The General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association has the twin powers of drawing a lot of interested people and at the same time stretching budgets past their breaking points.

One of the pain points is food. (I recall first-hand the problem of scavenging for food at GA when I was younger.)

This is an open blog post; please feel free to share those tips you have for eating economically in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Please include groceries that can be easily reached by public transportation. Nobody wants to eat at the CVS for a week.

Particular knowledge about specialized food requirements such as vegan or gluten-free food is especially welcome.

Something lighter today. In some old Universalist baptism rites, we hear this traditional question with Satan taking on a new guise.

Renouncing, therefore, the fellowship of evil, will you endeavor to learn of Jesus Christ, and co­operate in the study and practice of his religion?

Fellowship of Evil? Sure I’ll renounce it, especially if it means I don’t have to move folding chairs. Members of fellowships will get that one.

I hate folding chairs. I hate moving them and having them bang my shins. I hate the noise the metal ones make. I hate time it takes. I hate how uncomfortable they are. But they’re pretty darn common for new churches (and some old ones) and I want to make operating a new (and probably small) church as easy as possible.

Here’s a radical thought. Do without them and stand. OK, a few chairs for those (no judgements) who need to sit; perhaps already in the borrowed room. A few wingbacks or the like in the Garden Club room the congregation rents, say.  Plus prime reserved space for wheelchair users. Cushions for small, collapsing children? (No need to wrestle with strollers!) Everyone else, up.

Not so strange a thought. In my experience, people often stand for an hour or more after the service to enjoy one another’s company and a cup of coffee. And we Protestantish types do have standing services, though we don’t often think of them as such: graveside services, small weddings, devotions at campgrounds.

But we think of church and we think of seats, if not pews. Why? Many Orthodox Christians don’t, of course, so perhaps that’s the influence of reading Orthodox missological works lately. (More about that soon.)  But as I’ve written before, it was only a few generations back that owning or renting “a sitting” was highly identified with church membership itself. And those days are over. Of course, you would grow weary in the second or third hour of worship, and would want a rest, but again those days (for Unitarian Universalists) are past.

Provided people are warned, a standing service has some advantages:

• a wider variety of meeting space available
• time and volunteer labor saved moving chairs; perhaps a saving of fees, too.
• standing worshippers take less space
• freedom of movement fights fatigue
• standing worshippers can, as a group, better shift to accommodate newcomers. (Think of how people self-organize in an elevator.)
• likewise, they can better shift to focus attention away from how few there are in a large space

It is, however, strange. And there would be pressure to keep the services briefer than usual. (Is this bad?) But it’s worth an experiment. And I’d like to hear if anyone has tried this.

January 17, 2015. I’m not writing a new post about the Starr King School for the Ministry crises, but the newest blowup has driven traffic to this article, first published on June 2, 2014.  I do have some added questions:

• Who benefits from the status quo?
• What is the role of money — paid out, raised and possibly withheld — play in these crises?
• What named, tangible benefits, other than the emotional, does Starr King provide to the Unitarian Universalist community?
• What is the role of SKSM’s prior reputation? The role of a (possibly) over-professionalized ministry? The different approaches to ministry in different generations? West coast vs. East coast vs. “North coast”? 

Feel free to comment.

So, the Unitarian Universalist-o-sphere is blowing up around a crisis at Starr King School for the Ministry, a Unitarian Universalist-related graduate seminary in Berkeley, California.

I would go into detail about the crisis, but there aren’t many details to be had, and much of the commentary — including an appeal letter from incoming president, Rosemary Bray McNatt, lately the minister of Fourth Universalist, New York — takes place on Facebook, and that’s hardly a reliable archive.

The nut is, or seems to be, this: someone gave confidential documents about the presidential search process to those outside the process, including other Unitarian Universalists, the press and the theological seminaries accrediting board. (I have no idea what these documents say.) The Starr King board has made an inquiry. Two graduating Starr King students have not been graduated (a contingent graduation) pending further investigation. Unsubstantiated reports tell of two board members resigning. Past UUA moderator Gini Courter has established a legal defense fund for the students, who are being represented by lawyers. Talk of ethics, boundaries and leadership abound, with a predicable amount of expressed horror and people supporting their friends.

Rosemary Bray McNatt’s open letter is here. A statement from the lawyers representing the students is here.

Not suprizingly, web searches have brought readers to a post I wrote about Starr King in 2007. My basic opinion about the school hasn’t changed, and (plainly) I have a hard time caring if it prospers or dies. This blog post is not about Starr King School for the Ministry. It’s about Unitarian Universalist self-conception.

• This is the second time in a year (or so) that an unnamed consultant has been brought in to handle major Unitarian Universalist institutional conflict. Who is the consultant? A forthcoming introduction would go far to instill confidence that the consultant is qualified and has no conflict of interest.
• The lawyers refer to ‘an investigator for the board’s law firm’ which, if true, is alarming. But is very much in character with Unitarian Universalist culture which claims to create bold leaders yet makes the formation process a gauntlet of circumspection, wildly uneven power arrangements and keeping your head down. You have to pass to play. But you can’t build bravery though fear. (So no points to Gini Couter for “doing the right thing.” I’ve never seen so many good people sigh relief as when she stopped being Moderator. For some reason, people are afraid of her. If this is Unitarian Universalism, you can keep it. But she’s out of office and the rest of us are still here.)
• Which is, I believe, why Unitarian Universalist ministers are so deeply conformist, at least in public, and why ministers close ranks with the speed and force of a bear trap. Can you think of another denomination that avoids public fights so hard? It’s particularly bitter when you consider the brave souls we lionize, say, like John Haynes Holmes.
• When you spend all you time being “revolutionary” expect revolutionary justice. As in, innocent blood on the guillotine. But we aren’t that revolutionary, and weirdness is not a substitute. I’ll take sober, thoughtful leadership any day. Our rhetoric doesn’t match our reality, even a reasonable aspiration.
• There’s a Yiddish word you should learn if you don’t know it. Mishigas. Crazy-nonsense. Boy, do we have it. Good, self-differentiated people smell it and they stay away or leave. Remember that the next time you hear someone mew about the Millenials being our future.

As I said, this is far past a Starr King issue, but it is a test for Unitarian Universalist leadership, and we should all be watching.

As I wrote yesterday, one of the UUA backends has — if you know how to look — references to churches that are “not constituent[s]” though I suppose they must have all been thus at one time.

Since the larger list includes Canadian congregations (not listed here) that departed around Canadian Unitarian Council autonomy in 2003, this list has to be at least that old.

Which is also to reinforce that not all of these are dead. I see at least one Universalist church (Rockwell, Windsor) that has come and gone over the years. So also I can image a couple of community or federated churches doing fine outside the UUA.

But the rural and small-town Universalist churches and the marginally placed Unitarian fellowships are surely gone. Two were intentionally African-American-focused starts. (T.H.E., Atlanta and Sojourner Truth, Washington, D.C., which was long gome before I moved to D.C. in 2000.) The hardest to see is Epiphany, Fenton: the hoped-for firstfruits of a new age of Christian church planting. Others surely feel the same way about Panthea Pagan, Hoffman Estates. I’ll miss Muttontown’s sheep banner at General Assembly.

But many more are simply mergers. I recall the two in Flushing, Queens continue as one. Two in Minnesota. Saugus recently merged with First Parish, Malden. Oregon City’s merger even has a note online. Perhaps, too, the references to Dayton, San Diego and San Antonio?

Comments (and clarifications) welcome.

[table]
“‘Not a Constituent Congregation'”,City,State
Guadalajara Unit. Univ. Fellowship,Guadalajara,Jalisco
Seward UUs,Seward,Alaska
Coronado UU Church,Coronado,California
UU Fellowship of the Mendocino Coast,Mendocino,California
U. U. Fellowship Southern Marin,Mill Valley,California
Aliso Creek Church,Mission Viejo,California
U U Fellowship of the Ojai Valley,Ojai,California
Channing Society of Orange County,Orange County,California
The Chalice Unit. Univ. Church,Poway,California
U. U. Inland North County Fellowship,San Diego,California
Unit. Univ. Fellowship of Friends,San Diego,California
All Souls Unitarian Church,San Juan Capo,California
UU Fellowship of Leisure World,Seal Beach,California
UU Fellowship of Aspen,Aspen,Colorado
Darien-New Canaan Unit. Society,New Canaan,Connecticut
UU Fellowship of the Farmington Valley,Simsbury,Connecticut
Sojourner Truth Congregation of UUs,Washington,D.C.
U. U. Fellowship of South Dade,Homestead,Florida
Eastside UU Church,Miami,Florida
Thurman Hamer Ellington UU Fellowship & Ministry,Atlanta,Georgia
Rockwell Universalist Church,Winder,Georgia
Glenview Unitarian Fellowship,Glenview,Illinois
“Panthea Pagan Fellowship, UUA”,Hoffman Estates,Illinois
Universalist Church,Waltonville,Illinois
Sauk Trail Unit. Univ. Fellowship,Crown Point,Indiana
UUs of Northern Kentucky,Lawrenceburg,Indiana
UU Fellowship Johnson County,Prairie Village,Kansas
UU Church of Hopkinsville,Hopkinsville,Kentucky
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship,Ruston,Louisiana
First Universalist Society,Brownfield,Maine
Seneca Valley U. U. Fellowship,Gaithersburg,Maryland
First Federated Church,Beverly,Massachusetts
First Parish Unitarian Church,East Bridgewater,Massachusetts
UUs of Lowell,Lowell,Massachusetts
First Parish UU Church in Saugus,Saugus,Massachusetts
U U Fellowship Northern Berkshire,N Adams,Massachusetts
Church of the United Community,Roxbury,Massachusetts
First Unitarian Church,Stoneham,Massachusetts
First Unitarian Church,Ware,Massachusetts
U. U. Fellowship of Saginaw,Bridgeport,Michigan
First Universalist Church,Concord,Michigan
Epiphany Community Church UU,Fenton,Michigan
First Unitarian Church,Virginia,Minnesota
Burruss Memorial Universalist Church,Ellisville,Mississippi
Universalist Church of Westbrook,Concord,New Hampshire
Community Church,Dublin,New Hampshire
Dorothea Dix U. U. Community,Groveville,New Jersey
U U Gloucester County Congregation,Turnersville,New Jersey
Unit. Univ. Fellowship of Burlington County,Willingboro,New Jersey
First Universalist Church,Dexter,New York
Hollis UU Congregation,Flushing,New York
Unitarian Universalist Church of Flushing,Flushing,New York
Universalist Church of the Messiah,Fort Plain,New York
First Universalist Church,Henderson,New York
Unitarian Universalist Church,Lockport,New York
Muttontown UU Fellowship,Muttontown,New York
First Univ. Church Schuyler Lake,Schuyler Lake,New York
U. U. Fellowship of Fayetteville,Fayetteville,North Carolina
First Unitarian Church,Dayton,Ohio
Miami Valley Unitarian Fellowship,Dayton,Ohio
U. U. Society Western Reserve,Kirtland,Ohio
Community UU Congregation,Tulsa,Oklahoma
Unit. Univ. Community of Cottage Grove,Cottage Grove,Oregon
Valley Community U. U. Fellowship,Newberg,Oregon
Atkinson Memorial Church (merged),Oregon City,Oregon
Boones Ferry U. U. Congregation,Oregon City,Oregon
Unitarian Fellowship of Bucks County,Fountainville,Pennsylvania
Venango Unit. Univ. Fellowship,Franklin,Pennsylvania
First Universalist Church,Woonsocket,Rhode Island
Brookings Unit. Univ. Fellowship,Brookings,South Dakota
First U U Fellowship Hunt County,Greenville,Texas
Community UU Church,San Antonio,Texas
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship,San Antonio,Texas
The Old Brick Church,East Montpelier,Vermont
Jenkins Unit. Univ. Fellowship,Chesterfield,Virginia
Lewis Clark Unitarian Fellowship,Clarkston,Washington
UU Congregation of Grays Harbor,Hoquiam,Washington
Fork Ridge Universalist Church,Moundsville,West Virginia
UU Fellowship,Buenos Aires,
Tokyo Unitarian Fellowship,Tokyo 106-0032,
[/table]

My day job (Sunlight Foundation) colleague, Jeremy Carbaugh, has written a thrilling blog post about the technology Sunlight uses to run our annual big event/unconference, TransparencyCamp, a.k.a. TCamp. Along with masterful planning and execution, engaged group process and careful attention to design, TCamp is a sight to behold.

I’m quite proud of it, and wanted to point out Jeremy’s notes in case you feel inspired. Can’t code? What better way to learn something than to find a project that needs doing? (I’ll point out other new how-we-did-it writings if and as they appear.)

It’s going on right now, learn more TCamp itself at the main page — or better, though the #tcamp14 Twitter hashtag.

Unitarian Universalists: we can make, at least, a hearty Twitter presence at General Assembly, right?

So, I wanted a list of Unitarian Universalist member congregations and the years they were organized.

Not just an idle curiosity, but to see what proportion is less than 30 years old, to see what era (other than the Fellowship Movement obviously) produced surviving churches, and which areas have a better recent experience of welcoming new congregations. (Culture and expectations matter.) I’m about three-quarters done with the list.

As a side-effect of my search, I discovered the UUA keeps information about former congregations online. The disbanded, disaffiliated, merged and mysterious. I don’t know how far it goes back, or if its complete within that unknown date range. But the reportage of ex-member-congregations has, in twenty years, gone from routine to almost nil.

And without this missing news, how can we mourn our dead? How can we be thankful for their ministry? This tribute matters. It shows that we respect the life cycle of congregations and, like trees in a forest, have to plant the new to replace deadwood. It shows we replace the connections. It shows we respect the work now finished, or at least finished with us or in their former incarnations.

We cannot let these lost congregations go silently, any more than we would let our own loved ones go unlamented and unpraised.

Ascension Day, which marks Jesus’ return to God in the heavens, should be more dear to Universalists.

Jesus’ disciples, at his departure, returned to Jerusalem, to the Temple, and praised God. Though hard labor, trials of discipline and persecution would follow, they — and we — have in Jesus’ ascension an idea of our future: not a divinized rocket launch, as so often depicted in art, but a return to the source which made us, and a path that calls us to be a blessing to others, even those who would curse us.

Amtrak is an affordable, appealing option for many Unitarian Universalists coming from out of town to Providence for General Assembly.

The tickets become much more expensive if you buy them within 21 days of travel. Other discounts exists, but it’s hard to be the convenience of a single passenger travelling. Companion fares which could be booked later really don’t see you that much by comparison. So get your tickets now.

Use this tool to find the cheapest tickets from your location to Providence.

Next up on the blog…

• A couple of more articles on morning prayer before I give the theme a rest (for a while)
• how to simplify the order of worship creation process
• getting ready for General Assembly

So, I spent much of the Memorial Day weekend cleaning up papers. Among them, I found this print out of a report I wrote of newly-admitted Unitarian Universalist Association congregations from 1992 and 1993.

Sheeh. I know I’d been following church growth statistics for a long time, but not that long.

Here is that table, updated with the current congregation name and places. Blank gaps mean a church has not survived, but since I didn’t record the original church ID, I can’t be sure the churches haven’t moved more than a few miles. Much less merged with another congregation.

A couple of notes. Thurman, Hamer, Ellington was intentionally majority African American, and I don’t think it lasted the 1990s. Note that the Augusta, Maine and Chapel Hill, N.C. churches weren’t founded in 1992 or 1993. Churches served by a New Congregation Minister are marked Y under the column NCM, a program that no longer exists.

[table]

where,zip,name,church ID,organized,members then,now,NCM
“Coeur D’Alene, Idaho”,83814,North Idaho UUs,3127,1992,34,35,N
“Augusta, Maine”,4332,UU Community Church,3810,1826,160,198,N
“Jefferson City, Missouri “,65102,UU Fellowship of Jefferson City,5632,1992,21,50,N
“Lockport, New York”,,UU Church,,,33,,N
“Tahlequah, Oklahoma”,74464,UU Congregation of Tahlequah,7037,1992,48,52,N
“Coos Bay, Oregon”,97459,South Coast U U Fellowship,7115,1992,30,32,N
“Newberg, Oregon”,,Valley Community UU Fellowship,,,23,,N
“Tudaltin, Oregon”,,Boones Ferry UU Congregation,,,64,,Y
“Northumberland, Pennsylvania”,17857,UU Congregation of Susquehanna Valley,7320,1992,68,101,N
“Cordova, Tennessee”,38018,Neshoba UU Church,7616,1992,100,142,Y
“Ogden, Utah”,84401,UU Church of Ogden,7917,1992,76,93,N
“Leesburg, Virginia”,20175,UU Church of Louden,8113,1992,25,73,N
“Hoquiam, Washington”,,UU Congregation of Grays Harbor,,,25,,N
“Woodinville, Washington”,98072,Woodinville UU Church,8312,1992,164,189,Y
“Green Bay, Wisconsin”,54313,Green Bay Area UU Fellowship,8337,1992,21,89,N
“Amado, Arizona”,85645,UU Congregation of Green Valley,2029,1993,51,104,N
“Coronado, California”,,UU Church,,,52,,N
“San Juan Capistrano, California”,,All Souls’ Unitarian,,,37,,N
“Littleton, Colorado”,80128,Columbine UU Church,2634,1993,57,91,Y
“Miami, Florida”,,Eastside UU Church,,,33,,Y
“Orlando, Florida”,32817,University UU Society of Seminole County,2920,1993,54,92,N
“Decatur, Georgia”,,”Thurman, Hamer, Ellington Church, UU”,,,20,,Y
“Covington, Kentucky”,,UUs of Northern Kentucky,,,32,,N
“Chesterton, Maryland”,21620,UUs of the Chester River,4039,1993,21,62,N
“Ellicott City, Maryland”,21042,”Channing Memorial Church, UU”,4040,1993,36,61,N
“Chapel Hill, North Carolina”,27514,The Community Church of Chapel Hill UU,6626,”1953, 1993 (associated)”,144,356,N
“Canton, Ohio”,44711,UU Congregation of Greater Canton,6813,1993,20,39,N
“Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania”,18360,UU Fellowship of the Poconos,7220,1993,36,50,N
“Peace Dale, Rhode Island”,2879,UU Congregation of South County,7510,1993,29,147,N
“Cedar Park, Texas”,78613,Live Oak UU Church,7714,1993,52,147,Y

[/table]

So, I understand that the HVAC systems at 24 Farnsworth Street, the new headquarters building of the Unitarian Universalist Association, aren’t quite callibrated or what-have-you and some of the staff are cold. Really cold. This happens.

As a large, well-insulated person, I tend to cope with a frosty office better than most, but I hate to think of the energy waste.

And more, I hate to think about people being cold at home or work in the winter because the cost of heating is too high. So I’m writing because of the UUA news, but as a tickler for those who face heating insecurity. The same goes in case of power outage, or simply desiring to be less dependent on limited natural resources.

This might be the right time of year for sales shopping for the goods you would need, too.

Two articles to get you on your way:

1. “Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill” by Paul Wheeler is a way to use an assortment of low-power devices to create a “heat bubble” around you in an office setting.
2. “Insulation: first the body, then the home” by Kris De Decker is a heavily-sourced review of the use of modern performance garments to make low domestic temperatures comfortable. Would a Geneva gown count?

But if the UUA staff work in conditions implied in the second article, I’d contact OSHA first!

I meant to make this post available well ahead of Memorial Day, but that obviously did not happen. There will always be another occasion for wreaths and tributes at monuments, though.

But it wasn’t a national holiday that made me think about this subject originally. I live in Washington D.C., and live near several memorials to foreign luminaries. Embassies and ex-pats will often leave flowers in tribute, so I see a lot of these. And then there are the wreaths and other flowers left at the military memorials. Florists must do well around here.

But not all choices are equally good. Here are some ideas if you intend to leave a wreath or make a floral  presentation at a public monument.

If I had to pick one action, plan for someone to clean up the wreath-remains within a few days. A pile of compost isn’t a tribute.

After that, choose the backing (and if needed, easel) well. The Ukrainian embassy left a wreath for the Schevchenko bicentennial earlier this year — in the context of a national crisis no less — but the flowers were attached to a plastic (think bread wrapper) covered foam hoop. Worse, it was too heavy for the wire easel, and with a slight breeze it toppled over and broke.

I found it broken I was out walking Daisy the Dog, but it was past re-staging.

Contrast this with a wreath the Slovak embassy left on the birthday of the first Czechoslovak president (and husband of American-born Unitarian, Charlotte Garrigue) Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. The papier mache is stronger, so the wind did not destroy it, and the wooden easel adds dignity.

Or do without the easel, and mount the wreath with this tribute to the Madonna of the Trail, in suburban Bethesda. The coated wire provides a backing to hang the wreath. (And now I can imagine where the typical toothmarks of decay on old sandstone monuments comes from…)

They’ve been in for a while, truth be told. Not ready to review them, but each is larger that I thought it might be. There is the words-only edition of the United Church of Canada’s Voices United and the Church of Scotland’s Church Hymnary 4 (purple) with the words-only Unitarian and Free Christian Hymns of Faith and Freedom, Church Hymnary 3 (melody edition) and Church Hymnary Revised (pocket words-only) for size comparison.

Finally, a use for me for Foursquare. The Liberty Universalist church isn’t a member of the UUA, but has Universalist origins. And is active. I’d never seen it mapped before!

I was chatting with some parish ministers; one complained about having to go back to finish a newsletter column, to the moans and commiserations of the others. (The weekly newsletter-meditation implied by the order of service-themed blog post yesterday only raises the demand.)

I lightly chuckled, since I don’t have that responsibility anymore. And funny, as I was already blogging in my last pastorate, it was always easier and more pleasant to blog than write newsletter columns, so it isn’t the act of writing, per se. (The only thing worse was coming up with suitably vague but interesting blurbs for sermons I hadn’t written yet.)

So preachers,

• why is this task so awful?
• what can be done to make it less awful?
• would anyone notice if we stopped?

And by “we” I mean “you.” I’d love to hear from you. I’ll allow anonymous comments for this post, for obvious reasons.

My day at the Andover-Harvard Library archives was running out, so I wanted to see what I could as quickly as possible, including the files related to an ad hoc organization opposed to the creation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, from a minority of Universalists and Unitarians alike.

One of the opposing Unitarian churches was First Church, Boston, and the minister editorialized through orders of service, so these were included in the  file. The controversy aside, I thought it had value as a format.

The order was four pages: one leaf folded, and printed the usual way like a booklet. Since I don’t know the copyright status of the order of services, I won’t post them; it may be legitimate fair use, but the value is in the form (rather than the content) so I may replicate that later. A description will do.

Page one:

• Name of the church
• Names and title of the ministers
• Date and time
• Outline order of service with dialogues, responses and doxology printed out
• Name and title of organist

Page two:

• Responsive reading

Page three:

• A pastoral meditation (being the anti-consolidation opinion piece), signed with initials
• Staff list (or on page four)

Page four:

• Notices, in a mix of one and two columns
• Staff list and address (or on page three)

Not radical, but a some interesting features.

• tightly edited notices reduce or eliminate the need for a church newsletter
• the minister’s meditation provides another avenue for principled and educational communication; I wonder if it was used for pledging?
• bored with the service? you can read that meditation instead
• folded backwards, to expose pages 2 and 3, you have a welcome reminder of church to be extracted later in the week from your bag…
• …or a pleasing representation of the church to share with others
• one leaf means less paper and less cost, and extras can easily be printed on the fly

Of course, yours would be photocopied or laser printed, rather than job printing. That’s something you couldn’t do in 1959!

I was — and am — looking for a practical expostion on Universalist worship like the one from 1901 I found for the Unitarians a couple of weeks ago. In the process, I found the Tufts 1902-03 catalog, and its pages dedicated to its now-lost Divinity School.

A couple of items to note: one could enter as an undergraduate and study through, and option that died very recently in the United States with the closure of Bangor Theological Seminary. And that the curriculum included logic (for nongrads), economics, psychology and the “Biblical languages” of German, Hebrew and Greek. And PE for the men.

If you were approved, you would have gotten a generous scholarship — to imagine an early pastorate without student debt! — from the Universalist General Convention, though non-Universalists were admitted. Lodging “heated by steam and lighted by gas ” included, but you did have to provide your own “sheets, blankets, pillow cases, and towels.”

A fun read.

It’s 1920, and you’re in a large market town east of the Alleghenies. You’re looking for a church and your options include an Episcopal church and a Unitarian church. (Make it a small city or larger, and you might add the Universalists to this formula.) Ask the rector of St. Alban’s or the minister at First Unitarian if each has much in common with the other, and you would probably be told “no.” Different polity, different theology, different piety. The two have nothing in common.

But if you ask parishioners to describe how worship was worded, you might pick up on more similarities then you would have expected. Yes, Unitarian worship has changed, but so did Episcopalian worship, and in 1920 they were closer in style. These were the days before the Liturgical Movement, so an every-Sunday, main Eucharistic (Communion) service would be unlikely; Morning Prayer (with Sermon) would be more likely, and if it was old-fashioned, it may be followed in an odd rhythm by the Litany and then Ante-Communion; that is, the first half of the Communion service. And the Unitarians would have Morning Prayer and Sermon, by that or another name. A big litany would be an option, and if you’d shown up a generation or two before, even Ante-Communion.

Small-town Universalists, Western “fiddle and lecture” Unitarians and Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians would have fallen outside this spectrum, but Theist and even early Humanist Unitarians appreciated the rhythms and internal logic of Morning Prayer. You ask: so what?

In the next couple of weeks or more, I will blog on:

• what the contemporary changes Unitarians and Universalists made to common worship styles say about their assumptions then
• how traces of those forms persist, even in unlikely settings
• how these forms are based on centuries of developments
• how these forms can be the basis of lay theological education and mission
• how movement, habits and artifacts shape worship
• what adaptations and alterations by those who used those forms (Epiccopalians mainly) say about how these forms might be re-reformed and re-adopted

Should be fun! Thought? Please add them in the comments.

So, I was reading forms from the Church of England Diocese of Europe (as one does) and came across an “Application for the Authorisation of a Congregational Worship Leader.” (PDF)

As the diocese’s reach extends to Ulaanbataar and Vladivostok — not to mention parts in between — it makes sense there would be a provision for such leaders. And even more, a provision for non-Anglican leaders. After all, in some parts, the Church of England presence may be the only Anglophone option.  Non-Anglican but baptized Christians have to complete one more step: to “acknowledge the Church of England as part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” and “accept the teaching, discipline and authority of the Church of England.” That’s it.

Which reminds me of the pre-consolidation provisions for Universalist fellowship, for persons entering the ministry and presumably parishes: to accept the essential theological standard of the Universalist Church, and to abide by its laws.

Not so onerous a lift.

The discussions around these hymns and hymnal posts on that walled garden, Facebook, have been far more lively that the comments here might suggest. Thanks to commenters here and there.

A bit of alternative history. The Universalists didn’t have to be consolidated with the Unitarians. There was as an eleventh-hour attempt to stop it. (Which produced an interesting print artifact; I’ll talk about that later.) So the Universalists might have remained independent, or clubbed in with a Congregationalists — there were talks — and ended up with the United Church of Christ or the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. Some Universalist churches that opted out of the UUA did end up joining the latter body — I recall the names in the 1990s — though I’m unsure if any are extant. (Universalist National Memorial Church is an honorary member.)

I’m not saying that such an outcome would be desirable, only possible. And they would have come up with their own ways and resources.

I had this in mind when I re-reviewed the 1992 Hymnal: A Worship Book, a Brethren and Mennonite book. I couldn’t help but think that in might be good for Christian Universalists, or a Universalist-federated church. On the one hand, it’s got ecumenical standards, Unitarian classics from the like of Barbould, Hosmer and Longfellow, and cheery Gospel songs like “God be with you till we meet again” (which ended worship at a church I used to supply.)

It just feels Universalist. And since the Universalists in the Southern states started as Brethren, I suppose that’s right. Alas, like Singing the Living Tradition, it’s entry at Hymnary.org is almost empty, so it’s hard to make a comparison with other hymnals.

It’s inexpensive ($15) and well-made, though I’ve heard that they warp if they stand up in a hymn rack. A nice selection of worship resources, too.

And that might be the end of it: a useful hymnal in certain restricted (unlikely, really) circumstances. But then there are the supplements.

Two more substantial works are Mennonite-specific, but the little ones have modern hymns and some Taize (it seems) plus “Gathered Here in the Mystery of This Hour,” “Siyahamba” and something called “Spirit of Life.”

A parallel development, in an alternate world, indeed…

This will be the last hymnal post until my ordered books show up; until then, I’ll turn to other matters, including worship theory.

Following up on the “Fifty Shades of Unitarian” post, here are the “The Unitarian faith set forth in fifty Unitarian hymns” affirmations or platforms: the faith each hymn supposedly upholds. And matching biblical passage, Conveniently, it plots out almost a year’s worth of sermons, too. (Or at least I can be forgiven what some preachers surely must have thought in 1914.) But if you do preach these, I offer no guarantee that your congregation will like them all. A few are worthy of salvage, but then again I’m a Universalist without a preaching ministry, so take that as you will.

[table]
Theme,Incipit,Scripture,,Author
Unitarians Worship The God Who Is Revealed In The Heavens Above And On The Earth Beneath,Lord of all being throned afar,Psalm 19: 1,,Oliver Wendell Holmes
Unitarians Affirm The Immediate And Constant Presence Of God,Thou Life within my life than self more near,Deuteronomy 33: 27,Psalm 90: 1,Eliza Scudder
Unitarians Affirm The Encompassing And Sustaining Guidance Of God,Whither midst falling dew,Isaiah 26: 3,,William Cullen Bryant
Unitarians Affirm The Unfailing Goodness And Mercy Of God,”Eternal One, thou living God”,Psalm 103: 17,,Samuel Longfellow
Unitarians Affirm The Continuous And Inexhaustible Revelation Of God To Men,From age to age how grandly rise,Revelation 21: 3,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Affirm The Timeless And Boundless Revelation Of God To Men,Light of ages and of nations,Wisdom of Solomon 7: 27,,Samuel Longfellow
Unitarians Affirm The Revelation Of God In The Divine Order Of The World And In The Daily Faithfulness Of Men,We pray no more made lowly wise,Luke 27: 21,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Find A Revelation Of God In Nature,Mysterious Presence source of all,Psalm 104: 24,,Seth Curtis Beach
Unitarians Find A Revelation Of God In The Consciences And Hearts Of Men,O Thou whose Spirit witness bears; Within our spirits free,Romans 8: 16,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Affirm The Revelation Of God In The Human Soul,The Lord is in his Holy Place,1 Corinthians 3: 16,,William Channing Gannett
Unitarians Affirm The Validity Of The Things That Are Not Seen,Father thy wonders do not singly stand,2 Corinthians 4: 18,,Jones Very
Unitarian Affirm That The Purpose Of Worship Is The Communion Of The Souls Of Men With God,Father in thy mysterious presence kneeling,Romans 8: 15,,Samuel Johnson
Unitarians Affirm That Prayer Is The Aspiration Uttered Or Unexpressed Of The Human Soul Toward God,Nearer my God to thee,Psalm 25: 1,,Sarah Flowers Adams
Unitarians Affirm The Reality Of The Inner Light That Lighteth Every Man That Cometh Into The World,Go not my soul in search of him Thou wilt find him there,John 1: 9,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians In Spite Of The Inscrutable Tragedies Of Life Dare To Believe And To Trust In The Perfect Wisdom And Love Of God,Thou Grace Divine encircling all,Psalm 23: 6,,Eliza Scudder
Unitarians Affirm The Limitless And Ceaseless Incarnation Of God In Men,O prophet souls of all the years,Acts 14: 17,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Affirm That Inspiration Is The Unbroken Communication Of The Life Of God To The Open Mind And Reverent Heart Of Man,Life of ages richly poured,Matthew 10: 20,,Samuel Johnson
Unitarians Affirm That Salvation Is Not A Matter Of Belief But A Way Of Life,Christian rise and act thy creed,Matthew 7: 21,,Francis Albert Rollo Russell
Unitarians Affirm The Leadership Of Jesus Christ,O Thou great friend to all the sons of men,John 14: 6,,Theodore Parker
Unitarians Affirm The Humanity Of Jesus Christ,Our Father while our hearts unlearn,John 8: 40,,Oliver Wendell Holmes
Unitarians Affirm That The Permanent Influence Of Jesus Christ Is In Quickening The Spiritual Life Of Men,Immortal by their deed and word; Like light around them shed,John 8: 12,John 1: 4,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Affirm That The Spirit Of Christianity Is The Spirit Of Service,Thou Lord of Hosts whose guiding hand,Ephesians 6: 2,,Octavius Brooks Frothingham
Unitarians Believe That The Christian Life Is Not A Matter Of Name Or Form But A Habit Of Obedience To The Precepts Of Jesus,”The clashing of creeds, and the strife”,Luke 17: 20-21,,Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Unitarians Affirm That Out Of Noble Memories Men May Build Their Finest Hopes,We come unto our fathers’ God ,Psalm 90: 1,,Thomas Hornblower Gill
Unitarians Cherish The Associations And Inspiring Traditions Of The Christian Life,O Light from age to age the same,Psalm 145: 4,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Believe In Perpetuating The Sacred Usages And Institutions Of Religion,We love the venerable house Our fathers built to God,Genesis 28: 17,,Ralph Waldo Emerson
Unitarians Declare That The Rich Inspirations Of The Past Must Be Transmitted From Generation To Generation,Where ancient forests widely spread,Joel 1: 2-3,,Andrews Norton
Unitarians Value And Celebrate The Seasons Of The Christian Year (Christmas),Calm on the listening ear of night,Matthew 21: 9,,Edmund Hamilton Sears
Unitarians Value And Celebrate The Seasons Of The Christian Year (Christmas),It came upon the midnight clear,Matthew 21: 9,,Edmund Hamilton Sears
Unitarians Value And Celebrate The Seasons Of The Christian Year (Good Friday),In the cross of Christ I glory,John 12: 32,,John Bowering
Unitarians Value And Celebrate The Seasons Of The Christian Year (Easter),The Light along the ages Shines higher as it goes,Colossians 3: 1,,William George Tarrant
Unitarians Affirm That The Soul Of Man Is Prophetic Of A More Abundant Life,”Our God, our God thou shinest here”,Matthew 22: 32,Acts 17: 28,Thomas Hornblower Gill
Unitarians Affirm The Spiritual Idealism Which Is The Inspiration Of A Happy And Serviceable Life,O Lord of life thy kingdom is at hand,Galatians 5: 22,,Marion Franklin Ham
Unitarians Affirm That Religion Is The Consciousness Of The Presence Of God,O God whose presence glows in all,Micah 6: 8,,Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham
Unitarians Affirm The Brotherhood Of Man,”When thy heart, with joy o’erflowing”,1 John 4: 20,,Theodore Chickering Williams
Unitarians Desire To Establish On Earth The Divine Commonwealth Of Righteousness And Peace,Father let thy kingdom come,Romans 8: 19,,John Page Hopps
Unitarians Propose To Seek First Not Numbers Or Riches Or The Approval Of Majorities But The Kingdom Of God And His Righteousness,O Thou in lonely vigil led,Acts 24: 14,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Affirm The Freedom Of The Truth And The Constant Renewal And Expansion Of Religious Thought And Life,O Life that maketh all things new,2 Corinthians 3: 17,,Samuel Longfellow
Unitarians Believe In The Promise Of The Coming Of The Kingdom Of God,”Thy kingdom come,—on bended knee”,Matthew 6: 33,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Dedicate Themselves To The Cause Of Truth And Freedom,Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,John 8: 32,Psalm 20: 5,Julia Ward Howe
Unitarians Welcome The Inspirations Of Patriotism,’O Beautiful my Country!’,Isaiah 54: 14,Isaiah 33: 6,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Believe In International Peace And Goodwill,God of the nations near and far,Matthew 5: 9,,John Haynes Holmes
Unitarians Believe In The Ultimate Triumph Of Right Over Wrong And Of Goodwill Over Fear And Hate,”Hear, hear, O ye nations, and hearing obey”,Luke 2: 14,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Desire The Reunion Of Christendom In The Unity Of The Spirit Rather Than In Uniformity Of Belief,The ages one great minster seem,Romans 12: 5,,James Russell Lowell
Unitarians Believe In The Fellowship Of The Church Universal,One holy Church of God appears,1 Corinthians 12: 4-5,,Samuel Longfellow
Unitarians Believe That The Discipline Of Pain And Sorrow Is Part Of God’s Plan For The Upbuilding Of Character,My God I thank thee may no thought,Hebrews 12: 6,,Andrews Norton
Unitarians Believe That Through Sorrow And Bereavement The Soul May Be Purified And Faith Quickened,”O Love divine, that stooped to share”,Hebrews 12: 11,,Oliver Wendell Holmes
Unitarians Believe In The Immortal Life And In The Progress Of Mankind Onward And Upward Forever,I cannot think of them as dead,Psalm 23: 3-4,,Frederick Lucian Hosmer
Unitarians Believe In The Fellowship Of The Life Eternal,It singeth low in every heart,John 14: 2,,John White Chadwick
Unitarians Believe That The Life Of The Spirit Should Be A Progress From Good To Better From Mortality To Immortality,”This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign”,Romans 8: 2,,Oliver Wendell Holmes

[/table]

While looking for the source of an obscure responsive reading, I came across this little service book: Mission hymnal of the Unitarian Laymen’s League. Despite it being undated, and Internet Archive dating it to 1900, it is in fact later. Unless the Unitarian Laymen’s League had the powers of time travel, as it includes a hymn dated August 9, 1929. (It predates Hymns of the Spirit, 1937, for closer dating.)

Its tone is serene yet vital: a religion of rest of dyspeptic captains of industry, I wouldn’t half guess. Its purpose: to help establish Unitarian preaching stations, and more spiritually developed men. Yet, at first glance doesn’t seem to suffer the excesses of “muscular Christianity” from the generation before.

Two interesting points:

1. It has a hymn by a Universalist. “We praise thee, God, for harvests earned” by John Coleman Adams. (A God-free version exists in Singing the Living Tradition as “Our praise we give for harvests earned,” #294.)
2. The directions for prayer have a certain Unitarian resonance:

You say, however, “I do not believe in prayer.” Even so, this does not obviate the necessity of daily spiritual exercise. Retire every day into the silence of your own thoughts, there commune with the highest you can possibly conceive.

A dissertation I just found about the Labour (Labor) Church movement, which I’ve previously alluded to.

Summers, David Fowler. The Labour church and allied movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (University of Edinburgh, 1958.)

Click here for the dissertation in two PDFs. Interesting stuff.

Hello, Humanists? I hope you don’t feel too slighted on this blog; it’s only that I feel a particular mission to the Christian part of liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism in particular. But many of the same hymnological themes I’ve been writing about recently (and many of the worship themes I’ll be turning to) have parallels in the “churchly” side of turn of the twentieth century radical dissent, the spirit of which is the inheritance of Religious Humanism and Ethical Culture.

See the following three resources editored or written by Stanton Coit. I’ve written about the second two before, but the first seems to be recently scanned and published.

• Ethical hymn book: with music. (1905)
• Two responsive services in the form and spirit of the litany and the ten commandments for use in families, schools, and churches with a commentary. (1911)
• The message of man: a book of Ethical scriptures. (1902)

I’m still hoping to get or copy his 1914 Social Worship, but it’s quite hard to find around here. Perhaps a trip to Brown University Library over General Assembly.

Required watching for anyone with romantic ideas about going into the ministry. The “gone into nonprofits” is my story of the last ten years. Not sad, but the existential piece hits close to home

See the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly site for a transcript.
“Diminishing Job Prospects for Protestant Pastors” (May 2, 2014)

This blog theme is a WordPress default, and I’m seeing it (Twenty Thirteen) too often. Will be making a “child theme” derived from it: first to change the typeface, then the header image.

Saturday’s blog post (“Fifty Shades of Unitarian“) wasn’t the first time I’ve worked up lists of what might be “canonical” hymns in the Unitarian and Universalist traditions. Because this looks back over several decades, it necessarily includes only old hymns, which is useful (to a point) for finding hymns that have entered the public domain. (This makes alterations easier, and obviates licensing issues.)

See these posts, too; some research, some opinion, a couple of resources:

• List of hymns in the League of Lay Centers hymnal
• What hymns are distinctive for Unitarian and Universalist Christians? Lists proffered.
• Ecumenically-rich hymns in “Hymns of the Spirit”
• Hymn list I
• Favorite hymns
• Selection of hymns for a tiny church (A suggestion not a list)
• “Liberala Himnaro” hymn list in English
• Esperanto hymnal to download (but you need to read Esperanto!)
• Hymns about universal salvation (keyed to Singing the Living Tradition)

Goodness! I’ve written a lot about this.

So, what are the “standards” of Unitarian hymnody? Lacking an objective standard, I’ve looked at the question one of two ways: hymns commonly found in Unitarian hymnals, by Unitarian authors; and those chosem by leading lights. This blog post assumes the later.

“The Unitarian faith set forth in fifty Unitarian hymns” by American Unitarian Association (1914)

Each entry has a common structure: an entitling theme of what particularly Unitarian sentiment is expressed in the hymn (omitted here; will appear late as sermon meditation fodder), a relevant passage or two of scripture, the hymn, suggested tunes, and biographical stub of the hymn author. In the introduction, we learn that, “With three exceptions the hymns and poems in this collection are taken from the Unitarian Hymn Book [presumably the New Hymn and Tune Book; also 1914].…The selections on pages 9, 29, and 56 are verses which are adapted to reading or reciting rather than for singing.”

This is far from all good Unitarian hymns that existed then, much less encompassing what good non-Unitarian hymns the Unitarians sing. (Naturally, the Universalists had their own favorites, but there tended to be a lot overlap.) And not all of these hold up over the last century.

So, how did this list square with the succeeding Universalist, then the three suceeding Unitarian (and ) Universalist hymnals, to today? For what it’s worth, Singing the Living Tradition has more “survivors” than any other comtemporary hymnal, in the United States anyway.

Key:

• HOTC1917: Hymns of the Church (Universalist, 1917)
• HOTS1938: Hymns of the Spirit (joint Unitarian and Universalist, 1938)
• HCL1964: Hymns for the Celebration of Life (Unitarian Universalist, 1964)
• SLT1993: Singing the Living Tradition (Unitarian Universalist, 1993)

[table  width=”500″]

Incipit,Author,Pg,HOTC1917,HOTS1938,HCL1964,SLT1993
‘O Beautiful my Country!’,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,47,238,388,240,
Calm on the listening ear of night,Edmund Hamilton Sears,34,315,159,,
Christian rise and act thy creed,Francis Albert Rollo Russell,24,,282,,
“Eternal One, thou living God”,Samuel Longfellow,10,,367,246,345
Father in thy mysterious presence kneeling,Samuel Johnson,18,293,229,,
Father let thy kingdom come,John Page Hopps,42,,336,,
Father thy wonders do not singly stand,Jones Very,17,,41,,
From age to age how grandly rise,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,11,,423,231,105
Go not my soul in search of him Thou wilt find him there,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,20,,58,88,
God of the nations near and far,John Haynes Holmes,48,217,399,,
“Hear, hear, O ye nations, and hearing obey”,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,49,240,398,194,
I cannot think of them as dead,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,54,362,202,73,96
Immortal by their deed and word; Like light around them shed,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,27,,203,,
In the cross of Christ I glory,John Bowering,36,338,190,,
It came upon the midnight clear,Edmund Hamilton Sears,35,317,162,287,244
It singeth low in every heart,John White Chadwick,55,244,451,,
Life of ages richly poured,Samuel Johnson,23,,337,172,111
Light of ages and of nations,Samuel Longfellow,12,,75,248,189
Lord of all being throned afar,Oliver Wendell Holmes,7,,16,38,
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,Julia Ward Howe,46,241,567,,
My God I thank thee may no thought,Andrews Norton,52,,,,
Mysterious Presence source of all,Seth Curtis Beach,14,,63,130,92
Nearer my God to thee,Sarah Flowers Adams,19,171,245,126,87
O God whose presence glows in all,Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham,40,,60,,
O Life that maketh all things new,Samuel Longfellow,44,,416,54,12
O Light from age to age the same,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,31,,464,255,
O Lord of life thy kingdom is at hand,Marion Franklin Ham,39,,332,,
“O Love divine, that stooped to share”,Oliver Wendell Holmes,53,289,188,,
O prophet souls of all the years,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,22,,421,233,272
O Thou great friend to all the sons of men,Theodore Parker,25,93,209,,
O Thou in lonely vigil led,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,43,,171,,
O Thou whose Spirit witness bears; Within our spirits free,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,15,,52,74,
One holy Church of God appears,Samuel Longfellow,51,170,407,261,
Our Father while our hearts unlearn,Oliver Wendell Holmes,26,,235,,
“Our God, our God thou shinest here”,Thomas Hornblower Gill,38,,9,36,
The ages one great minster seem,James Russell Lowell,50,,417,,
“The clashing of creeds, and the strife”,Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,29,,,,
The Light along the ages Shines higher as it goes,William George Tarrant,37,,197,,
The Lord is in his Holy Place,William Channing Gannett,16,,73,,
“This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign”,Oliver Wendell Holmes,56,,,,
Thou Grace Divine encircling all,Eliza Scudder,21,87,224,,
Thou Life within my life than self more near,Eliza Scudder,8,,81,,
Thou Lord of Hosts whose guiding hand,Octavius Brooks Frothingham,28,,310,,
“Thy kingdom come,—on bended knee”,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,45,211,338,,
We come unto our fathers’ God ,Thomas Hornblower Gill,30,,363,15,
We love the venerable house Our fathers built to God,Ralph Waldo Emerson,32,,466,,
We pray no more made lowly wise,Frederick Lucian Hosmer,13,,274,188,
“When thy heart, with joy o’erflowing”,Theodore Chickering Williams,41,204,280,226,
Where ancient forests widely spread,Andrews Norton,33,,27,,
Whither midst falling dew,William Cullen Bryant,9,,,,
[/table]

Anyone who has read my blog over the last few days can see I’ve been interested in hymnology, and particularly how it affects the lives of Unitarian Universalists. I keep looking for an ideal solution, particularly for those us who come from particularly small congregations of Christian Unitarian Universalists, and I will continue to look and comment on the subject.

To that end, I recently ordered two words-only hymnals. These are Voices United from the United Church of Canada, and Church Hymnary 4, from the Church of Scotland. Because both of these books are imports, I got the words-only editions because frankly they’re cheaper, new or used. They’re also smaller, which is also a consideration given how many hymnals I bought over the years. But there’s something more than that: these pocket words-only hymnals also serve as books of prayer and actualized theology.

Words-only hymnals are, essentially, collections of poetry, but unlike others in the genre they are intended primarily to be heard aloud and to be used in groups. Even so, I’ve found myself — from time to time — dipping into hymnals to better understand what I’m feeling and give some language to it, if not always a tune. I’ve found comfort and solace in hymnals, and disproportionately in the little ones, missing the music, where I might be intimidated by symbols I don’t comprehend well enough to learn from. And there have been times that a hymn has the power either structured or free prayer does not, and that leads to better understanding (not the same thing as a better explanation) than an idea of God confronted head-on.

It would be nice to offer — or at least locate — such a resource so it may kept in every home, in a day bag, and finally in the heart.

I keep running into sites — Unitarian Universalist but mostly not — with MP3s or other files with hymn tunes ready to use as accompaniment for churches without an instrumentalist. Presumably ones that could be described with one or more of the following adjectives: small, poor, remote, fragile or disorganized. A church for which this is better than nothing.

These sound files follow CDs which did the same thing, and even special electronic players — but these belonged to the 1990s and 2000s and were quite expensive. And a free option is better than none. Or is it?

So now we have a resource, and probably a need. But what we don’t have are directions of how to use them. Am I supposed to cue them up on my phone, with a huddled few singing to a tinny MIDI? If not, then what? And what about the tempo. Or the number of verses.

Does anyone use these successfully? And if so, how?

This is a sincere appeal for ideas or resources.

If you look at the Singing the Living Tradition page at the über-useful Hymnody.org site, you’d think it has two hymns in it.

I think the hymn-interested Unitarian Universalist community should fix that. So first, does any one have a clean spreadsheet or list of all the first lines? If not, can we build one?

But ideally it would include most (or all) of the following:

• Hymn Number
• Title
• First Line
• Publication Date
• Refrain First Line
• Original Language
• Original Language Title
• Notes
• Text Person Name
• Text Person Relationship
• Text Year
• Text Language
• Text Copyright Statement
• Text Source
• Meter
• Tune Name
• Key
• Tune Person Name
• Tune Person Relationship
• Tune Year
• Tune Copyright Statement
• Tune Source

Work to help the common good, if a niche common good. Anyone interested? I’d be glad to take the lead.

Yesterday, Unitarian Universalist minister Steve Cook commented

As a late-in-life amateur singer, I’ve come to understand the issues of hymnology you raise with more appreciation than ever before. Stuffed into boxes in church closets, attics and basements, I’ve run across some of the more specialized hymnals for young people and so forth that we produced in earlier years. I wonder if, along with the expense, the vexations and blessings of theological diversity have militated against more than “one idea at a time” in our hymnal world? When our orbit was more “christotheistanaturism” out of the Western tradition, do you think it was easier to achieve consensus on a list of basics?

It may have been easier then, but I think it’s even easier to believe that there was more expressed disunity then, and we have an easier time managing it today. (That’s not necessarily a good thing.) Consider what’s changed:

1. Today, every church and minister is a printer. It’s not an original thought (I’m trying to re-discover the citation) to say the mimeograph radically changed how new liturgical works were created. And on a practical basis, if you didn’t have a hymn book or service book, you weren’t going to have the words of worship for the congregation, and what’s in there was all you had to work with.
2. A hypothesis: a generation of Unitarian ministers (much less so the Universalists, whose talents lie with prayers and debate) that created so many wonderful hymns were unlikely to be quiet about what was appropriate and what wasn’t. Some ministers had elegant or sophisticated taste (me) and others were surely tacky or pompous (you). And each wanted an appropriate hymnal. Not even to mention the East-West Unitarian division.

   

3. At some point, hymnals went from being primarily personally-owned and bring-your-own to becoming a church fixture. Until that transition was complete, wouldn’t it be easier to keep them small, modular or both? Cheaper to produce and buy, easier to carry. One reason to think so: over the last two centuries, hymnals kept growing in size. An antebellum worshipper would look at her hymnal like her heir today would look at a smart phone; they were much the same size.
4. Our ancestors sang more than we do today: at home, at Sunday School, in mission circles. Young and old alike. Some hymnals then would be called supplements today: a few standards with a bunch of new material. A variety of tastes: from chant to gospel tunes (if you look at the Universalists). Many of these volumes were paperback, and quite ephemeral.

Any other thoughts? Of course, I have my own (and different than these) reasons for having multiple hymnals today but that’s for another blog post.

The old joke that Unitarians believe in “one God at most” lives again in the paucity of resources we develop, projects we plan or visions we tolerate. Today, it’s “one idea at most” — and they’re rarely new.

One option at most for anything with Unitarian Universalism, even though our ancestors both on the Unitarian and Universalist sides were able to produce a variety of hymnals and different worship resources for differing churchmanships and congregation size, and with fewer people and at higher cost. We even had hymnals for church schools and social groups. Imagine what they would do with word processors and an on-demand book publisher like Lulu.com. The difference is will.

For years but particularly recently, I’ve been trying to figure out what would have been the trajectory of Unitarian (and) Universalist hymnody if it had not gone down a path lain down by Kenneth Patton, the influential editor of the “old blue” Hymns for the Celebration of Life. One practical reason is that such a hymnal might work better for Christian Unitarian Universalists.

And recently, I was in Massachusetts for friend, minister and blogger Victoria Weinstein’s installation, and spent a day researching at Harvard Divinity’s archives: I have and shall report out from those discoveries. But the library closed long before my train left Boston, so I went to the Harvard Co-Op to right a wrong. I had to buy the fourth edition (2007) of the Harvard University Hymn Book. I had opted against it the last time I was there.

When I came home, I started using old directories for background research, and look what I found. From the 1892 Year Book.

The Harvard University hymnal was once considered a suitable hymnal for Unitarian churches. “Of course it was,” I mused. 

And the more I look at it, I see the new edition would work in a liberal Christian church, including a Unitarian (or) Universalist one, the name notwithstanding. But here are a few (and hardly exhaustive) things I like about it, both serious and frivolous:

1. It’s in very good taste and well typeset.
2. It’s full of Unitarian standards like “Holy Spirit, Truth Divine” “Lord of All Being, Throned Afar” and “Life of Ages, Richly Poured”
3. It has a good assortment of “canonical” spirituals and gospel songs, like “Shall We Gather At the River” “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” “What Wondrous Love” keeps the Lamb.
4. In good Hymns of the Spirit (1938) style, “God of Grace and God of Glory” is matched to Regent Square, not Cwm Rhondda, which we see fitly with “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.”
5. It has good hymns newer than 1938. “Hope of the World, Thou Christ of Great Compassion” and “For the Fruit of All Creation” — ok: not many.
6. Older hymns are altered more gently than say, in the UCC’s New Century Hymnal, while newer hymns are more gender-inclusive. (I’ve not made a close read of inclusive language for human beings, which I think is a more pressing claim for revision.)
7. No need to tip in “Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands” (which always makes me cry) “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” and “We Three Kings”

But

1. There’s no responsive readings or service elements.
2. No “Morning So Fair to See” “Eternal Ruler of the Ceaseless Round” or “O Life That Makest All Things New”
3. I could do without the patriotic songs at the back.
4. At $30, it isn’t cheap.

[Paul] had a broad vision and a comprehensive grasp, and his thirty years’ ministry as an ambassador of Christ attests his intelligence not less than his zeal. He was grandly equipped for his work, not alone by his exalted faith and consecration, but also by his rare intellectual skill and strength, and his acquisition of wisdom gathered from various sources. But with all his genius and learning he held to one straight course. He preached Christ crucified He believed that the Crucified One would come again to earth, that he would incorporate himself in believing hearts, becoming their inspiration and blessedness. If at the first he seemed to look for this second coming of Christ as an outward manifestation, he soon came to realize its spiritual import and to dwell upon its vitalizing presence within the soul. “Christ liveth in me,” said Paul, “and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God.” * * * “I can do all things through Christ who strengthened me .”

From “The Fullness of Christianity,” by the Rev. Henry W. Rugg: the occasional sermon delivered before the Universalist General Convention, held in Washington, D. C. on October 24, 1883.

It is like a dear home-meal, a family supper, where the Elder and the younger brothers meet around their Father’s table. It is like a farewell meal just before a dear one goes away from home on a perilous journey. The breaking of bread together, the cup of wine together, the beautiful words of remembrance that will stay in their hearts all their lives that will stay in the heart of the world forever.

Wonderful words follow. The promise[of] “many mansions”, the new commandment of love, the new name of friend, the gift of his own peace, the prayer for the “little children’s” safe keeping. Under the sorrow of parting is the joy of returning; with his going away the spirit of truth will come. “It is better tor you that I go.”

The uplifted face seems to smile back into God’s face the voice is tremulous with joy as it whispers, “I go to my Father.”

Maria L. Drew , The Sunday School Helper (1896)

Pivoting from the Unitarians, and looking forward to Maundy Thursday. I’ll go into the Universalist laws of fellowship (and how they changed) later, but suffice it to say now that state conventions, parishes and ministers were subject to them or risk losing their standing. For a few decades, at least, one of these laws concerned who could be admitted to the Lord’s table, or Communion.

From the 1946 Laws of Fellowship

In every church the Communion of the Lord’s Supper shall be statedly observed at such times as the laws thereof prescribe; and at every such service all persons present, whether members or not, who may feel it to be a duty or privilege to do so, shall be invited to participate.

This formulation goes back at least as far as 1891. It also appears in the 1951 version, but disappears in the next (1953) version when, with other specific rules related to Christianity,  it was removed. (As for the reference to church laws, even today  Universalist National Memorial Church, Washington requires it on “Thursday of Holy Week and at such other times as the Pastor and Diaconate may determine. At every such service all present shall be invited to partake.”)

The reading of the law matches what is printed as an invitation to communion in the “red hymnal” Hymns of the Spirit service for communion, even though it was a joint Unitarian-Universalist production:

A Communion Service will be held in this Church at (stating the time). It is a service of commemoration, consecration and fellowship, open to all who desire to take part in it.

Interestingly, no such preface exists for the Communion service before the last solely Universalist hymnal, Hymns of the Church.

The Armenian genocide began in 1915, so in anticipation of the centennial, I’m reprinting this witness — towards the end of the genocide — from the April 15, 1922 issue of the Universalist Leader. (I’m not sure what else to call it but “witness,” and the people of 1921 don’t have the language we do to describe atrocities.)

This is a powerful prayer: learn from it. The references to orphanages demand research. There was a Sunday School fundraiser for a “Near East Appeal” and at least three congregations survive that gave then. Thanks and praise to the parishes in (West) Hartford, Connecticut; Franklin, Massachusetts; and Haverhill, Massachusetts.

There are other witnesses, and I will lift them up as I find them.

But was this a remote act of sympathy? Perhaps not so remote. If you are in Providence this General Assembly, be sure to tour First Universalist Church. It’s quite near the convention center and the minister — Scott Axford — is a friend; he plans on giving tours then. He once gave me a tour and pointed out the typically Armenian names on a memorial plaque, pointing to a lost and little-known Armenian chapter in our history.

A PRAYER FOR ARMENIA

Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us by Thy blood and made us unto our God kings and priests. (Rev. 5: 9-10). Having therefore boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus… Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. (Heb. 10: 19-22.)

ALMIGHTY God who by Thy grace hast not only called us out of darkness into light but hast called us into the Blessed Service of Intercession, we come to Thee with accord on behalf of the people of Armenia. We pray that Thou Thyself wilt undertake their cause, and with great might succor them. We remember the many thousands who, rather than deny Thy Name, have suffered torture and death, and we give Thee thanks for all who have by Thy grace endured and are now in Thy presence, and we ask Thee, for those who remain in the fiery trial of their prolonged agony, to stand by them and strengthen them and grant them a clearer vision of Thee and deliverance from their sufferings. Send them what they need for their material wants–protect the fatherless and widows–remember the orphans still without home or shelter.

Bless the children in the orphanages whom Thou hast committed to our care and those who are giving their lives to help and save them. We thank Thee for all Thy servants laboring for Thee, who have been true to Thy name. Strengthen and bless all by whatever name they are called, who contribute of their substance to feed the hungry and to provide shelter and care for the sick and the helpless.

Give wisdom to all who are seeking to help the Armenians in any way, whether spiritually, politically or materially, give courage and a spirit of responsibility to our statesmen, deliver our country and all who are called Christian from blood-guiltiness, through apathy or fear. Bless all who are serving Thee, and may all our service be lifted on to a higher plane of selflessness and sacrifice through the power of the Holy Spirit of him who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and give his life a ransom for many. In whose Name and through whose merits we offer our prayer and praises, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Adapted from the Armenian Liturgy.)

Even though we have data and options for forming new Unitarian Universalist churches, I didn’t present  “airdrops” nor “strawberry runner” models for serious consideration. I said the Fellowship Movement era was over without any desire to duplicate it.

The reality is that the Unitarian Universalist today have few resources for church planting : economic, appropriate talent, organizational culture. This may change, but we don’t have it right now.

One of the things we do have is a historic surplus of ministers, and an undersupply of parish ministries. Should we wonder when we see little, “emerging” congregations coalescing around a minister from day one? (Did you notice this in the recent UUWorld article about emerging congregations?) Planted not in the “ideal” place, but one chosen for personal reasons, or from necessity. This may very well become the model for today. Will we let them go it alone?

Unitarian Universalist blogger and minister Cynthia Landrum has responded to my earlier blog post about bivocational ministry.

We seem to agree on most things, not the least of which is the financial difficulty that can come with this model of ministry.

Her post is clearly the place to discuss this development in ministry in America, so do follow on there.

So, dear Unitarian Universalists: today is Palm Sunday and Passover starts tomorrow. You’re probably busy, so I’ll keep this brief.

Do we have a gospel? Not a bunch of gospels, or pieces that can be grouped into a gospel, but a story that makes it possible for a group of disparate persons into a particular people? I don’t think we do. I think we have a context for ministry, where we bring gospels, but I don’t think that’ll be sufficient for long-term survival. And so the people will perish.

We may be too big to share a gospel (from this point) and too small to re-organize around multiple centers.

An unhappy thought, but not having the though won’t save us. The comments are open.

Woof! woof! woof!

Daisy the Dog announced the delivery of three books from the UUA Bookstore, which I will read and comment upon as soon as practical.

• Ulbrich, Holley H. The Fellowship Movement: A Growth Strategy and Its Legacy. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, 2007.
• Hewitt, Erika A. The Shared Pulpit: A Sermon Seminar for Lay People. Skinner House Books, 2014. [Later. Created OpenLibrary listing and linked.]
• Tittle, Matthew and Gail Tittle, eds. Bless All Who Serve: Sources of Hope, Comfort and Faith for Military Personnel and Their Families. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, 2010.

This four-year-old comment (thanks, Derek) led me to revisit Stephen C. Compton’s 2003 Rekindling the Mainline: New Life Through New Churches (link for reference) to see what’s still applicable and what’s not. My (used) copy arrived today.

In the meantime, be sure to see my widget in the sidebar, which counts up the number of days since the last member congregation was added to the UUA. Alas, none are scheduled to join at the next UUA Board meeting, but Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Dawn Cooley points out a report (the report, in PDF) (thanks to her) to the UUA Board that recommends lowering the required quantum of thirty charter members for admission. Fascinating. I need to give it a close read — lots of references back to the UUA bylaws — and will report on that soon.

The 1922 “neighborhood of Boston” map I posted a couple of weeks ago, plus my own need for a visual reference for maybe one day visiting a UU Christian clergy meeting (how close churches are to T stops) and a curiosity to guess at what parts of metro Boston were underserved led me to knock this up.

Please note obvious errors.

I got so many nice comments from my post about not holding worship in the round, that I thought I’d press my luck by talking about how we decorate our worship space.

A few months ago I attended a worship service — not in a Unitarian Universalist church, if it matters — where the candles and flowers and paraphernalia of worship was made up of flower delivery cast-off vases, a hodgepodge of tea lights plus tatty papers and other assorted junk.

This wasn’t a poor congregation. They have full time staff, an old but large and attractive building and a prominent place in the community. And I remember thinking in the moment that this worship service was dragged down by the ticky-tacky.

Not that the congregation needed elaborate or expensive ornaments. But it should be fitting. And in a large building, large equipment is necessary. If the vases are donated, let them be large ones and few. A little taper on a candlestick is far more attractive than a mass of matches, barbecue lighters, or messy little tea lights. The readings that service leaders bring should be put into attractive if inexpensive folders, and not be seen as floppy bits of printed paper.

Less is more. And cleanliness is next to godliness.

And while you’re at it, revisit this video — a few years old and taggeted to an Evangelical audience, but still apt — about how your church may be perceived.

Finishing up a thought from last month. If you had to pick one part of the United States where — all else being equal — it would make sense to start a new church from scratch and with an external push (or airdrop) because there was relatively little support available nearby, where would you go? It would have to be sizeable city with no organized Unitarian Universalist presence.

I ran the numbers and one candidate rises above the rest: Lake Charles, Louisiana.

There are three small lay-led congregations — all organized in the Fellowship Movement era — within 100 miles. All together their membership is 40. The nearest residential parish minister is in Houston, Texas. And yet the Lake Charles metropolitan area boasts about 200,000 residents.

It’s a gap in the map. Just a thought.

Following on yesterday’s post, we can talk about the Fellowship Movement with either praise or scorn, but either way, it will not come back. We have to understand what it was, good and bad, before deciding what we want. (Or what some of us want: I’m not suggesting Unitarian Universalists need to act as a united front with one missions policy.)

So, we can have something today that draws upon the lessons of the Fellowship Movement, but it’ll come with its own rewards and challenges. We do not live in the demographic world of the 1940s to 1960s. Anything we learn from those days needs to be translated for today.

Let’s count out the obvious differences. Can you think of others?

1. We do not have a culture that defaults to church membership.
2. Indeed suspicion of religion is at all time high, and despite our rhetoric of how different we are, we are still a religious institution to anyone criticizes religion.
3. We don’t have a mass exodus to newly developed suburbs.
4. There are a few areas where there is no liberal religious congregation. (But many are underserved.)
5. We do not have a shortage of ministers.
6. Women, who more likely worked at home in the Fellowship Movement era, and so may have been available for the volunteer roles necessary to run fellowships, are now more likely to work out of the home.
7. Opportunities for social service in secular settings are more robust now they were in the Fellowship Movement era.
8. The Internet makes it easier to connect with communities of religious liberals without actually having to be physically present.

Here’s the word: Christians and the nameless group who appeal to accustomed polity standards (like plain congregationalism) not play-acting. We have something to say and something to offer.

I’ve been in this game for a long time now. And so it’s not hard to tell when I’m being sidelined or even gently insulted, although I didn’t understand this at first.

• Oh, you’re a nineteenth-century Universalist.
• I didn’t know there are any Christians left.
• That’s fine for traditionalists like you but what you suggest isn’t practical.

There’s the insinuation that anyone who’s a Christian is being obstinate, or that our presence is indulged as some sort of polite inheritance. The same goes for anyone who insists that the processes within our religious institution should be held to a higher standard of democratic and spiritual accountability, using historic models of how Unitarian and Universalists organize. What better way to sideline people than to tell them they don’t belong, or that they belong to another era.

There’s the cruel insinuation that our religious lives are some kind of live-action role playing (LARP) game and that the way we worship is more about re-enacting then having moments of profound spiritual joy or insight.

To me, the issues are fundamental. Does Unitarian Universalism include a assortment of customs and churchmanships (we need a new word for that) that can cooperate without trying to undo each other? Meaning that there needs to be room for each to grow. Unitarian Universalism is increasingly a brand name: a kind of politically-involved, community-focused, liberal eclecticism, within in the bounds of respectability.

Or are we just subject to the American fascination for the new? Unitarian Universalists have the uniquely unsavory prospect of outliving what they have come to know is good and true.

I bring this up now because I have been posting so much historical material lately. I don’t necessarily feel old works should be used as-is, but the tendency to write off any resource or development (except trust funds) that’s more than a few years old means that we don’t dwell with our ancestors long enough to learn from them. Would it hurt to try? We don’t get inside their heads to see what they valued and what they rejected; we don’t understad their process. And because we don’t understand well what made them tick, it’s hard to see the arc of Universalist or Unitarian culture, past individual personal preference. How we do what we do is not an accident, but in many cases an inheritance. (I’ll post a couple of examples of “living fossils” within Unitarian Universalism when I come across them again.)

And once we understand how our traditions evolved, it become easier to draw on old cultural resources, adapting them to our own time. This is a serious practical matter. We have a thinner corpus of go-to worship, education and (perhaps) administration resources than we did 25 years ago. Through the Internet, the cost of storage and “duplication” has dropped to nearly nil, so we should be awash in resources, but we aren’t. It makes sense to reuse and recycle; I suspect money’s going to get tighter in the next 25 years. Room for everyone, and resources for all.

Moving back another generation from the Lay Centers I wrote about last week.

A HUNDRED UNITARIAN SUNDAY CIRCLES

What is the next aggressive missionary movement for the Unitarians of this country to give their attention to? I believe it is the establishment of religious Sunday circles, or what I may call simple parlor churches, in a hundred–yes, in five hundred–communities where there are now no liberal religious churches or services.

Unitarian thought is making its appearance everywhere. Our books, tracts, and printed sermons are being widely circulated by means of our Post-Office Missions and other agencies. Science is our ally. The periodical press of the country is also our ally, powerful and everywhere present. So is the natural reason or common sense of men. Thus in nearly every community, whether of city or country, there are minds in essential sympathy with our religious views, some of them consciously so, some of them unconsciously, but none the less really. Cannot something be done to help these minds to discover themselves and one another, and to come into some sort of mutual relations? At present they are for the most part isolated. In a community where there are a dozen or twenty persons who, in their real thought, are liberal the probability is that hardly any two of the number know each other’s views. Such isolation is dreary and barren. Is there not some way of at least partially overcoming it, of bringing these vast numbers of scattered liberals into helpful touch with each other and with the organized liberal religious forces of the country?

When this question is proposed, of course we naturally, first of all begin to think about organizing churches. And in places where church organization is practicable, this is doubtless the true remedy for the evil of which we complain. But, unfortunately, in a very large proportion of the places a church is out of the question. The population of the place is too small, or the number of persons interested is not sufficient. Mistakes have often been made in starting churches without sufficient promise of subsequent support. Hence our large number of church organizations that have fallen into decay, some of them even after houses of worship have been erected. A wise missionary policy will push vigorously the organization of churches in large towns, and in places where there is good prospect of maintenance and strength, but not in other places or under other circumstances.

But are our small places and our communities where Unitarians are few to be left, then, with no associated religious life? It is here that the Sunday religious circle, or parlor church, finds its place. By these names I mean a very simple organization of the persons of liberal faith in any community, for the purpose of acquaintance, mutual sympathy, and encouragement, and to carry on together a regular religious service, of a simple and informal but helpful character, in some fitting place generally in the parlors of some of the persons interested.

Such organizations are not mere untried speculations. Already quite a large number are in existence in various parts of the country. And they are proving themselves practicable and valuable. It has been my own privilege to assist in setting in operation two or three during the past year. And within a month several other new ones in this State have come to my knowledge. The opportunities for this kind of work are practically limitless. There is hardly a town of a thousand population in the United States where there are not enough liberals to establish and carry on successfully such a movement. In great numbers of country neighborhoods, too, and in sections of cities remote from liberal churches, such movements are practicable.

Here is a work appealing to our ministers; for there are few ministers but have acquaintance with liberal persons in outlying neighborhoods who could be set to the task of rallying and organizing in this simple manner the liberal elements around them. Here is a most important field of activity for our Women’s Alliance and for all our Post-office Mission workers. The very wide spread distribution of our literature during the past dozen years through the agency of these missions has prepared the way in scores and scores of places for such organization as I am urging. Here is a work to which our American Unitarian Association superintendents may well give special encouragement in all parts of the country; for all sections–East, West, North, and South–are ripe for it. Especially may our Unitarian papers help greatly in this matter by clearly and repeatedly calling the attention of their readers in places where there are no liberal churches to the value of such Sunday religious circles, or parlor churches, and to the practicability of organizing them in hundreds of places where no step in this direction has yet taken.

How are such Sunday circles conducted?

In the simplest way. At a regular hour on Sunday, it may be the ordinary hour of morning service or it may be an afternoon hour, those interested come together at the home of one of their number (or other place appointed), have their cordial greetings as a company of friends, then in their simple service of singing or other music, brief Scripture or other devotional readings, the recitation together of Lord’s Prayer, and the reading of a sermon by one of the number. Then a closing hymn or other piece of music, a few minutes devoted to talk about the movement that all are interested in and how make it more successful and useful, then go home. This is the general plan.

There is no difficulty in getting of the very best quality to read, so volumes of sermons are published, and many sermons of our very ablest men constantly appearing in pamphlet form in the columns of our religious and papers.

Small singing and service books adapted for use in such Sunday circles also be obtained from the American Unitarian Association, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, or from the Western Unitarian School Society, 175 Dearborn Street, Chicago. The last-named society has a most admirable book prepared on purpose such meetings. It is called “Hymns and Services for Sunday Circles.” It contains eight “Responsive Services” (something which the people always like in such meetings), eight “Choral Responses” and a hundred choice hymns, set to the most familiar tunes. The cost of these books is only 15 cents apiece, or $1.50 per dozen, so that any circle can supply itself easily, as all circles should do (with this book or some other) at once on starting. There are also several other excellent books of services and hymns, a little larger and more expensive, sample copies of which can be obtained by writing to the addresses already given.

It is often perhaps generally found practicable to combine with the Sunday circle for adults a children’s circle, or children’s class, or parlor Sunday-school for the children. This feature is important, and should be added wherever it can be. No part of the education of a child is more important than its religious education. It becomes a very serious question therefore to Unitarian parents, living in places where there is no liberal church or Sunday-school, how to bring their children under such religious influences as they ought to be brought under, and to impart to them such religious instruction as they ought to receive. In this children’s side of the Sunday circle may be found the solution of this problem for thousands of parents.

A good plan is to have the children come for an hour either before or after the adult meeting. A study class or two for young people or for older adults may be carried on at the same hour with the children’s circle if this seems desirable. But let the children have a bright, happy, loving, earnest hour, which is distinctly their hour. We have most excellent singing and service books, and lesson helps and manuals of various kinds, well adapted for such children’s circles, which may be obtained from either Boston or Chicago. Even in cases where not more than half a dozen children can be brought together, such a little Sunday circle or class, in the charge of one or two loving and earnest women, may be made very valuable and successful. No community ought to be without such an opportunity for children of liberal parents to obtain rational and morally healthful religious instruction.

It will be found easy and useful in many cases to connect with the Sunday religious circle one or more of several auxiliaries besides the circle for children.

1. One of these possible auxiliaries is a fortnightly or monthly ladies’ meeting on a week afternoon for literary study and charity work.
2. Another is a literary class, or club, for the young people or for old and young, to meet regularly, more or less often on a week evening. The ladies meeting and the evening literary club may both be made so simple and elastic as to meet a large variety of needs.
3. With the Sunday circle may easily be connected also a small library of liberal books to be loaned to all who desire. Each family connected with the circle could probably without difficulty contribute a book or two to start the library. Then if a new book a month could be added, the library would be in condition to be very useful in the community.
4. One of the first outside things the Sunday circle should interest itself in is the very important matter of getting a liberal religious paper into as many of its homes as possible. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that if it can get a Unitarian periodical taken in each of its homes, it will by this one means alone double its coherency and practical working strength.
5. Let the Sunday circle make itself from the first a positive missionary force in the community through the steady and systematic circulation of liberal tracts and pamphlet literature. Such tracts can be obtained without cost from the American Unitarian Association. A quiet circulation of the same in the community year after year will produce wide spread and lasting results.
6. Finally, let the circle from the very first adopt the practice of each member giving to the cause, weekly or monthly according to his ability. This is important. The sums need not be large; but they should be regular and contributed as a matter of principle. Thus the circle will all the while be in possession of a small fund, which will add greatly to its stability, self-respect, usefulness and success. This fund may be used to buy singing and service books, new books for the library, sermons for reading on Sunday, meeting incidental expenses of any kind, and occasionally to pay the expense of getting the nearest liberal preacher to come and give a sermon or lecture.

As has been already said there are hundreds and hundreds of communities in this country where the conditions are ripe for the establishment and successful maintenance of such simple Unitarian movements as have been described above. Is not this the direction in which we may well undertake to make our next general missionary advance? Is it too much to believe that a united and earnest effort on the part of the readers of this article would give us a hundred new Sunday circles during the coming year? How a hundred such new centres of organic life and influence would strengthen the cause of liberal Christianity in this country! What new hope and courage would they kindle in our churches! And it should be borne in mind in estimating the value of these Sunday circles, that some of them will eventually develop into fully organized and equipped and self-supporting churches. And even those that never become churches will do a work as valuable in its place as that of organizations having the full church form and name.

J.T. SUNDERLAND
Ann Arbor, Mich.

https://archive.org/stream/unitarian05unkngoog#page/n129/mode/2up

A listing of the hymns in the Service and Hymn Book for the Unitarian League of Lay Centers, by incipit and by section. The hymns themselves are unnumbered; the number is the page. (Nearly all are one page long and no more than one hymn is on one page.)

I’ve also outlined the book’s liturgical offerings.

Invocation
61. Let the whole creation cry
62. Be thou, O God, exalted high!
63. Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
64. Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings
65. Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh
66. Sovereign and transforming grace
67. To thine eternal arms, O God
68. Father, again to Thy dear name we raise
69. We praise Thee, Lord, with earliest morning ray
70. Thou Lord of Hosts, whose guiding hand
71. Come, Thou Almighty King!
72. Thou, whose almighty word
73. O Thou who hast Thy servants taught
74. This is the day of light!
75. O God, whose presence glows in all
76. Gracious Spirit, Love devine
77. Out of the dark the circling fear
78. Father of me and all mankind
79. Shine on our souls, eternal God
80. Return, my soul, unto thy rest
81. Mysterious Presence, Source of all
82. By cool Siloam’s shady rill

Worship and Service
83. Nearer, my God, to Thee
85. Wenn Thy heart, with joy o’erflowing
86. Life of Ages, richly poured
87. Eternal and immortal King!
88. God is love; His mercy brightens
89. Lord of all being! throned afar
90. Father, in Thy mysterious presence kneeling
91. Send down Thy truth, O God!
92. O everlasting Light!
93. As pants the weary heart for cooling springs
94. Awake, our souls; away, our fears
95. O God, I thank Thee for each sight
96. Abide in me; o’ershadow by Thy love
97. O God, beneath Thy guiding hand
98. O Thou, whose perfect goodness crowns
99. Glorious things of Thee are spoken
100. O Thou, in whom we live and move
101. Our Father! while our hearts unlearn
102. Let my life be hid in Thee
103. O Love Divine, Whose constant beam
104. One holy Church of God appears
105. Wherever through the ages rise
106. The Lord is my Shepherd, no want shall I know
107. O Spirit of the living God
108. Father of eternal grace
109. Oh, sometimes gleams upon our sight
110. Spirit of grace and health and power
111. O Blessed life! the heart at rest
112. Awake, my soul; stretch every nerve

Christmas
113. Calm, on the listening ear of night
114. O Prophet souls of all the years
115. O Thou great Friend to all the sons of men

Evening
116. Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
117. Now, on land and sea descending
118. Abide with me! fast falls the eventide
119. Our day of praise is done
120. Softly now the light of day
121. Abide with me from morn till eve
122. Teach me, my God and King
123. Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing

After poking around the League of Lay Centers service book I wrote about yesterday, I discovered something about how is organized.

For one thing, it was not meant to be used by itself. The recommended order of service called for scriptural readings to come from a book called The Soul of the Bible. This was a lectionary in the true sense; that is, a book of readings, rather than a chart of readings. That deserves some investigation in its own right. Because the hymnal section has no printed music, an instrumentalist would need to use another Unitarian hymnal for the music. Recommended hymn tunes point to hymnals noted as “C & H” and “H & T.” Matching the citations, we see that these are

C & H: Hymns for Church and Home: with Tunes. (1895)
H & T: Hymn and Tune Book for the Church and the Home: And, Services for Congregational Worship (1896)

The former would have been more useful. Printed tracts or sermons, rather than original compositions, are likely the sermons intended, but those could be ordered for free from 25 Beacon Street. These resources in hand, let’s turn to the commended order of service.

Order of Service

1. Music — Instrumental or Vocal.
2. Responses Service from the Service and Hymn book.
3. Hymn.
4. Scripture reading from “The Soul of the Bible.”
5. Hymn.
6. Sermon.
7. Hymn.
8. Closing Formula Read by the Leader, or by the Leader and People in Unison.

As we now turn to the duties, to the joys and sorrows of this busy life, may the spirit of a brave confidence in God be our constant support and comfort, and the consciousness that we are doing His will guide us into to the way of sincere fellowship with one another, and along the path of perfect peace. Amen.

A hearty little order.

But what do you get in a Responsive Service? The first two options are stucturally similar, with a selection of opening words; an exhortation in the first option or the Lord’s Prayer in the second; and a substantial litany. The second option ends “Praise ye the Lord/The Lord’s name be praised.” Even without parsing the text closely, the first scans Classic Theist and the second Christian. The other Responsive Services are thematic and shorter: a substantial responsive reading and a prayer.

These services themes are

3. God Our Father
4. Man Our Brother
5. Jesus Our Leader
6. Character Our Salvation
7. Progress Our Destiny
8. Spring
9. Autumn
10. Worship
11. A Very Present Help in Trouble
12. Blessed Are They
13. Righteousness and Peace
14. A Service of Thanksgiving
15. Commemorative Service

A pretty Unitarian assortment, and you’d be forgiven if you looked for Boston Our Neighborhood. No sacraments, wedding or burial services — as one would expect for a lay service book — but no Christmas or Easter either. The selection of hymns is equally hard-wearing, grouped under the themes

• Invocation
• Worship and Service
• Christmas (3 hymns, but none we’d think of as Christmassy)
• Evening

Details about the services and hymns eventually. But I’ll look to the next Unitarian hymnal-prepended servicebook, Services for Congregational Worship (1914) for shared material.

This is that wonderful-terrible time of the year when many Unitarian Universalist congregations and community ministry settings announce (sole) candidates for called pastorates or hirings for assistant and non-pastoral positions.

So here’s a bit of the 1894 Universalist litany that speaks to this season. And spare a prayer for the search committees, applicants and pre-candidates (many of whom must necessarily be disappointed at some point) and the candidates.  I’m keeping a secret prayer for many of you.

Minister. We beseech thee, O Lord, that it may please thee to rule and guide and comfort thy holy Church universal; to bring into the way of truth all such as have erred and are deceived; to send laborers into thy vineyard, and to give saving power to the preaching of thy word;

People. We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Minister. That it may please thee to illumine all Ministers of the gospel and teachers of truth; and to give to them, and to the people committed to their charge, the needful spirit of thy grace, and to pour out upon them the continual dew of thy blessing;

People. We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Reading Bright Galaxy is making me re-visit the scattered history of earlier Unitarian efforts to organize lay-led congregations, including the League of Lay Centers. This was active, I believe, c. 1907-08.

[Correction: These were “Centers” and spelling changed;  but I believe there was another attempt with “Lay Centres”.]

February 1908 issue of Unitarian Word & Work outlines the program.

I got in the mail yesterday a little find: Service and Hymn Book for the Unitarian League of Lay Centers. It’s undated, and judging by the condition, never used. I hope to share as much of it as I can.

The forward follows:

Forward

The formation of a League of Lay Centers has grown out of a demand for a liberal interpretation of religion and for a simple form of worship in harmony with it, such as can be conducted without the expense and responsibility of the ordinary church organization. This Service and Hymn Book has been arranged to provide for services of worship under lay leadership. And while it is brief and free from liturgical complications, it is hoped that the responses, prayers, and hymns contain the strength, beauty, and dignity which will commend them to the uses of thoughtful and reverent worshippers. Familiarity is, however, the best avenue of attachment for such a book, and too much cannot be said in favor of making use of all the services and all the hymns.

The compiler take this opportunity to acknowledge his indebtedness to Reverend Thomas Van Ness for the service and psalm selections taken from his “Responsive Readings,” and for many of the prayers selected from the Collections of the Reverends George Dawson and R. Compton Jones.

L. G. W.

If you have not seen the April Fools Day issue of the spoof publication, The Beacon, go ahead and take a look at it now. And jump ahead to page eight which reprises the old complaint from Generation X that they — no, we — are ignored by a graphic juggernauts younger and older than we are.

I do think we need to be better self- and peer-advocates, and ask why there is so much long-term pessimism and distress among a generation that should be at the peak of its strength, and be recruited accordingly. And not just in the ministry by any stretch, but across culture.

But it’s also reasonable to sidestep authorities (personal and institutional) that don’t meet our needs and take some of that talent to bootstrap some solutions that value our leadership and ideals. Crowdfunding a project to employ some of that talent would be one idea. (I have my doubts about the UU crowdfunding platform, Faithify, to be introduced at General Assembly, but I’m glad to be proven wrong.)  Or speaking about economic distress from long first-person experience. Or planning intentionally for ministry that speaks more clearly from our experiences. Or realizing that there other dates in history besides 1968.

Nothing anyone should have to do without, even if people a few years either side of my age (44) have to ask louder and more constantly.

This link was slipped under my door, anonymously. Read it in good health. Happy holidays.

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2014/04/01/the-beacon-april-2014/the-beacon-april-2014.pdf

No April Fools, but an honest request. One of those resources that other communions have that we do not have is a comprehensive list of every Unitarian, Universalist and Unitarian Universalist church that has been: the living and the dead. At the very least it would help establish a frame for a missiological history and might surface some “hidden histories” that challenge received narratives, say, around the success or failure of the midcentury Fellowship movement. (Which the Universalists also had, with a non-competative arrangement  with the Unitarians, details to come. Or that gold mines, oil wells or a-bomb plants attract Unitarians.)

We can start with something easier? Say, all churches in existance in 1959 (to account for those that rejected consolidation and didn’t join the new UUA; another one of those histories) and onwards?

Small congregations, or small groups within congregations, have the tenacious habit of pulling a set of chairs into a circle for worship. The idea is that this is intimate, thus warm and friendly. Thus good.

But there’s another way of looking at worship in the round that argues against it.

1. The circle is invariably closed. It needs to be broken open to admit participants, which is awkward for newcomers or latecomers. It is fixed in size, meaning it literally must be deformed to accommodate more. Both requires the cooperation of others, who will be strangers if you are new. And draws attention.

2. If the service has one or two speakers, up to half of the group will get a rear or sharp side view, and most people will be twisted in their seats.

3. Not a problem for everyone, but you will watch people pray, or make an effort to not do so. And others will watch you. No room for a private thought, a private tear.

It’s worth remembering that newcomers may not be there too meet you in worship. Even for small groups, sitting in rows has its well-deserved place.

Religion and Ethics Newsweekly this week has a feature on bivocational ministry, something to which (in my opinion) Unitarian Universalists need to pay more respectful attention.

It’s been ages since I’ve seen Laile Bartlett’s Bright Galaxy: Ten Years of Unitarian Fellowships (1959) and I’ve never had one at hand long enough to read it closely. So I found a copy for sale online and it arrived a few days ago. It is still the definitive work on the Fellowship Movement, or at least the early phase.

I wondered what she thought the strengths and weaknesses of the fellowships were, and at least as importantly, what period Unitarian leaders thought they were doing. Why? Because even though it was an experience of rapid growth and geographic expansion, it’s hard to find someone in UUA officialdom that’ll call it a success or be willing to stake out a culturally-appropriate iteration of what “fellowships” can be. (Terminology seems to be part of the problem, thus the scare quotes.) But what we’re doing now isn’t working.

I’ll pull excerpts as appropriate.

And I’d never seen one with its dust jacket. See! Neuland!

A quick request — I’m moving to a theme of non-congregational support organizations — but is there anything remaining of the Unitarian Universalist Men’s Network.

The website (which is up) has no references past 2006 and nothing for certain past 2004. The domain is registered to an entity in Russia.

Please comment if you know anything.

Call it my late Cold War childhood, but I’ve always found the term comrade thrilling in a slightly transgressive way. Which make the Order of Universalist Comrades, a national men’s organization, so appealing. Appealing, but evidently short-lived.

Like similar women’s and mixed young adult organizations, its goal seems to have been fund raising and wholesome entertainment, in the mold of then-more common city clubs, and may have been an outgrowth of freestanding clubs.

But without documentation, it’s hard to say. Will keep an eye out for references.

And perhaps an opportunity to consider the next wave of men’s organizations.

The All-conquering Love logo, used by Universalists in the middle of the last century, has popped up on Facebook and drawn interest.

I used Inkscape to trace a vector image, peeled off the Universalist Church of America ring, and tidied up the lines a bit — and present it here.

As before, a PNG to use now, but the SVG (download) can be blown up to immense dimentions. Back tattoo? Billboard? Blimp decor?

I don’t agree with Unitarian Universalist blogger and minister Tom Schade on his call for a common UUA-wide CRM (customer relationship management) tool on practical grounds.

In short, I think it isn’t any real kind of reorganization, but rather he conflates a tool with a creative and productive culture, and so would disappoint those hoping for a meaningful solution to our lack of evangelization. Such a CRM would necessarily disappoint some people who might want to use it, and it’s implementation will take vast resources of time and money that would likely be used more productively in local activity.

That’s the short version of my objection. I worried that I have written for too long and too much. I may add another post if it is needed.

The suggestion that technology is itself an organizational change misunderstands the relationship between technology and its user. The old saying “use the right tool for the job” implies you know what the job is, and I think Unitarian Universalists have too little practical experience with evangelism to make adequate use of this or any tool. A vision comes before planning, which comes before provisioning. (And, besides, if one’s going to claim that this was the most important changing polity-tool in a hundred years, other more radical but simple technologies, like the mimeograph or telephone would make a better case.)

I’m concerned that there will be fond interest, born out of desperation, and that the investment of thought, labor and money that might be better used building skills or developing an evangelism strategy will be frittered away in an experiment which would bear nothing like its promises in a few years’ time. (Programatically, the UUA seems a shadow of itself ten or twenty years ago.) The promises will then changed to fit the new reality, but the bills will keep coming at the old rate. And the feeling that the UUA is in a death spiral increases.

I’m glad to see some commentators at Tom’s blog mention privacy. Securing the amount of data his idea suggests takes professional help, and such a CRM will certainly be white-labeled. No complaint there, if you trust the expertise of your suppliers. But we are talking about literally thousands of data users and suppliers… Pretty easy to make an error in permissions or judgment. And more than that: consider privileged information, say between pastor and parishioner, or among staff. Or on a pledge committee. Would you want everything on a common, cloud-based, UUA-managed CRM. I wouldn’t; I bet  many others wouldn’t either, which invites a database fragmentation within a congregation. That limits its utility. And that’s not even considering that personal privacy concerns of people who never signed up for a religious community that collects such a large volume of data centrally.

And how many UUA-member congregations have to not participate — after all, guessing by the UUA ChurchMgmtSoftware mailing list  traffic, many already have their own CRM and others way simply be suspicious of the quality of service — before its utility as an association-wide tool is compromized? But say your congregation has opted it: what do you get?  The creation of CRM suggests use cases which conditions what kind of information is gathered, by whom, and how often and to what detail. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, which means that a common CRM is going to fit much better for some congregations than others. And I suspect the use-case in mind will be large congregations rather than small ones. Meaning that the small congregations, the ones least likely to adopt their own CRM, would be the ones least well served by a common UUA CRM.  Once you’re in, you’re locked in, and that changes the power relationship between congregations and the UUA.  Central databases are meant to be used for coordinated efforts. What’s to keep a development officer for the Friends of the UUA (or what-have-you) from running reports on your big donors for central development purposes? Is that really wrong? But is that really what a congregation agrees to?

And I haven’t gotten to the polity considerations, service quality, ongoing cost (including staff time in Boston and at home) or real or perceived overreach.

So we have a good, well-intentioned thought that needs the clear eye of review. Plainly, though, there are so many other programmatic and policy changes that would do more good with fewer resources that I think there’s little to debate.

I’ve written before how state adoption of the Revised Uniform Unincorporated Nonprofit Association Act — look; RUUNA, a UU acronym with no Unitarian Universalist reference — can make church organization easier and polity more organic, rather than always borrowing the idiom of corporations or trusts.

It is being considered this year/session in two states: South Carolina (S 552) and Oklahoma (HB 1996).

(Links are to the Sunlight Foundation’s Open States project. I work for the Sunlight Foundation, but these opinions are mine alone.)

Having goals, and a way to measure progress towards those goals, can help you know if you are doing the right right things that point you in the direction you desire. Simple in concept and, I hope, uncontroversial.

I will be writing soon about UUA metrics, but I have no fantasy that that subject is uncontroversial.

But it’s not all about numbers or charts. I hurt my back a couple of months ago, and my orthopedist challenged me to create metrics through a narrative of my recovery. It’s helped me put the slow improvements and little setbacks into a larger context, and it’s better that the conventional narrative: “Turn forty and begin to fall apart.”

But sometimes numbers and narrative work together and for this reason I’m putting together some 2014-15 metrics around my cultural resource goals.

So, what do you have to have to apply for congregational membership? There can be other requirements like corporate status, acknowleging jurisdiction, a financial contribution and a provision for dissolution, but those are standard and one-off.

This was in my to-blog list, but the UUWorld article, “Emerging, alternative groups at UUA’s growing edge” (Donald E. Skinner) brought it to the fore. Perhaps it’s time for a larger/smaller standard for congregations again?

Current standards

Australian and New Zealand Unitarian Association. Membership “shall be made in accordance with the procedure decided by a meeting of the Association voting on a recommendation of the Executive.” (PDF)

Canadian Unitarian Council. No stated minimum membership or number of services, for “member societies” to join, though the Council could make rule, per the By-laws.

General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.

“A congregation must have at least 12 subscribing members over the age of 18 years, and must have existed for regular worship for not less than one year.” (Bylaw 2.1.2) (PDF)

“Meetings for a religious purpose must be held at least once a month.” (Bylaw 2.1.5)

“Small congregations” without a General Assembly vote “…shall be given recognition provided that they shall have been meeting regularly for 6 months. They shall be admitted on the recommendation of the district association if they comply with the above conditions for Congregations except that the number of subscribing adults shall be reduced to 8 and the requirement for meeting shall be amended from ‘at least once a month’ to read ‘at least bi-monthly’” (Bylaw 2.2)

Unitarian Universalist Association.

“A new congregation, to be recognized as a member of the Association, must have thirty (30) of its adult members be members solely of the new congregation.” (Rule 3.3.3)

“For purposes of determining compliance with Section C-3.5 of the Bylaws, a member congregation shall be deemed to have conducted ‘regular religious services’ if it has held at least 10 services during the fiscal year.” (Rule 3.5.1)

Historic standards

Unitarian Fellowships and Churches (1954, 1955)

“A Fellowship may be recognized when it has ten resident adult members and meets the other qualifications for membership in the Association.”

“A church may be recognized when there is a charter membership roll representing sixty-five or more resident, contributing families and when the regional and continental officers concerned are convinced that the community is large enough to assure very substantial future growth…”

“A church may be recognized when it does not seek financial assistance[,] whenever it has 65 resident member families, … when it can support a full-time resident minister at a salary comparable to other new churches and meets other qualifications for membership in the Association.”

“General Policy of the Admission of New Churches and Fellowships” (February 9, 1955)

Universalist Fellowships (1957)

N.B. As distinguished from parishes and churches, but dirffering more in degree than kind; indeed, a fellowship could also be a parish. But I suspect the distinction was to give a parallel structure to the far more numerous Unitarian fellowships in the years leading to the then-all-but-certain consolidation.

“ten or more who come together for public meetings of a religious nature…” (Article XIII, 7, Bylaws)

Fellowship (the status) could be withdrawn from a fellowship (the organization)  “for having less than ten persons of 21 years of age or older, resident and contributing to the support of the fellowship” and “for failing to support no less than eight public worship services annually.” (Article IV, 1, iii, Laws of Fellowship)

I was getting to the Universalist Church globe logo — quite a creature unlike others we’ve seen — from the 1950s, just before consolidation with the Unitarians. But if you’ve got the cash, you can get an original street sign on eBay.

I wonder what church it pointed to?

From the October 20, 1921 issue of the Unitarian Register.

The map is familiar; the idea of a program launching after a 90 minute meeting is pheonomenal. But why should it be so? What might a group of people, meeting over a long lunch say, accomplish or at least propose?

The Boston Circle

The twenty five mile circle drawn around the Boston State House contains two elements of profound significance: first, it has the largest permanent population of any similar district in the States; second, it has more Unitarian churches than any similar area in world. What is the obligation of churches to this population?

To answer that question the ministers of the twenty five mile circle were called together May 25. After an hour of discussion it was voted that the chairman, Rev. Eugene R Shippen appoint a committee of seven to promote an intensive membership campaign…

When the new UUA logo came out recently, quite a few people (myself included) japed about it on Facebook and mused about the past logos, some quite old. I noted the Universalist “Christ Will Conquer” seal and the off-center cross.

But dang if, in my research at Harvard-Andover Theological Library, I didn’t find a missing link graphically between the two. It should be noted that I have found no official adoption for any of these logos, but it’s not the sort of thing that’s voted upon, so I suppose the most we’re ever likely to find (if anyone looks) is a launch notice, and probably not even that. We live in a branded age today, and I suspect these earlier “logos” were originally corporate seals (as we’ll see evidence below) that later took on an “inked” existance, much as the flaming chalice started on letterhead.

So let me introduce the “All Conquering Love” seal.

I’m guessing that it did not predate 1935, when the Washington Avowal was adopted by the Universalist General Convention (UGC) at the still-swank Mayflower Hotel, a short walk from my day job office and a lovely place for drinks.

The version of the image here is from the cover of the 1946 edition of the Laws of Fellowship, and in this context I wonder if its release was associated with the UGC’s 1942/43 re-conception as the Universalist Church of America.

The whole Washington Declaration text is a historical layer cake, and its use was to define the terms of fellowship between the General Convention, the state conventions, the churches and parishes and the members of the ministerial college. The Avowal is its core, with the text in bold type being the part best remembered:

The bond of fellowship in this Convention (church) shall be a common purpose to do the will of God as Jesus revealed it and to co-operate in establishing the kingdom for which he lived and died.

To that end, we avow our faith in God as Eternal and All-conquering Love, in the spiritual leadership of Jesus, in the supreme worth of every human personality, in the authority of truth known or to be known, and in the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God. Neither this nor any other statement shall be imposed as a creedal test, provided that the faith thus indicated be professed.

And while you can draw a straight line from “the supreme worth of every human personality” through “to affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality” (from the 1961 Principles) to “inherent worth and dignity of every person” I think that image of God being Eternal and All-conquering Love is far more evocative, even thrilling.

Back to the idea that it was a seal: well, I found two cases (1958 and 1960) of the UCA corporate seal with this design, the rings simplified. Here is the easier-to-read 1960 version: a level of officialdom the off-center cross could not claim. (I did see it on the letterhead of the Illinois state convention; Clinton Lee Scott’s influence from his Peoria pastorate?)

I’ve recycled my liberalchristian.net domain to a fresh (hours old!) WordPress install, to serve as a church website for an imaginary church.

I want to invite three or four people, particularly those with church responsibilities and few local resources, to walk through the process of (modestly) customizing and managing such a site.

My added goal is to learn what’s the most needed; I hope to do a training off-schedule in Providence during General Assembly.

If you’re interested, leave me a note in the comments below, with your time zone and any particular goals. Please reply by Tuesday, March 25, 2014.

Holy and eternal Spirit, source of life and light, thou art our helper in every need, thou fulfillest all our joy. Be thou this day the present help of all who turn to thee, here and everywhere, whether hurt or ashamed, whether sick or disheartened. And when we are strong, be thou a light beyond our present thoughts and pleasures, to guide us into ways of larger right and nobler blessedness. Amen.

Von Ogden Vogt

This is the first part of a (surely long and rambling) series on findings from Universalist records at Harvard Divinity School’s library archives.  My thanks to Fran O’Donnell and Jessica Suarez of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library for making my visit possible. I love combing through these Hollinger boxes. Evidence of Yankee thrift abounds. Serious business — which today would be shipped by courier or with tracking numbers, or protected with encryption — went by typed postcard. But one of their habits — one I share — revealed some glorious relics. Make old print jobs into scrap paper; the other side has a use you know. So mundane memos preserve scraps of design choices. Here are a couple I caught.

With due respect to the designer of the off-center cross here, this one — with thinner lines and a smaller cross; I made it about as high as the circle radius — looks more like the ones I’ve seen used by mid-century post-Christian Universalists. Its later, and I think unintentionally ironic, adoption by Christians notwithstanding.

For Universalist Christianity, I’d suggest an anchor or heralding angel as more appropriate, but that’s for later.

In the spirit of the original, I also dedicate these graphic files to the public domain.

The public domain declaration applies to the ready-to-use PNG and the better-for-making-derivative works SVG, downloadable below.

To the extent possible under law, Scott Wells has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to off-center-cross_thinner-10px_cross-radius_300px.png. This work is published from: United States.

To the extent possible under law, Scott Wells has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to off-center-cross_thinner-10px_cross-radius.svg. This work is published from: United States.

Fred Phelps, an infamous hatemonger under the cover of a pastor’s call, died today. I won’t weep for him, or pretend to. I won’t yell or call for pickets in retribution. I endorse the “stay cool” platform floated on the web, if not the “ignore him” plank.

We can’t afford to ignore what he and his clan did, not least of which is the harm inflicted on other generations of the Phelps family. But even as the hurt lingers, and there are many who have been hurt deeply and personally by his actions, let’s remember that his life — and his ability to cause further harm — is over.

Let’s also remember and praise the creative responses that many people — some strangers to his targets — developed, and acknowledge (if not be grateful) that his indecent targeting demonstrated that many more of us were “decent” and worthy of care than if a respectable and cool-headed judge decided to separate the sheep and goats. His outrageousness was his own undoing, and a warning about simmering and violent hatred that has a better public face and smoother voice.

And let’s not make him better in death than he was in life, nor overstate his shadowy, late-in-life apotheosis suggested in news accounts. He set himself up consciously to be my enemy, and perhaps yours. But Jesus taught us to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors. This reminds us, and is our testimony before God, that we regard Fred Phelps as human and not a monster. Redeemable, if not in this world then the next. And if he could not change, others still might. He, too, is more like the rest of us than not, and if we regard him as monster only, we will be unable to minister to those who have been hurt by his cruel hate, or those trying to flee it.

I have no answer why he hated with such a perfect hate, but the reason is less important than making clear to the living that we need not live like that, that we need not be silent before it or that he did not represent what faithful people are.

So, if you think the best option for developing an unreached area is to plant an initially-subordinate extension from a large, existing congregation, you will want some place that’s

• got its own commerical (for space rental) and community focus
• yet is close enough for church staff and volunteers to support it, but
• far enough away that saying “come to us” expects a very high level of commitment

Using (now 14+ year old) commuting zone data, to obvious place to center new activity is south and north of Charlotte, North Carolina. (New data, using the successor to the commuting zone, is due out next month.)

Specifically, York County, South Carolina. With an estimated population af 234,635 in 2012, the county serves as a bedroom community to Charlotte. It has been growing fast: up from 85,216 in 1970. At 27 miles, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte is nearest congregation York County’s largest city, Rock Hill. (All milages from city hall.)

View Larger Map

I was going to refer back to my micropolitan survey that suggested Salisbury and Lexington, North Carolina were ideal places to launch a new church, using a similar analysis, but lo and behold, the Piedmont Unitarian Universalist Church, Charlotte has since opened a branch “gathering” (their term) in Salisbury.

So I feel vindicated. York County, anyone?

Mt. Auburn Cemetery is well known as the nation’s first “garden cemetery” which, though now the norm, contrasted with the gloomy church yard or burial ground. But Mt. Auburn does it better than any I’ve seen and there lies the mortal remains of many a famous Universalist and Unitarian.

I joined dear friends, also Unitarian Universalist ministers, Hank Peirce and Adam Tierney-Eliot, there on March 17 to visit a just a couple of luminaries and brave the late-winter ice.

Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Tom Schade reflects on his recent experience at a technological conference and suggests congregations use a CRM: an acronym with so many variant renderings that I created my own. And while I disagree with some of his suggestions, principly aboung changing our structures because it’s complex and expensive, his first thought is sound; that is, we need something other than a binary member-nonmember frame, we need to identify stages of affiliation, and we need systems to support this.

Fortunately, we have structures in our heritage and in parallel organizations to concieve this, and I have written about it here.

• Full text of “Parish Practice in Universalist Churches” (Pages 121 ff., for how it was done a half-century ago. Easy to imagine in spreadsheet form. And I bet it’s more that some churches do today.)
• Questioning the high-commitment church membership
• Three cheers for clear membership expectations

On “adherents”

• Christian Century on membership
• Terms as the United Church of Canada defines them (Fun fact: the framers of the UUA consolidation looked to the United Church of Canada for background research.)
• Terms as the Uniting Church of Australia defines them
• Those United, Uniting polity statements

I thought I had written about the Universalist way of distinguishing members from affiliates but I’m not finding it if I have.

As for a CRM, a typical Unitarian Universalist congregation is likely to have dozens or low-hundreds of members or members in process, and hundreds of contacts. Perhaps low-thousands. But not tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of persons that make complex, commercial systems worth their cost and trouble. There are more useful, better-scaled options, and a very small congregation might use (or at least start with) an old-fashioned paper system.

I’ll be examining this need in future weeks. As Jesus said: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” Too much tech makes the user its servant.

I took this picture of 24 Farnsworth, the future home of the  UUA, yesterday after arriving at Boston South Station. A former industrial area, reminds me a bit of lower Georgetown,  in the District of Columbia. More food options nearby than 25 Beacon, too.

Last time –and this was a while back — I talked about commuting zones was using them as a proxy for communities where a new Unitarian Universalist church could rise up. I have to admit I was wondering if I was being naive by drawing this conclusion. After all I don’t have any sociological, mapping or civic engineering experience. But once around the numbers, some of the gaps in the Unitarian Universalist map became perfectly clear and when I tested my findings against the UUA congregation locator map, I felt my process was valid. (If this post gets significant traffic, I’ll write about the process.)

Looking at the gaps, there are two ways you could read them to see where a new congregation could be planted. On the one hand, it makes sense to reach to the nearest unserved zone: a place where a large existing congregation might put a satellite. On the other hand, it might make sense to stage concerted effort to reach a large area with no nearby Unitarian Universalist presence.

Let’s call these the strawberry runner and airdrop methods respectively. This week, I’ll look into each.

I’m taking the train to Boston tomorrow in anticipation of the installation of close friend and colleague Victoria Weinstein (whom you may also know from her blog persona) as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn, Swampscott, Massachusetts.

I like trains because I can rest, read, listen to music and write with less-than-usual distraction. I’ll be planning my blogging, and writing some evergreen posts. I’ll test out my phone, and the limits of mobile devices in anticipation of General Assembly.

And I’ll take requests. Are there subjects you’d like me to explore here? I’m here for you.

The simplest definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ. This was his own definition: “My sheep hear my voice, and follow me.” “I am the way and the truth and the life.” “Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden.” When Mary sat at the feet of Jesus, and heard his words, he said that she had chosen the good part, and had done the one thing needful.

James Freeman Clarke, “The Five Points of Calvinism and the Five Points of the New Theology” in Vexed Questions in Theology: A Series of Essays (1886)

So I stumbled across a new, handy, location-aware flight planning tool on Google. And so continues my love-hate relationship with Big G.

Click this — you should get prices for flights to General Assembly

https://www.google.com/flights/#search;t=PVD;d=2014-06-25;r=2014-06-29;ti=t0000-1100,t1700-2400;mc=m

I would appreciate you telling me what you actually get.

After the call for tools, what can you get today?

Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation — their office is halfway between old 25 and new 24 — is

means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”.

Open-source software is software which has code you can review; no hidden “black box” blobs. These aren’t the same thing, even though one often defends the other, and one kind of software is often the other. (But some defenders of one camp will also pick apart the other with a zeal that might be called religious. We won’t be getting into that here.)

In any case, both free and open-source software (together, FOSS) have defined meanings and a set of defined obligations though a family of licenses, the ramifications of which are not particularly clear to newcomers, thus I am suspicious when a non-software project is described as “free and open source” as fuzzy branding and jargon.

Here are the tools.

• Firefox. Yes, the browser. You may be using it already, and it has developer tools and add-ons (not necessarily FOSS) I use. 
• LibreOffice. Word processing, spreadsheet, presentation (a la Power Point) and other tools. Makes PDFs natively. I use it daily at work and home. A fork (offhoot project) of OpenOffice.org; the development community seems to have sided with it.
• VLC Media Player. Plays just about anything you can throw at it, including streams and converts between formats.
• Inkscape. A vector graphics editor, analogous to Adobe Illustrator. It’s what I’ve used to make the flaming nectarine, the double rings and other oddments.
  
• KeePassX. Password creator and manager. Can’t live without it.
• Brackets. An HTML editor, in rapid development. I’ve not created any sites with it — I don’t write sites from scratch anymore — but I have been noodling with it, and looks promising. A proper review when I use it more.

What’s needed across platforms? (Please comment if you know one that’s cross-platform and free and open-source.)

• PDF reader (though there’s a plugin for Firefox)
• a good low-distraction text editor (like iA for Mac; I use UberWriter)
• FTP client (though there’s a plugin for Firefox) Filezilla, see comments.
• color themer (can use certain web services)
• photo manager
• score editor (for that new hymnal)

It’s not enough for some of us to sprinkle a handful of digital resources into liberally-licensed common use. I think we should be more demanding about the kind of tools we use to wake them: software that is free to use, free to share and (if we have the skill) free to build upon. Our output should be in formats unencumbered by patents; we need te free to open our files in the future.

This kind of freedom is often expressed as term like “free as in freedom” but they are also usually free of charge. This allows us to experiment with no added financial risk: no small thing.

And it’s not a pipe-dream. I’ve used Linux on the desktop at home and work for almost a decade. But I know the Linux market-share is still pretty small, so I intend to point out tools that are available for Linux (so I can test them) and at least Windows or Mac, but preferably both. (And considering that the still-popular Windows XP is coming to its end of life in April, considering a Linux future for those machines will keep them useful and out of landfills. Like in China. Or Germany.)

I’ll be writing about these tools in the future. But the Hungarian-Transylvanian Unitarians do this today.

Thanks to Stefan Jonasson I learned that today is the 200th birthday of Ukrainian national hero and poet Taras Shevchenko. Since I live very close to the Shevchenko memorial here in Washington D.C. I took our dog Daisy for her morning walk to visit the memorial.

After all, the Ukraine is much on our minds now.

We followed up with a visit to the Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk memorial around the corner, whose birthday was March 8. Masaryk was the first president of Czechoslovakia; he was also a religious reformer, ending up as much a Unitarian as Jefferson, no doubt in part to the influence of his American Unitarian wife, Charlotte Garrigue.

(I’ll be writing more about what makes successful floral tributes closer to Memorial Day.)

This is Daisy: it’s not her birthday today, but she is going to go to the groomer.

Later. The goomer did quite a job, but where’s the rest of my dog?

Even though you occasionally hear about Unitarian or Universalist preachers using a lectionary — indeed, a handful of churches have a well-established lectionary tradition — most UU preaching is topical, with the sermon and other observances hanging off of a holiday. If there is one to be had. Otherwise it’s Preacher’s Choice: which can be magical from a great pulpiteer, but too often the effect is uneven or eccentric.

In which case, it makes sense to rehabilitate the observances commended by the Universalist General Convention generations ago. In any case, it provides an excuse to put an idea on the calendar, and that can be one less blessed thing to think about.

Links refer to prior blog posts on the subject; for Japan Sunday, you might read ICUU or IARF. Presented here are set opportunities for new member welcome or recognition; religious education; child dedication or baptism; remembering the dead in our circles from the last year; the common origins and destiny of humanity; our foreign work; and (well) Christmas.

The observances:

• Easter Sunday: a Service of Recognition be held, “at which time persons baptized in childhood, and others, may be welcomed by suitable rites to membership of the Church.”
• Educational Sunday: the third Sunday of May,  “for the presentation to the people of the educational interests of our Church…”
• Children’s Sunday: the second Sunday in June, “that parents and guardians be encouraged and invited to bring their children to the altar on that day for baptism or dedication to the service of the Lord.”
• Memorial Sunday: the first Sunday of October, “for commemorating those friends who, during the year, have been taken away by death.”
• All-Souls Sunday: the first Sunday of November, “for a special celebration of our distinguishing doctrine, the Scriptural truth that all souls are God’s children, and that finally, by His grace attending them, they will all be saved from the power of sin, and will live and reign with Him forever in holiness and happiness.”
• Japan Sunday: the fourth Sunday in November, “for the presentation of the claims of our Foreign Work and for soliciting pecuniary aid therefor.”
• Christmas Sunday: Sunday nearest Christmas, be “observed by appropriate services”

Dear readers: A bleg: blog beg. Any ideas for an inexpensive guest house or hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard or Mt. Auburn Cemetery?

I have a day coming where I can look some things up in the Universalist archives, and visit the graves of Hosea Ballou and John Murray. One to satisfy some questions (for later blogging) and the other as a pilgrimage.

No democracy can be real which shuts out half the people. Women should therefore have equal economic, social and political rights with men.

A Declaration of Social Principles (1917)

This is blog post #3,500; I’ve been writing over almost eleven years. I thought worthwhile to talk about how I blog now.

1. I try to keep several blog posts written and scheduled for publication. Right now my goal is six scheduled posts at any given time. Just because I try to publish something every day, it doesn’t mean I write something new every day.
2. I treat the week as the basic measure of time. I tend to post heavy or controversial works early in the week. I post follow-up or supporting information mid week. And lighter items, including quotations and happy thoughts later in the week.
3. I publish scheduled items at 7:00 a.m. Eastern time (sometimes later on the weekend) to be fresh for morning and lunch readers.
4. If I’m included the UUWorld.org blog round up (hi Heather Christensen!), I usually get a bump in traffic over the weekend so I’m not prone to start a heavy new subject.
5. Controversial items do bring traffic, but I won’t bait readers by saying something I can’t defend. (That doesn’t mean I’ll open debates, though. They’re rarely productive.)
6. Theological topics, I’ve learned, take tons of time to do correctly and get little attention.
7. If you want me to write on a subject, or focus on a theme, comment. I try to respond to commentators’ requests and interests.
8. I tend to blog one or two overlapping themes.
9. I block out text-heavy blog posts, this one included, using my phone to dictate through the WordPress phone app. I copy edit and add links later. Saves the wrists, you know.
10. I promote the more substantial blog posts and resources on Facebook and Twitter.
11. I do have an editorial style, though so far unwritten. (No, I won’t refer to you by “the Rev.” but I will refer to you as a minister on first reference if it’s applicable, for instance.)
12. Growing edge? More images and charts.

This is a continuation of the thread on the history of membership in Unitarian and Universalist congregations.

I know the very idea of a fundraising canvass will send many of you into a fit of groaning. But the approach to funding, also known as the voluntary system, is a huge improvement over what came before it: the pew-rent system.

By this I mean raising money for building a meetinghouse and sustaining a minister by selling or renting seats or pews. You can see vestiges in older churches, in the form of engraved plates with names of people long dead. Owned pews were property: they could be inherited or sold. Their use was restricted by their owners, and status-seeking persons could show their social station though high-priced seats up front. Additionally, they could be used as collateral in securing debt. Pew owners, very often hereditary and with no particular interest in a congregation, had been known to sell out meeting house for profit.

The pew-rent system made theological orthodoxy nearly impossible to enforce, even as it reinforced class structures. Thomas Whittemore, in his 1840 The Plain Guide to Universalism, cautions societies to maintain the twinned church–a community of professing believers– with the religious society because

In some cases, especially in Boston, it is impossible to guard the society against the admission of members, whatever their religious opinions may be. For what is a religious society in Boston? It is the proprietors of the meeting-house, the owners of the pews therein. These pews may be transferred from one to another, at the will of the owners; and the purchaser has the full and legal right to attend all the proprietors’ meetings, and vote in all concerns of the corporation, whether he be Christian, Jew, Mahometan, or heathen. The whole business is in the hands of the proprietors of pews, and we suppose, of right, ought to be, not excepting the selection and settlement of the pastor.

But as with other calls to reform, the weight was with the status quo: a practical source for liberality or practical plurality?

But times changed. James Freeman Clarke was the Unitarian first-mover when, also in 1840, he opened in Boston the Church of the Disciples on a “free seat” (voluntary donation) basis. While Universalists came down on both sides of the religious freedom this system brought, its unworkability with its final downfall across all confessions. It was unfair and discouraging to new would-be members. The occasional provision of free seats (in undesirable places) underscored the problem. It set the building up for speculation, and building bubbles bankrupted not a few congregations. And while the idea of collecting rent seems simple enough, there were also complaints that it was impossible to extract them–particularly from absentee landlords–and so money was tight. By the time in 1922, the Christian Register (May 4) published it survey of more than 200 Unitarian parishes, none had anything good to say about the pew ownership or rental, or any number of hybrid variant, systems. The voluntary system was modern, ascendant and lucrative. “Free seats” made better financial sense. Churches in the easy-going West were most likely to use the voluntary system, and churches in New England, where the practice continued the longest, were willing to try something new.

Of course, the pew-rent problem would have solved itself in time. There are usually too few attenders rather than too few pews. Amplification has made more of the meetinghouse accessible to more people. And how many times have the few first pews of a church been taking up–prime real estate–in order to make room for a piano or some other liturgical change? New occasions teach new duties.

All of this goes into our understanding of the running of a religious society; that financial responsibility, however structured, is a valid, perhaps even critical requirement, for full participation.

Ways of organizing churches, including how membership is accorded, come and go. It might surprise my long-time readers to hear that I’m not particularly taken with any given model. (I may have radical views about the relationship between the church and society, but these remain to be revealed.) All I care about is that membership standards are made deliberately, fairly, and with the goal of healthy institutions. Since unintended results may come out of good planning, there must also be a mechanism for adjustment, for the sake of equity.

But what we have is better than what we had, and to God be the glory.

Well, my post (“What is it we become a member of?“) seems to have stirred the Walled Internet. Where do you go to know what our Universalist or Unitarian forebears thought membership meant? So long as you don’t confuse the concepts of parish, society and church, you can look to a large, if disjointed, number of resources. And the idea of a meetinghouse being an entity, through trustees, in its own right. I do not intend to exhaust this thought here.

First, I’d look to service books and ministers’ manuals, common after the first third of the nineteenth century. Look for services of opening churches and confirmation, which often includes language about membership. Also, Universalists published meaty apologetic works that often had a polity chapter, so you’d have all you need to start a church. Don’t skip the introductions. Look for model bylaws and constitutions, especially among the Universalists; these are easier to find than the local bylaws, but some can be had. Not just for the church and the parish, but for the (after the 1890s) the recommended unified church-parish. And for the state conventions, and how the concepts of fellowship, obeying laws and assented belief have parallels at the local level. Look to the Universalist professions of faith without knee-jerk anti-credalism, such as the 1899 “Five Principles” which begin “conditions of fellowship in this Convention shall be as follows…”

Look to what made certain churches and leaders exceptions, so as to see the rule. The preface of the King’s Chapel prayerbook is, among other things, an ecclesiological document. Investigate James Freeman Clarke‘s Church of the Disciples (I’ll come back to him) and the institutionalism of Universalist Elbridge Gerry Brooks’s “new departure.”

Consider that the law itself has shaped our ecclesiology, even if we don’t talk about it past the Cambridge Platform. There’s the ad-hoc and minimalistic ecclesiology of first generation Universalists. The Dedham Decision, naturally. But also laws that forbade religious congregations from incorporating early on; what was their alternative? (Virginia was the last (PDF) give this up, in 2002.) And the very idea of tax exemption…

There’s more, but that’s enough to digest now.

The General Assembly housing site opened today I was curious to see how much rooms would cost in Providence for General Assembly. (Not for myself: I’m staying with friends.) The city is rather thin for hotels, and when (in my day job) I sent people there, I thought the price was high.

But every room for the days of General Assembly (GA) proper were full. How? Ah.

Hotel rooms for General Assembly are currently sold out. Due to unforeseen circumstances, two hotels originally contracted (Renaissance and Hilton) are now involved in labor disputes. We terminated our contracts with these properties as the UUA supports fair labor practices. Dormitory style housing is still available at Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University click here. We are working to secure additional hotels in surrounding communities and will post as they become available. Be advised that housing is fluid, so please check back on a regular basis to see if rooms have become available.

As if the trouble with Phoenix GA hotels wasn’t heartburn inducing enough.

I feel bad for the GA office, but the policy is correct. If you had to make a short list of people whose well-being could be improved by ethical spending, hotel workers would be high on the list and they deserve our support.

This puts financially strapped attendees in a bind: do you go to the rejected hotels and side with management? I hope the core labor isseo can be resolved, but the least one can do is not cross the picket line early.

Also, take the dorm room option seriouly, if you hadn’t before. Oh, and if you got a room today, double up.

Some notes from my quick survey of Unitarian Universalist websites. This speak to the broad middle in quality; I’ll be writing about the really amazing ones and some deeply problematic habits another time.

Here’s another case one of those Facebook walled-garden discussions that really needs amplification and a public airing.

The subject is membership. The issue is on what basis can a congregation admit members? And in particular, by whose authority and volition. Is a person’s membership largely the will of the person who wishes to join? Or is it a status conferred by in an authority of the church: its governing board, say, or the congregation in meeting?

The answer you think is right says a lot about what you think the congregation itself is. In Unitarian Universalist circles today congregation has become synonymous with church, society, parish or fellowship. In historical practice, however, these were each different things.

A congregation is who met. The church is the company of believers, governed by spiritual leaders — the minister and the deacons — and it might shock you to know that many Universalist “churches” never organized one. The society is the parish without particular, reinforced geographic bounds, though that meaning is now especially obscure. Both served as a kind of moral, educational and religious (almost “religious but not spiritual”) public utility. Preference for the society/parish over the confessing church is the characteristic the Unitarians and Univeralists share. Indeed, share it so deeply that the distinction with church-as-company-of-believers is either blithely forgotten or hostily deprecated.

I contend it’s what gives us our curious something-for-everyone institutional chaplaincy feel. And it’s what makes some of our attempts to carve a unified spiritual community out of this nexus so awkward. We’ve believed the jargon, that we are a community of faith. That we have a “saving gospel.” (OK? What is it?)

No, we are more like a community of people with faith, than a community of faith. Not the same thing, and not a bad thing either. The history and particular friendships aside, it’s what makes it possible for me, a confessing Christian, to keep fellowship with other Unitarian Univeralists.

Following up on the Creative Commons theme. Here are some congregational websites and like resources that are covered in full or part by a Creative Commons licence. The headers to each section go to a human readable version of the license, presented here starting with the most permissive. (Check the version of the individual licenses made on each site; they have evolved.)

CC BY-SA

• Champlain Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, Middlebury, Vermont

CC BY-NC-SA

• All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana
• Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County, Media, Pennsylvania (Service texts)
• First Unitarian Church of San José (Lessons)
• Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough (Ontario)

CC BY-NC-ND

• Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, New Mexico
• Denton (Texas) Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
• Sermons presented at the First Unitarian Congregation of Orlando, Florida, US by Rev. Kathy Schmitz and others (Internet Archive)

Back numbers of The Unitarian magazine published by “the Manchester District Association of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches”may downloaded from a new site. I’m glad to see it.

So, again on Facebook, a discussion about Creative Commons licensing and the problem (both real and imagined) of using another person’s copyrighted work without permission. As I’ve written before, this unauthorized, unlicensed use has a special place in our history (The 1811 “pirate edition” of the Treatise on Atonement), and that our forebears made a similar, liberal license provision almost 80 years ago.

I’ve moved to licensing particular posts and resources to highlight that they are available under that license. Let’s be clear: a lack of a Creative Commons license doesn’t affect your fair use. (Indeed, my “flaming nectarine” is, I contend, fair use parody. I do have a plan when I write.) Or I could make a particular (just to you!) license for the work. Or I could take a request to license something.

But it does mean everything else isn’t objectively and permissively licensed. This is the kind of ambiguity kills innovation and the measure of use the creator often intends. But one licence doesn’t fit all situations.

One example. The CC-BY-ND-NC is the most restrictive “liberal” license; that is attribution, no derivitive works and no commercial use. It is, in essence, “pass around and post” permission. Not ideal, but the de facto standard for most preachers, with the understanding that a CC-BY-ND-NC sermon could be repreached as-is and without pay. (It’s the lack of attribution that I hear caeses grief.) But it couldn’t be translated, the preaching couldn’t be made into a recording or (to stretch the point) not be made into a screenplay under that license.

A make-it-your-own guide, say for an RE program or HR manual, is a derivative work, so the no-derivitives plank wouldn’t make sense. A non-commercial provision would make publishers shy away. And so forth.

It’s interesting. Reviewing by use statistics, the two posts that get regular, evergreen attention are for an image of a seven-pointed star to be use as a non-cross emblem for Christians, and a Sunday-only calendar for worship planning. (I’ll go back and add a public domain declaration, not available then.)

And, oh, I drew up a public-domain flaming chalice image for anyone to use a few years ago. High time to get those licenses set.

I also licensed my deck from my presentation at the UU Christian Fellowship Revival a couple of years ago.

But every once in a while, in UU circles, I run into an ad-hoc semi-permissive license. The intent is good, but confusing and ambiguous.

The rights around the new UUA logo is a case in point, and its ambiguity and tentativeness wouldn’t fill me with confidence if I was in a congregation and was about to commit to a design re-do. Can you remix the logo for congregational (not the UUA proper) use? Or the background wallpaper-like image? What about applying the color scheme or wordmark into an existing congregational design?

The advice — “Congregations are welcome to download and use the new symbol for their own outreach purposes” — doesn’t really help in these cases.

With all the recent talk about the new Unitarian Universalist Association visual standard, it was a pleasure to run across another way of approaching the task. Mozilla, who produces the popular Firefox browser, has its entire style guide available for review on its website. You can also download its open-source standard font, Open Sans. It’s full of interesting design choices, and it just makes me feel better about Firefox.

The whole suite might inspire a design-forward congregation to adopt similar parts of a standard for its own branding. A cmmon font free to share would be a plus, and congregations would also benefit from templates for often-used documents.

OK, the flaming nectarine was a bit of fun, but here’s something that might be more useful. The linked, double circles are an older emblem of the Unitarian and Universalist consolidation, and deserve some attention, at least in “communion of the churches” settings. It uses the gradient standard of the new UUA visual identity.

You are welcome to use, modify and share this symbol, even commercially, provided you acknowledge me. This licence applies to the ready-to-use PNG and the better-for-making-derivative works SVG, downloadable below.

You may acknowledge me in words or by a link back to this particular post.

If in words, and because it is a small symbol, the acknowledgment may be inconspicuous, on a colophon or acknowledgements page, or in an alt tag.

Please use this form: CC-BY Scott Wells

Double ring symbol by Scott Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://boyinthebands.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/dual-rings_gradient.png.

Double ring symbol by Scott Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://boyinthebands.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/dual-rings_gradient.svg.

So, continuing the thread about the “twenties” default WordPress themes, I thought I’d see what this blog would look like in an untouched version, Twenty Ten to Twenty Fourteen. (I’ve already tweeked Twenty Thirteen for this blog, and while I adore each of you, I’m not reverting it for this blog post.)

I chose this blog so I wouldn’t be thought to be picking on (or praising) a particular congregation. Will pick up on what this may mean later.