation before sermonizing to pray with him that the words of his mouth and the meditations of his heart be pleasing to the Lord, and that the Word may reach the people, you know you’re in trouble when he mumbles and fumbles his way even through that preface. There is no excuse for this, young preacher. If you intend to begin your sermons with this invocation, learn it. Own it. Deliver it as though you mean it or stay out of the pulpit until you do.

After the young preacher (dressed, according to my male friend, like a gangster) claimed for the third or fourth time what a hypocrite he was to dare to preach on this topic and then said he had no right to be up in the pulpit, I whispered to my friend, “Then don’t get up there!”
We left.

Preachers of every age and experience level: If you don’t think you have “the right” to be in the pulpit, stay out of it. If you think any of us is preaching from a place of total purity, get over it. We are all spiritual failures and we are all hypocrites. We do not preach from a place of perfection but of faith, hope and love. We preach because we have a deep desire to understand, to be seared by conscience, to experience God’s grace, to find a way to help build the Kingdom of God. No one wants or needs to hear how unworthy we are. How unsure, yes. How confused, fine. How afraid, certainly. How vulnerable, of course. Unworthy to address the congregation, no.

My God, what a thing to say. What a cop-out. What an offense to the worshiper, who has come trusting that the preacher is prepared internally and externally to impart some wisdom.

A Bronx cheer to “I’m not worthy.”

* I have TOTALLY done this myself in the past and am going to try to avoid it in the future now that I see how uninteresting it sounds to the seeker.

She Feels Called To Reconciliation

Cindy wrote in response to my earlier post, “The Whole Rick Warren Thing,”

Lesbian UU here.

And utterly unruffled by the Rick Warren pick. I’m not feeling any consternation. No anger at all.

I feel a growing spark of hope.

These days, I feel called — very powerfully called — to reach out in reconciliation. This is a time for GLBT folks to really show up in our communities and help the sick, the poor, the elderly and the children. My stripe of marriage has no bearing on my ability to do good works.

I somehow feel that, if I could make good on the goodwill that runneth over from the election, I should do it. If I can be visibly gay, visibly religious and visibly ready to bridge the distance between myself and the conservative end of the religious spectrum, I might be doing a fraction of that thing called “God’s work.”

I’m very moved by Cindy’s words. Not because she’s saying something that I agree with more than I agree with those who are angry and hurt by Obama’s choice of Rick Warren, but because she speaks so unapologetically about her sense of calling.

Unitarian Universalists are very good at sharing opinions — what we think – but if we are to mature as a people and live authentically into our covenantal promise to support one another in the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” we will have to become more accustomed to bearing witness to each other’s deep calling.

We have a long history of sharing our convictions through intellectual argument and rational persuasion (that has often been quite irrational, but I digress). I am excited by the possibility of a new era where we may speak of calling, of discernment and of how God may be working through our lives.

As my friend and colleague Adam says, “Rock ON.”