I wrote this post a few months back about a congregation with slipping funding and membership, where the minister is going part-time to offset the budget.

Well, it turns out while the budget situation is a reality, a big force behind the transition is a certain portion of the older crowd having a grouchy attitude toward the minister and trying to put him in his place. They complain about service quality, which maybe isn't pew-rocking but at least is fairly substantive.

Myself and the other "younger" person on the team have largely been steamrolled, ignored, or ridiculed when we've given an opinion.

About the only positive thing to come out of this experience has been the reallocation of some funds to a Youth/Teenage RE class. When I brought up how the services aren't very child-inclusive and how it would be nice to have something else for elementary age children to do, the response was largely, "send the kids to the nursery until they learn to sit quietly."

Meanwhile, the lay-led services have become more shallow and pointless meanderings. In adult RE, my spouse and I are always the only people under 60 and we get a lot of passive aggressive questions on "why young people do X" while they spent time griping about their Gen Y/Z kids and grandkids.

The last service was extremely, groan-worthy vapid, and the team meeting later that day started with the old hats praising it. For me, that was the end of it. My kid doesn't want to go, my spouse and I find the services less insightful than feel-good messages in greeting cards, and nobody in our family feels like this church meets our needs.

I hope others will take up the mantle to reform it, maybe in a few years when the situation is more dire or those in power have let go, but I'm not willing to commit a huge chunk of time to an organization and group of people so hostile to change. Due to a nearby university, they tend to have a regular flow of visitors, maybe that will be enough to keep them afloat in the meantime.

The only problem I'm left with is where my child can have a space to explore religious topics away from parents, but we can revisit that in a couple years.

I'm relatively new to the congregation, and to UU generally. This congregation is fairly well-established, has a decent building in a vibrant city, but over the last decade or more funding and membership levels have been sliding. The congregation has tried to ignore the problem by dipping deeper into endowments/bequeathals, but that solution isn't working any longer. While the sanctuary is often reasonably well filled on the average Sunday, and occasionally packed even, the overwhelming majority of the congregation is 60+, and most of the work of running it has fallen into just a few hands. The financial woes have finally reached a head, so the minister is going part-time and a team has been assembled to help prepare this congregation for its next steps - whatever they may be.

I'm not at all spiritual and a rather firm secular humanist, but have a background in philosophy and the humanities and am generally interested in religious and life topics. My spouse and I started attending UU because we have a young child and felt he needed a broader sense of community, a place to help instill positive social values, and a venue to ask religious questions to open minded parties who aren't just his parents. If we didn't have a child, we probably wouldn't attend at all, and as it is we usually only make an appearance once a month.

But as one of the few dozen under-40s who attend, and one of the few families with children, I was asked to serve on this team. I'm not usually the outgoing/volunteering type, but I couldn't say no in a moment of need.

I haven't attended a team meeting yet, but these are the questions as I see them:

• How can we increase membership (and with it, hopefully, donations) without obnoxiously proseletyzing? Demographically, millennial (like myself) and younger are not generally interested in organized religion. But there seems to be a desperate social desire for positive community experiences and sense of connection, and I think UU is a good fit for those who don't agree with the theology or social views of the religion of their upbringing, who want the freedom to debate and form their own opinions, and who want to make a positive impact.
• How can we increase engagement from the members we have, to help them take the next step from being casual attendees to members of the community? Chalice circles and the like don't seem to be catching on (hell, I'm not part of one). The way I see it, the time competition comes from the fact that people are overworked and overstressed. How can we make congregational participation more accessible for people who have fleeting free time and low emotional reserves?
• Can a congregation plausibly function without a minister? Ours only gives 2 sermons per month, and now it will reduce to 1. We seem to have a steady stream of decent guest speakers, mostly thanks to the nearby university, but when lay members lead services they tend to be... wandering events. The topic is unclear and gets lost, or sometimes people get very woo-woo/hokey, or far too personal, emotional, and a bit... cringey. I worry that without a minister, the lack of organization will become worse, and the service consistency will be so lacking that it turns people away.

My first starting point is trying to understand my lack of engagement. When my child attended the nursery and it was just play, he loved to go, but now that he attends Children's Education he hates it. A lot of it is over his head. But the people who run it are educators, and while my spouse has thought about stepping in to help, my spouse is a teacher at an underprivileged school 5 days a week and really needs the weekends off from anything resembling teaching. I was previously a EFL teacher abroad, but I'm not intrinsically inclined to work with kids. My kid generally doesn't enjoy the main service either, because while they try to incorporate a "story for all ages," most of the service is just sitting, standing, singing, sitting, a little talking, more sitting.

And then why don't we participate in other activities outside of education and the service? We have such little time to recharge our personal emotional reserves from the work week, and we still have to catch up on the labors of life, as well as parenting, on the weekends and weeknights, and we just don't have time to spare. We're natural introverts who happen to be successful when out in the world, but only when we're given the appropriate time to recharge. Plus, we're highly drama-averse, traits we developed from our pasts being community activists; UUs seem to be a passionate lot, and with passion comes a lot of drama.

The amount of work needed for the congregation seems like so much, and it's hard to break it down into bite-size chunks that can be spread around, so instead nobody pitches in to help.

Is it a hopeless case? Are all church-like institutions on the steady path toward irrelevance? Demographically speaking, that seems to be the case.