In the last two years, I've known some ministers who attend GA without attending GA.  That is, they come to the city of the General Assembly, but don't register for General Assembly.  In doing so, they save registration costs, but are still able to have lunch and dinner meetings with colleagues, or churches, if they're in search, or meet with denominational committees if necessary.  There are a few GA events that are open to the public, as well -- Sunday morning worship, and the Service of the Living Tradition, and the exhibit hall on Sunday.  This year there are even more, since any person can attend the witness events that are held outside of the convention center, and that includes more events this year.

There are always good UU events to be found outside of the General Assembly programming, too, and this year I find myself, although registered for GA, interested in attending more of it.  One high-profile example is an event hosted by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee at the Hyatt tomorrow: a conversation with Bill Schulz (UUSC president, and former UUA president, and former Amnesty International president or director or whatever the top title is there) and Anita Hill (yes, that Anita Hill!). (3:30-5:00, Hyatt Ballroom AB)

Another interesting opportunity is the ability to see The Minister's War tonight, tomorrow, or Sunday evening, or screenings of the shorter version throughout the days. (Full screenings at 6, 8, and 10pm at 222 E. Monroe St.)  There's a suggested donation of $5 for this.

All this means is it's a good year to be even around GA, and there's plenty to do without registering.  But that opportunity to hear Michelle Alexander alone was worth the registration, in my opinion.  And, of course, I get to vote in the plenaries, which is important, although you can do that as an off-site delegate, but there was still a $100 fee for that. 

Still, I can see the possibility of saving money in future years by coming to the GA city, attending some events electronically and some events off-site, and just making the most of what's available.  I might actually get to see something of the city, too, if I did that.  Many years at GA there are suggested sight-seeing things to do in these interesting locations, and I've never taken the time off or added time on to do those things.  To take one day off in a full day of meetings is reasonable by work standards, but it's harder to justify when I've paid money to be at the things that are offered that day.  So, this is definitely something to think about more for future years as a viable option.

Tomorrow we vote on what Study/Action issue to adopt for 2012-2016, and I haven't made up my mind yet which one I'm voting for.  I talked with a proponent of "CSAI 1 - Climate Action and Adaptation Plans: Why Greenhouse Gases and their Effects Matter to Us" today, who points out that if we don't save the earth, none of these other issues will matter.  Well, yeah.  That's a point.  And he also points out that some of the other issues are related to this one, particularly "CSAI 2 - Families, Population, and the Environment."  I've also seen that a lot of people I know are walking around wearing anti-slavery buttons and that there seems to be a lot of support for "CSAI 5 - Ending Slavery."  The advocate for CSAI 1 asked me, "Well, what is your congregation engaged in?"  We're engaged in all these issues to some extent.  Our JXN Community Forum series has often engaged in environmental issues.  Our members are individually involved in the Occupy movement, and might be very interested in "CSAI 4 - Exploring Class Barriers."  But what immediately came to mind is that our church has voted for Planned Parenthood every year for the last several years as one of the local agencies to donate to, and I've seen our members be strong advocates for that organization.  And it's going to be hard to convince this feminist that, with everything going on in my home state, that I shouldn't vote for, "CSAI 3 - Reproductive Justice: Expanding Our Social Justice Calling."  I stopped at the booth for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice today.  I said to the woman there, "I'm from Michigan."  And she gave me a look of pity and said, "Vagina! Vagina!"  (This may be a somewhat exaggerated story, induced by heat, but that's the way I remember it right now.  My apologies to the lovely RCRC woman if I've exaggerated her response.)

Things are going crazy in Michigan, folks.  Our legislators are considering severe anti-abortion legislation.  Our women representatives are being barred from speaking in the house because of saying things like the word "vagina."   This issue is alive and serious in the state of Michigan.  We're turning anatomical terms into dirty words that can't be spoken aloud, and the effect is the silencing of women on women's issues.  How many women got to speak to the House Health Policy Committee at their hearing of the bill?  None--three men only, although Rev. Jeff Liebmann did a fabulous job.

This morning at the Meadville/Lombard alumni breakfast, we heard, as always, memories from ministers who graduated 25 and 50 years ago.  The minister from 50 years ago couldn't be there in person, but sent his memories in writing.  He talked about creating an organization of ministers to help pastor to women and help them connect to illegal abortion providers, so that they could have safe abortions in the time before Roe vs. Wade.

I don't want to have to do that ministry--but I might have to in Michigan soon, if this trend holds.

So my mind isn't made up about the CSAIs--but I sure know what's resonating right now.  We're here talking about immigration, but for the first part of the week, my heart was still on the Michigan capitol steps, where the Vagina Monologues were taking place Monday evening. 

When I was a child, I went to a UU church that was a larger-sized church for a church in our movement.  The church religious education program was large enough to have paid staff, and a different classroom for every two grade levels through 7th grade, an eight-grade class of its own for coming of age, and an active high school group.  But a church that size often comes in a larger metro area, as was the case with Birmingham Unitarian Church in Bloomfield Hills, MI.  And so, in my school, I was one of only a small hand-full of families with Unitarian Universalist children in our school district of Ferndale, and in my grade there was only one other UU.  I was lucky--I think my two sisters had no other UUs in their grade in our school.  When I got to High School as a freshman, there were still the two of us UUs in a graduating class of over 300, and three UUs that I knew of in the school, although I later found that there were two sisters who went to another one of the metro area UU churches.

Now I'm in a smaller church and a smaller city, and the situation is very much the same.  We have a smaller church school, with K-5 in one class.  As I think about our UU children and youth, I don't think we have any two families with grade-school children in the same school.  I think we have children in Jackson schools, Columbia schools, Hanover-Horton schools, Grass Lake schools, and a couple more school districts further north of Jackson, but no two children in the same school from different families.  At the High School level, it's possible that we have more than two families with children in the same school district, if we count members who are not active in the church and whose children don't come to religious education classes, but our few active teens are all, I think, in separate school districts.

What these two examples tell me is that the vast majority of UU children and youth grow up fairly religiously isolated in their school lives.  Before we get to college, where we're in educational systems with thousands of students, we don't have enough critical mass to, for example, form high-school-based religious club.  And it also means that our children in religious education classes pretty much only see each other once a week.  Occasionally strong friendships can form--some of my daughter's best friends are her church friends--but it's harder for our children to make friends with children from their own religion.

There are positive things about this, of course.  It means we raise flexible, tolerant children, who are good at being allies and bridge-builders.  It means our children learn quickly and early how to relate to people of other religions and appreciate and embrace that diversity.

But it has its drawbacks in terms of support for our children when they face religious intolerance, which they sometimes do.  And I think it's also a factor in retention.  My child wants to go to church so often for the primary reason that she loves the other children there and doesn't get to see them any other time of the week.  But if she hadn't made those strong bonds there, there would be much less drive from her to go to church.  And, as we see, our teens often start to get to be reluctant to go to church, and we lose them.  I continued to go to church as a teen despite any strong friends who were active in my youth group, because we had a strong program--it had a sizable group, it was fun, and it was engaging. But if you have a small group, and no strong friendships, it's a rare UU youth who will prioritize religious education in a busy teen schedule.

Unfortunately, this means rocky roads for most UU religious education programs -- there's simply no magic formula to making friendships happen so that children will want to come to church. The best answer I have is this: One of the primary reasons someone comes to a UU church for the first time is because the person has been invited by someone that person knows.  What better person to invite than the parent(s) of your child's best friend?  If it works, you gain a friend at church, your church gains a member, and your child gains a reason to want to go to church. 

I can think of no better way to help our children be less religiously isolated, to help grow our religious education programs and churches, and to build the drive in our children and youth to want to come to church.

This week's Time Magazine cover of a woman breast-feeding her 3-year-old son sure has a lot of people talking.  My own feelings about the Time cover are conflicted.  On one hand, I think Time is making an important point, and the controversy surrounding it is ridiculous.  I vigorously defend the following ideas:

• Breast-feeding is normal and healthy.  
• Breast-feeding is normal and healthy for toddlers, including 3-year-olds like this one.
• Breast-feeding is normal and healthy for boys, not just girls!
• It is okay and normal to be a sexy woman and also breast-feed your child.  Women can be both mothers and sexual beings at the same time.
• There is nothing wrong with breast-feeding standing up, either!

This cover does not show anything inherently sexual or abnormal or unhealthy.  The fact that so many people have looked at this cover and had an immediate negative reaction is about the ways we have hypersexualized women in this society, and see breasts, in particular, as only sexual.  It is also about how we have, correspondingly, not supported breast-feeding.  Our society has taken something that is normal and healthy, and made it something pathological--something so rare that women have to fight a ridiculous battle to engage in what our bodies are created to do.  Breast-feeding past three is the world-wide norm, and children continue to receive important nutrients for toddlers' developing brains and immune systems.  Breast milk actually adapts to a child's changing needs as the child grows--it's a pretty amazing thing.

The comments I have seen against this picture range from the uninformed, suggesting that there's absolutely no reason to breast-feed at this age and that the mom is just weird, to the downright ridiculous, suggesting that this boy will need psychotherapy, or the mom should be indicted on charges of corrupting a minor.  And overall the level of talk around this cover shows that as a society we are just profoundly screwed up on the subject of what should be seen as just a natural and good thing.  The controversy is an extension of the fact that women are routinely tossed out of restaurants and other public places in many states for breastfeeding, because women's breasts are viewed as inherently indecent. 

All that being said--and it's important, and comes first--I think Time did something of a disservice to the issue of making "extended breast-feeding" accepted in our society.  They took a picture that made extended breast-feeding look as freakishly weird as possible.  I say that while still supporting that there is nothing wrong with what is depicted.  But given that in our society extended breast-feeding is seen as unusual at best and as "wrong and perverted" as some comments have said about this picture, the cover photo is a picture that did everything it could to make the situation look even more abnormal and wrong.  It has a very tall-looking three-year-old as the child portrayed, and having him standing makes the picture look even stranger, and putting him on the chair extends his length, making him appear even older.  The picture doesn't capture the toddler's baby face, but makes him look older, and the fact that he's looking at the camera makes it weirder, as well.  Compare that photo to another one with the same mother and son, and it's easy to see that if this second photo were the cover story, a lot of the "shock" factor would be gone.
With both mom and son sitting, and the son's eyes closed, you can see how natural (and comfortable) they are. 

The other way, and to me the more significant way, in which Time does the issue a disservice is by the cover title, "Are You Mom Enough?"  The title does two things--both immediately sexualizes the mother to the viewer, and, simultaneously makes breast-feeding the latest battleground of the "mommy wars" perpetuated by magazines like Time for years.  The title sexualizes the mother by connecting the image to the saying "Are You Man Enough" which is often paired with sexy images in our society.  The viewer is instantly ready to see the woman as sex object, and the confusion of seeing her as sex object and also in a mothering role produces immediate discomfort for some viewers, who have placed women's lives into two separate categories of mother and sex object, with women not allowed to be both simultaneously.  As for the mom wars, by giving extended breast-feeding with this title, it both suggests that to not do extended breast-feeding is wrong, and, at the same time, suggests this woman has gone to an unnatural extreme with the subtitle, "Why attachment parenting drives some mothers to extremes..."

What a magazine like Time could do, and should do, rather than look to shock and provoke is have an article on why extended breast-feeding should be accepted, and how this is just one of a range of acceptable choices for a woman to make.  Instead of creating mommy wars, we should acknowledge that there are a wide range of acceptable choices to make in mothering, and support all of them, as a society and as individuals. 

The Rev. Barbara Child
The Rev. Cynthia Cain, Unitarian Universalist Church of Lexington, KY
The Rev. Dr. Nana' Kratochvil, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Michigan, Mt. Pleasant, MI
The Rev. Andrew L. Weber, YRUU Advisor, First Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Ann Arbor, MI
The Rev. Kimi Riegel, Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church, Southfield, MI
The Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
The Rev. Mary Ann Macklin, Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington, IN

For more information,

         I was deeply disturbed when Caylee Anthony went missing and mourned her death.  I know why, too.  She was of a similar age to my own daughter, and at least one person told me that Caylee reminded this person of my own daughter.  Caylee's big brown eyes, in particular, do have a resemblance.
         I cried when I read about Christina Taylor Green, who was 9 years old when she died in the shootings in Tucson.  She, too, reminded me of my daughter, a precocious, politically-involved, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl. 
         I know why I mourned these little girls who, for a moment, caught our nation's attention.  They were innocent, beautiful, and gone too soon.  And they were in the media spotlight -- beautiful little girls -- white little girls.  Their deaths were horrible, outrageous, and made us sad and also furious.
         Too often the children whose deaths we mourn as a society are like Caylee and Christina Taylor -- the white little girls.  Too seldom do we, as a society or as individuals unconnected to the family mourn young black children killed.
         This point about who captures our national attention and who we mourn and how there really is racism involved in this was brought home to me this week from an unlikely source -- a fictional one.  Like many others, I've read The Hunger Games and went to see the movie last week.  The character of Rue had a particularly tragic death in the book.  It's particularly tragic because she becomes a person who is important to the heroine, Katniss, and who Katniss particularly mourns, because she reminds her of her own little sister, Primrose.  Suzanne Collins, the author, describes Rue saying, "She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that's she's very like Prim in size and demeanor."  I know why I mourned Rue.  I had little sisters, too.  Rue was beautiful, innocent, and young.  Her character as portrayed in the movie also reminded me of my sisters and daughter. 
          But for some, the fact that they identified with Rue and mourned her death means that she can't be black -- even though the text says she is and the author has directly stated that she is African-American, too.  There are a number of twitter users who have posted about The Hunger Games following the movie saying thing such as, "why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie" (prompting, thankfully, spoofs such as "why does Frederick Douglass have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined abolition"), "call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad" (Yes, you're a racist), and "Rue looks nothing like I imagined her.  Isn't she supposed to be a pale redhead (or was that just in MY head?)?  Why is she black?" (Yes, it was just in YOUR head.)  For more, see what I think is the original Jezebel story here, more Jezebel commentary here, and a bunch of racist tweets here.
         Yes, too often the children whose deaths we mourn as a society are the white little girls, and too seldom do we mourn young black children killed.  That's why these people struggle with Rue being black--they mourned her, not realizing her race, and assumed her, therefore, to be white, despite textual evidence.  If you care, if she's important, she must be white.  We're used to not caring in our society about young black children who are killed.  And even more so those who are boys, boys killed too soon like Trayvon Martin.  Trayvon was innocent, beautiful, precocious, and gone too soon, too. His death was wrong, horrible, outrageous.  And remarkably, it, too, caught media attention and made us sad and furious.
         The fact that we are, really, conditioned through our media and our culture to be more sympathetically inclined towards dead white children and to find their deaths sadder and more outrageously wrong makes it even more clear how very, very wrong Trayvon's death was.  The fact that we are paying attention to it not because of his race but despite of his race shows how very, very horrible and wrong it was.  If you've listened to the 911 calls and heard him crying for help and heard the level of distress of the callers calling 911 you know it was brutal.  A beautiful, promising young man carrying iced tea, Skittles, and a cell phone, gunned down for the crime of walking while black and wearing a hoodie -- of course we are, and should be, outraged, sad, angry, furious, and tearful.  And there can be no doubt that if this was a young white boy, a high school football player, walking home from a store who was shot by a black man who happened to think he was up to no good for walking home that night, that the shooter would be behind bars awaiting trial, a trial at which he would not be treated kindly by the justice system.
         President Obama has said that the nation needs "soul-searching" in response to Trayvon's death.  In response, people are saying things such as "If Trayvon’s mother were white, would Obama give her a call?" implying that it is the president, not the shooter, who is the racist.  Of course, for Christina Taylor Green, Obama did speak at her funeral.  But facts never get in the way of racist attacks on the president.
         We do need a national soul-searching in response to Trayvon.  And especially if his death doesn't prompt sadness and outrage, we do need soul-searching.

So if living as if there is no God doesn't mean living immorally, what does it mean? 

• Without threat of eternal damnation, it means that we must take seriously the consequences of negative behaviors during our time on earth.
• Without threat of eternal rewards, it means we must live life to the fullest, appreciating the beauty, love, and kindness that we experience now, and share it with others.
• Without a God to make the rules, it means we must pay attention to our rules, create our own moral codes as individuals and a society and justify our behaviors as moral to the larger community. 
• With this as the only world we will know, it means that we must take care of it, and make ensure that our planet is livable for generations to come.
• Without a God's love and support, it means we must love and support one another.
• Without a God to blame for negative things happening, it means we must work to make a world where people are cared for in the best way possible.
• Without a God to thank for our rewards, it means we must acknowledge a randomness to life.  Some people get things easier than others.  And when we do, it's our moral responsibility to help those less fortunate.
• A truly "Practical Atheist" would be someone who believes in caring for the planet, living justly, caring for fellow humans and for animals.  

So I ask my Christian colleagues, when you hear the term "Practical Atheist" bandied about as synonymous for immoral behavior, challenge that term.  Atheists gave us the Eight-Fold Path.  Atheists gave us the Humanist Manifesto.  Atheists give us statements like this one from the American Ethical Union: "Dedicated to cultivating moral development in personal life and moral reform in society, Ethical Culture seeks to nurture relationships in which we act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in ourselves, to provide inspiration and guidance for moral living, and to transform the way humanity views the meaning of life."

What does it mean to live as if there is no God?  It means to be responsible for one's own morality; it does not mean to live immorally.  So let's make a deal, Christians.  If people don't live up to your idea of Christianity and you don't call them "Practical Atheists," then when people don't live up to my idea of Atheism I won't call them "Practical Christians."  A better term for Christians who act immorally would be Hypocritical Christians rather than Practical Atheists.  If a Christians are not living up to your understanding of your faith, Christians, call them out on it, but don't call them Atheists.  We don't claim them; they're all yours.

A Christian colleague ran across the term "Practical Atheist" recently and brought it to a group I'm in for definition and discussion.  I wasn't familiar with it, and as probably the only thing close to an Atheist in the group (for the record, I call myself an Agnostic), offered up that it might be about a distinction between declared Atheists and default atheists (those who have not made a sort of declaration of atheism, but have no belief in God).  Other Christian colleagues in the group went with a definition of those people who might profess a belief in Christ, but live a Godless lifestyle.  Turns out, it seems they were right according to some definitions.  And that makes sense, because it's not a term that would make sense within the Atheist community, but makes sense in the Christian community.  And no term is likelier to drive Atheists hopping mad, now that I understand it better.

So here's the Wikipedia definition, which would be closer to my definition: "In practical or pragmatic atheism, also known as apatheism, individuals live as if there are no gods and explain natural phenomena without resorting to the divine. The existence of gods is not rejected, but may be designated unnecessary or useless; gods neither provide purpose to life, nor influence everyday life, according to this view."

However, I found this definition which matches my Christian colleagues' definition exactly on About.com:  "This is a category used by some religious theists to describe all those theists who technically believe in a god, but who behave immorally. The assumption is that moral behavior follows automatically from genuine theism, thus immoral behavior is a consequence of not genuinely believing. Theists who behave immorally must really be atheists, regardless of what they believe. The term 'practical atheist' is thus a smear against atheists generally."

The other top results of my Google search show that this term is generally being used in the About.com way, rather than the Wikipedia way.  For example, LifeChurch.TV says, "Practical Atheist -- You say you believe in God. Do you really? Do you live your life as if God is in the room, or do you assume He’s not paying attention? You call yourself a Christian. Are you who you say you are?" There's a video there that I chose not to watch.  If you watch it, let me know how awful it is.  Or take this article in the Christian Post as an example, about the guy behind the LifeChurch.TV video:  "S.C. Pastor Exposes 'Practical Atheists' among Christians."  It says, "Practical atheist, or Christian atheist, is defined as someone who believes in God but lives as if He doesn't exist."

The use of the term "Practical Atheist" in this way assumes morality is from God, and so those who are living amorally are atheistic, at least in practice, even if not in belief.  And it's a slam on Atheists.  But, as we've seen, people generally believe that Atheists don't have morals, because Atheists don't believe in God. 

For the record, then: living as if there is no God does NOT mean living immorally.  More on that in my next post.

The UUA President, the Rev. Peter Morales published a working paper titled "Congregations and Beyond" last week.  It's available in its entirety here.  In it he says, "I am realizing in a profound way that congregations cannot be the only way we
 connect with people." and "We have long defined ourselves as an association of congregations. We need to think
 of ourselves as a religious movement." 

The Rev. Morales says, "
Congregations as local parishes arose in a different era. They arose in a time of limited
 mobility and communication. Most members lived within a couple of miles of their
 church."  This is something that I've been thinking about recently, as well.  The time that the church is where you go to in order to hear the latest ideas or even the latest gossip is a time that's behind us.  The church is no longer the central, or even a central, hub for how people get and exchange information and ideas.  There are still things that churches do better than other institutions, but those things are fewer and far between.  We're no longer the best source of therapy--the psychological profession, as it emerged, has taken over that role.  We're no longer where you might hear the best, most engaging lectures--you tube gives you access to the best in the world, and it's a rare church with a minister of that level of academic excellence.  We're no longer the place where you hear first what is going on in your community -- our newspapers and even our friendships are available 24/7 on the computer.  We are, still, the best form for worship, I think, although much of that is available in electronic form, as well, except for the communal aspect.  We do retain the role of being one primary way that brings together groups of people for personal connection -- the social role of face-to-face regular gathering is filled less and less by other groups in this society, while we're still going strong.  But the point is, congregations are less needed in many people's minds, and, accordingly, we're not growing.

The two-part strategy the Rev. Morales outlines is:

1. Congregations remain the base

   
2. Focus energy on creating a movement beyond the congregation

Honestly, it looks pretty much like a one-part strategy to me, as part 1 is basically just reassuring us that this congregational thing that we're already doing will still be important.  So what does part 2 entail?  Looks like his answer is social media, re-engaging the identity organizations formerly known as "affiliates," small groups of other undefined sorts, and social action. 

It is, well, vague.  And not clear exactly what it would entail that's not being done currently. 

But the question that he points to, well, that's intriguing.  Morales points out the there are, as we've known, bunches of people who identify as UU and who don't attend UU churches.  And there are bunches of people who were raised UU who don't attend UU churches.  Some of them are fairly well connected to UUism in other ways -- he points to the fact that a significant number of people who attend SUUSI don't attend any UU congregation.

I'm sure any parish minister can name dozens of potential, former, or raised-UUs in that minister's geographic area who are not church members.  And, like Morales who says we need "A great deal more research about those who identify as UUs but are not members of
 a congregation," most of us don't know why these UU-types are not UU-affiliated in our towns. 

But what I think is new about "Congregations and Beyond" is that Peter Morales is not suggesting we find out why they're not in churches, but, rather, find out what they are interested in doing that would connect them to our movement in other ways.  Some people will never be church-goers, he's saying, but that doesn't mean that they can't be part of the UU religious movement.

It's a radical concept and one we ministers often argue against, saying such things as, "You aren't a Unitarian Universalist if you're not a church member, because the Unitarian Universalist Association is an association of congregations."

But I also know that there were a few years for me -- four of them, to be exact, the college years -- where I was not in a congregation but very much considered my religion to be Unitarian Universalism.  I didn't attend church in my college town, which didn't have a vital campus ministry in those years, and I would occasionally attend when I was home from school, but not often, because my church didn't have any specific get-together for those of us home on holidays or summers from college, and so I wandered off from us as an association of congregations, but not from my UU identity. 

I have trouble envisioning the way we strengthen these sorts of connections and grow this "movement" Morales speaks of, but I hope we'll keep talking about these ideas and exploring the potential.

In 1964, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of the American Atheists, was called "the most hated woman in America." Judging from the response to Jessica Ahlquist, the love of atheists hasn't increased much.  Indeed, in 2009, a University of Minnesota research study published in the American Sociological Review showed atheists to be the most disliked minority group of those they polled, including Muslims and homosexuals. When asked to respond to the statement, "This Group Does Not At All Agree with My Vision of American Society," 39.6% agreed atheists do not (26.3% for Muslims, who came in second), and 47.6% would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist (33.5% for Muslims, again the next highest category).

So perhaps the vehemence directed toward 16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist should not be shocking.  Ahlquist is a teenager who attends Cranston High School West in Cranston, Rhode Island.  Cranston High School West had a prayer banner that hung in their school:
(picture from The Providence Journal: http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2012/01/federal-judge-o-1.html)  Jessica, an atheist, felt that this violated separation of church and state.  It did, according to the ruling issued by the U.S. District Court Judge last week.  The judge weighed in very clearly on this question, saying, "The Court refrains from second-guessing the expressed motives of the Committee members, but nonetheless must point out that tradition is a murky and dangerous bog. While all agree that some traditions should be honored, others must be put to rest as our national values and notions of tolerance and diversity evolve."

Since that time, and probably before as well, Jessica Ahlquist has received messages of hate and threats of violence and death.  She has been the victim of cyberbullying from within her community and without. Rhode Island state representative Peter G. Palumbo, who called her an "evil little thing."  Even some moderate Rhode Islanders with Cranston connections I talked to recently were saying things like, "I don't see why it can't stay there.  It's tradition.  If you don't like it, just don't look at it."

Over and over again, I see something like this, and I'm stunned.  I can't grasp what makes people so frightened, especially when they are the majority, of the actions and beliefs of a young girl.  It's a fundamental piece of my understanding of what makes America great that we create a space where people should be free from religious persecution and that the way we do this is through freedom of belief, lack of state-sponsored religion, and freedom of speech. 

Freedom of religion means that the government does not impose its religion on you.  It's what protects us from Sharia law, too.  These same people who are so incensed that a Christian banner is taken down from a public high school, well I'm sure the majority of them would not want a Muslim banner hung in its stead.  We keep hearing the panic that Sharia law is being declared in Muslim communities in America, like Dearborn, from the conservative Christian right.  But what protects us from being a country under Muslim law is exactly the same thing that demands that this banner be taken down.

But, of course, the fear of Muslims and the fear of atheists aren't logical, rational things. 

The obvious irony is that the words of the prayer call on people to grow morally, to be kind, to conduct themselves in a way that brings credit to the school, and to be good sports and smile when we lose.

If only everyone who wants the prayer to hang could at least try to live up to it.

 (Continuing from Part 1)

Well, it seems the video of young Girl Scout, Taylor, which asking you to boycott Girl Scout cookies because Girl Scouts is inclusive of transgender girls, has been taken down. There are a number of well-done responses from Girl Scouts that are available, however.  Some of my favorites are:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAnt5cqQ4Ss
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCDtaGCjujc
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=qxWM3dxfbX0
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BChDci9mkE&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=k85-CXLLIek

These Girl Scouts make several good points about what Girl Scouts is all about.  A primary one is about the Girl Scout Law.  In her original video, Taylor talked about the line of the Girl Scout Law that says, "Honest and Fair," and how Girl Scouts is somehow not being honest if they're not proclaiming loudly to everyone involved that there are transgender scouts, and who and where they are.  Obviously, the Girl Scouts are being honest about their policies, and fair in their implementation, but the Girl Scout Law has nine other pieces to it, many of which apply in this situation:

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.

 It's obvious that the Girl Scouts in the response videos have learned what it means to be "considerate and caring," "courageous and strong," "friendly and helpful," "responsible for what I say and do," to "respect myself and others," and, most importantly, to "be a sister to every Girl Scout."

My biggest worry in all of this is that the Girl Scouts could bend to pressure from the right to change their policies in this and other areas.  They're under considerable pressure from the right about interactions with Planned Parenthood, the transgender and lesbian scouts issues, and religious freedom.   When I started as a troop leader two years ago, it was printed everywhere the Girl Scout Pledge was printed that girls could change the word "God" to any word representing the Girl Scout's belief.  That's still the official policy, but it was controversial.  And it's no longer on their website and it's not in my brand-new Brownie handbook where the law is printed, either.  So it's not clear to me how a new scout or a new scout leader would be clear that Girl Scouts, unlike Boy Scouts, gives them this religious freedom.  I worry about a new scout being told by a troop leader that they have to say the pledge as written, and taking that troop leader's word for it.  Similarly, the conservative websites tell me that where Planned Parenthood was previously mentioned, in places like staff members' bios, it has been "scrubbed" from the website.  There's nowhere on Girl Scouts USA's webpage where you're going to find the policy on transgender scouts, either. 

So while Girl Scouts is open and welcoming, it's cautious, understandably.  That's why it's important to me that we, on the religious left, know what Girl Scouts is standing for, and the pressure they're under, so we can be as supportive as possible.  Don't buy the cookies if you don't want cookies, but when your local Girl Scout comes to you for support, please know that this is an organization that is working to empower young girls; to teach them valuable leadership skills; and to teach them love and respect for their bodies, minds and spirits; the people around them; and the world around them.  Stop and tell the Girl Scouts that they have your support and you believe in what they do.  There is so much in the world around us that is teaching negative messages to girls about their capabilities and their bodies, that I'm grateful that not only does Girl Scouts exist, but that it is a place that is open and welcoming to all girls, and we don't have to change our religious or political beliefs to belong.

And if you do want cookies, they go on sale here January 20th, a week from today. 

I've never seen so much discussion among my liberal and ministerial friends about Girl Scouts.  Sure, there's the palm oil controversy which comes up every year at cookie time, and the confusion that people sometimes have between Boy Scouts of America's stances and Girl Scouts USA's stances.  The two are unrelated organizations, and Girl Scouts USA welcomes scouts to change the word "God" in the Girl Scout pledge to any word representing the scout's spiritual beliefs.  Girl Scouts also has not taken any stance limiting participation of lesbian or bisexual scouts or troop leaders.

The latest Girl Scout controversy is around transgender scouts.  And, once again, Girl Scouts has taken an inclusive stance.  The story that has caught the attention in the news is of a young girl, Bobby Montoya, who wanted to become a Girl Scout.  Bobby is a 7-year-old transgender girl.

The story first emerged that Bobby wanted to become a Girl Scout but had been turned down by a local Denver-area troop.  Bobby's parents then appealed to the council.  The council overturned the troop's decision, saying, "Girl Scouts is an inclusive organization and we accept all girls in Kindergarten through 12th grade as members. If a child identifies as a girl and the child's family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout."  Some articles have misrepresented this as Girl Scouts as an organization taking one stance and then reversing it, when it was more of a matter of a local troop not following the inclusive policy that was in place.  When this story first emerged, I contacted Girl Scouts USA to ask about the policy on transgender scouts, and heard the same thing that I had heard from my local area coordinator and the same thing that the Colorado council said -- any child who says she is a girl and wants to be in Girl Scouts is welcome.  I had heard that the Denver-area troop leaders had responded by disbanding the troop, but when I research this, it turns out it looks like this is just rumor and misunderstanding.  It appears Bobby has not yet joined the troop, and that there have been no further developments on the situation in Colorado.  On the other hand, there are troops hosted at a conservative Christian school in Louisiana that have disbanded in protest. 

What's got people talking about this story again is a video by a California Girl Scout, Taylor [last name and troop number are being withheld, understandably].  Taylor urges you to boycott Girl Scout cookies because Girl Scouts admits transgender girls.  I'm having trouble embedding her video -- it seems to have been taken down, but I'm sure it'll be findable soon. 

Taylor's video is being spread through social media in thanks partly to the attention from conservative groups focused on pushing back against some of the more liberal and inclusive aspects of Girl Scouts, such as "Honest Girl Scouts" which takes issue with GSUSA for transgender scouts, but, more particularly, for some programs and events that have been done with Planned Parenthood, particularly at the international level (GSUSA is part of WAGGGS--the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouting).  Taylor's video, while it appears at first to be just one individual Girl Scout sticking up for her beliefs, ends with her plugging the Honest Girl Scouts organization. 

Just giving the background on this story was longer than I expected, so I'll share my thoughts and comments in a later post.

Lowe's recently pulled advertising from the show All-American Muslim, bowing to pressure from conservative groups such as the Christian Florida Family Association.  The president of that group, David Katon, said this on NPR:

Our concern with ‘All American Muslim’ is that it does not accurately represent the term Muslim, which is a follower of Islam and a follower of Islam believes in radicalization, the use of Sharia law, which provides for honor killings, mutilation of women and numerous other atrocities to women.

Despite how often we hear anti-Muslim rhetoric in our society, this piece of vitriol really shocked me.  His objection to the show is that it portrays moderate, average, peaceful American Muslims.  Apparently a religious extremist like Katon can't believe that moderates within other religions exist.  He paints a caricature of Muslims and then claims that anyone who doesn't look like his caricature isn't Muslim, and that moderate, peaceful Islam doesn't exist.

Of course it does.  This is ridiculous.

The Muslims on All-American Muslim are more more peaceful, more American, and more Godly than Katon and his organization.  His statements are a disgrace to the faith of real Christians, and thank goodness we aren't using his beliefs to paint a caricature of the religion he claims to be a part of, because he gives Christianity a bad name.  I'll take Dearborn Muslims over his Florida Christians any day as my neighbors and friends.

I was excited to see the show air, by the way, and watched an episode or two, because it highlights the sort of people here in Michigan that I've gotten to know and care for as part of my community.  Unfortunately, I found the show rather boring, which is, really, pretty good news.  It turns out that All-American Muslims?  Well, they're just like us.  In truth, they are us.  And that's just not very exciting TV in my book.  Now, vampires or dragons or something, those are different.

Meanwhile, shame on Lowe's, which has offered this chicken-hearted response:

Lowe's has received a significant amount of communication on this program, from every perspective possible. Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.

No, Lowe's, what you did wasn't a response to controversy; what you did was a response to bigotry.  The controversy wasn't something you acted in response to, it was something caused by your action.  And your non-apology of "If we have made anyone question that commitment (to allowing people to have 'different views'), we apologize" isn't going to throw us off track while you continue to bow to the wishes of the hate-mongering bigots by not advertising on a show which is all about showing this thing you've just stated you have a commitment to--differing views.  You're daring to tell us that you have a commitment to allowing different views, and then pulling ads from a show highlighting difference because the bigots say different views can't really exist?  

We call bullshit.

Dashed off a letter to the UUA today.  Leaving off the official's name to whom I addressed it, the text of it was as follows:

I am writing to you as a Unitarian Universalist minister and as a Girl Scout Troop Leader and Girl Scout Troop Organizer. I’ve paid attention over many years to the “continuing struggle for inclusiveness” situation between the UUA and the Boy Scouts, as outlined at http://www.uua.org/re/children/scouting/169633.shtml.

I’m proud as a Girl Scout leader that Girl Scouts do not share the Boy Scouts’ discrimination towards atheist and agnostic scouts and troop leaders nor their discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender scouts and troop leaders. Indeed, I proudly tell my Brownie Girl Scouts on a regular basis that the Girl Scout Promise, which includes the word “God,” can be, according to Girl Scouts USA, replaced by any Girl Scout to reflect her own spiritual beliefs. I model this in my troop meetings by replacing the word “God” in the GS Promise with “love,” “earth,” “peace,” and another of other terms.

Similarly, Girl Scouts has recently been in the news for their inclusive policies on transgender Girl Scouts, and has come down on the side of believing that any child who considers herself a Girl and wants to be a Girl Scout is welcome in Girl Scouting. I confirmed this through calling GSUSA directly and asking about transgender girls being welcomed in scouting, and through conversations with my own area coordinator.

That’s why I am disturbed that right under the “UUA and BSA” page on the UUA’s website, the next link is to a list of “Alternative Scouting Organizations,” and that this page then begins with stating “In addition to the popular Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts of the USA, there are other scouting organizations.” (http://www.uua.org/re/children/scouting/169569.shtml.) This statement makes it look like the UUA has problems with Girl Scouts similar to the problems with Boy Scouts, and perpetuates a common misunderstanding that Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are related organizations that share common policies and practices, when this is not the case. Girl Scouts ought to be listed as an “Alternative Scouting Organization” along with Camp Fire USA, Navigators USA, Scouting for All, and SpiralScouts. I grew up in Camp Fire, and can say that I have found Girl Scouts every bit as welcoming, if not more so, to girls of regardless of race, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, sexual orientation or other aspect of diversity. My little troop last year was a group of girls who through themselves and their parents represented every aspect of that list of diversity types, in fact!

I’m hoping the wording on the UUA’s webpage can be changed to represent the positive relationship that the UUA has with Girl Scouting. If you are not the person who this letter should be directed to, please tell me who I can refer this issue to. This March is the 100th anniversary of Girl Scouts, and I’ll be highlighting Girl Scouts in our church this year, where several Girl Scouts have earned their “My Promise, My Faith” badge for learning about how the Girl Scout Law relates to the Unitarian Universalist Principles. I would love it if by the 100th anniversary our organization could show more support for this inclusive and supportive scouting institution.

Thank you for your care and attention to this issue.

In faith,

Cynthia Landrum
Minister
Universalist Unitarian Church of East Liberty
Clarklake, MI
Girl Scout Troop Leader & Troop Organizer

I'd been having a rough day, when I came to the studio with my daughter to wait for an hour while she takes her class. In the last ten minutes, one stranger has offered to buy me a latte, and another has told me that I look really nice in purple.

Random acts of kindness, folks, go a long way. You never know when the person you just reached out to really needed that kind moment from a stranger.

Here's hoping I remember to pay it forward.

This is a shout-out to the GA Planning Committee, I suppose.  I know they're doing a lot of hard work, and I know that criticizing what they've done, when they have so many voices they've been asked to listen to and they've put a ton of thought & effort into things, is not helpful, constructive, or appreciated.  So without criticizing, what I want to say is that I want them to know how much work we, ought here in the non-UUA-committee world have been doing, as well.  We've been asked to prepare ourselves for this General Assembly, and I think we have been.  By the time I get to General Assembly, here's some of what I will have done:

• Read the UUA's "Common Read" book for 2010-2011, The Death of Josseline.
• Read other books on immigration.
• Read just about everything on the UUA's webpage on immigration.
• Read countless e-mails and websites from social justice agencies on the subject.  
• Attended workshops designed to prepare us for "Justice GA" at my district annual assembly at two consecutive district assemblies.  
• Attended a training from Standing on the Side of Love.
• Attended workshops and discussions at past GAs on the subject.
• Held congregational discussions on the subject.
• Preached on the subject.
• Participated in press conferences and social justice events at a state level.
• Held a Community Forum on the subject with local experts.
• Taken one or two semesters of Spanish and perhaps also immersed myself in an intensive study course, as urged in the Responsive Resolution from GA 2011.
• Participated in a UUMA chapter gathering focused on immigration justice and preparing us for the "Justice GA."

That's what I can think of off the top of my head.  I don't think it's atypical for a UU clergy person--I think it's probably typical of the amount of work we're personally putting in to prepare ourselves for this GA.  I know that's not everything I need to know.  But I didn't start off this process knowing nothing about how to do justice work, either.  And I also know that there are people who will have done a lot more than me, and people who will have done a lot less.  And I'm sure that I will need some of the "education and preparation" times announced in the preliminary schedule.  Since those are all on the early days, though, I worry that the people who have prepared the most before coming are the ones who will get the most preparation there, and vice versa. 

I know there's no way to know the preparation level of each participant, and so things have to be somewhat geared towards the least prepared. But I'm just wanting to let folks out there know that when you ask us to do our homework, there are definitely those of us who are listening and doing so.  If there can be something of a advanced track that's geared to us who have done so, that would be great.

I'm pouring out post after post on 9/11 to get out of my system those things which I need to say but which don't belong in my sermon.  This is done in hopes that once these things are out, I can see what is left.  What I know is left right now is the stone of hope that is hewn out of the mountain of despair.  Perhaps it is connected to those five smooth stones.  Or perhaps it is one of them.  What mountains do we hew the other four stones out of, then?  Grief, hope, memory, and even joy are all the tumblers now as I polish the stones up. 

I've been rereading what I wrote in those days after September 11th, 2001.  Here's what I said at our water communion service on September 16th, 2001:

9/11 had a large impact on my ministry.  About two years later, in 2003, now ministering in New England, my colleague Jennie Barrington and I, were talking often how 9/11 had shaped our ministry.  We also were big Simon and Garfunkel fans, and Simon and Garfunkel were doing their "Old Friends" reunion tour.  We bought two tickets to go see them in New Jersey, and we hit the road.  We went two places: the concert, and Ground Zero.  That was it -- we didn't do a Broadway show or see the Statue of Liberty, or go to the Met.  We had two things we wanted to do: that concert, and see Ground Zero for ourselves.

I had been to New York City only two or three times before -- once to visit a boyfriend in college over the summer, once with my college's Glee Club on a concert trip.  I had driven through it a couple of times on my way to New England, also, but all I can say about that is that the tunnels and bridges are expensive, and that driving through New York City six months after 9/11 with a truck full of furniture is a nerve-wracking experience.  I had never gone to see the World Trade Center when it was standing.  I've still never been to the Statue of Liberty, although I saw it from the ferry my first time there. 

So we drove with our bad Mapquest directions ("take the exit" -- which exit?) down to our hotel in New Jersey near the concert venue.  We listened to Simon and Garfunkel all the way down and all the way back, hearing some songs that we had never heard before on their newest release, such as "A Church Is Burning," which we heard with stunned ears, and replayed over and over again several times in a row, weeping, as we drove down.  We talked about how to use the song in worship, something I still haven't done.  And we went to the concert, which was a special treat not only getting to hear them, but hearing them in home turf, in the New York City area.

And then we went to Ground Zero.

There was no memorial there, of course.   What there was was a big pit where work was still going on uncovering things that had been pushed down into the earth by the collapse of the towers.  The area was surrounded by fences, tourists walking around, and people selling t-shirts and tchotchkes.  It was a strange and surreal experience standing there by the fence with nothing particular to say or do once we got there.  It had become more tourist site than memorial at that time.  Yet it was an important moment, this finally seeing it for ourselves, and understanding how big the area was.

I don't remember if we wept or if we prayed, or if we just walked around and looked.  I do remember that it changed us.

When I was younger, particularly, but really for a lifetime, I can remember instances where people were talking about how they remember where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy was shot or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.  I was born after both of those instances.  But I could tell that there was something important about sharing those memories.  For my generation, we had a bit of this with the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.  I remember that I was in science class at school when I heard about it.  But for us, really, it's now 9/11 that holds this strange fixed moment in our cultural consciousness.  I think it's true not just for us, but maybe a bit more so, since we aren't old enough to have experienced those tragic deaths of JFK and MLK, much less the World War II moments that still loom large for that greatest generation.

My story of 9/11/01 is intricately woven with the beginning of my ministry.  I was in my first month of ministry, fresh out of seminary.  I had started about a week into August, and the Sunday following 9/11/01 would be our ingathering  Sunday, the official start to the church year.  I was at home in my new Houston apartment when I got a call from our music director.  She asked me if I had heard the news, if I had my television on.  I hadn't.  I remember her saying, "The World Trade Center is gone.  It' gone."  I turned on my television as she told me the news.  And she asked me, "Do you think we should have a vigil this evening?"  I said, "I'm not sure, I'll call you back in a few with a decision.  Let me process this."

Two more calls from church members followed in rapid succession to make sure I had heard the news and to find out if we would have a service.  By the second one, I said yes, and started to make all the plans -- called the music director to start planning the musical elements, called the president to start the phone tree so that people would get the news, and had somebody calling the television stations to get us on the list of services. 

In my memory it was that very day, but perhaps it was the next day, that I had a meeting with the local Houston-area UU ministers.  What a blessing that was.  They shared resources that they had been thinking about for vigils and for the following Sunday: Annie Dillard, Anne Frank, Adrienne Rich. 

I get the vigil we had and the following Sunday conflated in my memory.  I know at the Sunday service we had our usual water communion.  And I remember somebody bringing water from their trip to the World Trade Center.  Whether it was actual water from there or symbolic water, I can't tell you.  To me, it was water that came from the World Trade Center, and it was there with us in our water communion.  I've carried that water as part of our water communion since -- I took some water from that water communion with me to my next congregation, and to the one that followed (my current congregation), and saved water from year to year.  The World Trade Center is still there in the drops of water we pour every year into our common bowl at our water communion. 

Other things I remember from those services are that we had a fireman in our congregation who shared the Fireman's Prayer with us, and that even as far away as Houston, there were people with connections at the Pentagon and in New York City.  We shared with the entire country the pain, the fear, and the longing to get up and go and be of some help as we watched the endless process to try to find survivors and identify the dead unfold through our television sets.

This was the beginning of my ministry as a UU minister.  And that I ministered through this time is still one of my biggest accomplishments as a minister.  Nothing in seminary had prepared us for this situation.  Those of us who were new in the field had had no training on how to craft a vigil after 9/11, how to minister to the fear and pain that was a national experience like this, how to be a non-anxious presence when the entire country was feeling the most anxiety it had ever felt in our lifetime.  We were new and green in a raw and earth-shattering moment. 

I didn't do everything perfectly, I know.  I remember the competing tensions even then about patriotism and religion -- Do we sing "God Bless America"?  Do we use a flag print cloth as our altar cover?  But as I look back now as a minister with ten years experience, and open the files and read my words from that time in 2001, I wouldn't do anything differently.  It was real and genuine.  I'll be using some of those same resources my Houston colleagues shared with me from 2001 in 2011, and am still grateful for what I learned from them on that September day.  

There are a lot of people who have written a lot of wise words about how to talk to children about 9/11.  I'm not a child psychologist, or a teacher, or an expert on trauma.  I am a parent, though, and ultimately every parent has to handle this themselves, whether or not they are also a a child psychologist, teacher, or trauma expert.

So I talked to my child about 9/11 today on the way to school in the car.  She was born a few years after 9/11/01, so it wasn't something that had really come up before.  But we had switched the radio from NPR to her favorite music station--the one that plays all the pre-teen pop songs--and they were talking about 9/11.  So I just asked her, "Do you know what they're talking about when people are talking about 9-11 or September 11th?"  She didn't.  So I told her, in simple terms, that on September 11th, ten years ago, before she was born, some men, which we call terrorists, had taken over some planes, using knives, and wanted to kill everyone, so they flew the planes into buildings and crashed them, and that they did this with three planes, and two of the buildings, the World Trade Center or "Twin Towers" had completely collapsed, and a lot of people had died on that day.  And then I just answered her questions -- she's pretty bold about asking questions.  And that let me know where her thoughts were.  And I made sure to tell her two things -- first, that this was why they check people over a lot more now before we go on airplanes, so that would keep us safer, and, secondly, that there were a lot of people who were heroes on that day, like some people on a fourth plane who stopped that plane from hitting a fourth building. 

Her questions were:
Why do people want to remember this now, and talk about it?
Why did those people want to crash the planes?
Why did they hate us?

Ten years is a long time when you're not ten yet.  However, explaining why we want to remember, when people are still sad, is easy to do for a kid who has done funerals for her pets.  Answering "Why did they hate us?" on a car ride to school is less easy.  I told her that I didn't really completely understand this, either. 

How do we explain acts of violence to our children?  It's definitely not easy.  I'm still working on this one.  Meanwhile what I want her to know at her age, the age of nightmares, is that we've worked to make things safer, and that most people on that day acted in good ways, and that's a big part of what we want to remember.

Almost two weeks ago, a blogger going by "Wondertwisted" wrote a blog post titled A 'Dear John' Letter to Unitarian Universalism.  (Her real name appears to be "Cindy" based on the responses to the post, but since I'm a Cindy, that's confusing, so we'll call her "WT.")  In her post, WT outlines the reasons why she's leaving Unitarian Universalism.  The blog post immediately got a lot of my colleagues talking about it, mostly on Facebook as they posted up the piece.  I've been thinking about WT's post since then, and am still not really ready to put out a full response, but here goes for a bit anyway.

I understand what it is my colleagues are saying when they are sympathizing with Wondertwisted.  They see in her post a desire for a deeper spiritual experience in Unitarian Universalism.  It's connected to the "Language of Reverence" discussions that went around a few years ago and the "Whose Are We" discussions the UUMA has started.  The recent UU World piece by David Bumbaugh articulated this neatly, as well. 

I also understand the yearning for a Unitarian Universalism that is more embracing of its Christian past.  I serve a church with a high percentage of UU Christians, and I'm the child of UU Christians, and I think it's very important to create a religious atmosphere in UU churches that is welcoming and embracing of UU Christians.  And I know that there are UU churches where UU Christians have felt the atmosphere to be hostile to their beliefs.  I've heard this from a family member, for one thing.  I've worked hard to discourage this kind of attitude whenever I've seen it.  And I know some see in WT an articulating of how hostile our churches can sometimes be.

I read Wondertwisted a little differently, however.  First of all, I'd like to say that while I want Unitarian Universalism to grow, I don't envision a world wherein everyone becomes Unitarian Universalist.  It's well and good that people are different religions--I like religious diversity in the world.  So I don't mourn that UCC members are members of the UCC and not the UUA.  That's great that the UCC is there and that we have so much in common with them.  And I think UU churches are sometimes a stopping point for religious wanderers on their way to somewhere else.  That's okay with me, too.  Not everybody who walks through our doors is really going to find that Unitarian Universalism is what that person is looking for.  And a lot of what people are looking for and not finding in our church is something a lot more Christian than what we are. 

So there are UU Christians and there are UUs who are not Christian and there are Christians who are not UU.  And it's good that there are all these categories.

I think Wondertwisted may be, as she describes herself, a "Unitarian Christian," but she's not a UU Christian, and it's great that she's figured that out and gone off to somewhere where they are more Christian and maybe less Unitarian, but more what she's looking for.  Let me explain.

It's comes down to this passage:

I was at a UU leadership function. I met a really smart, really energetic and sweet guy. The kind of guy that any church elder or pastor would love to recruit onto the board. He volunteered his path to me: “I’m a Buddhist-Humanist,” he said. Then he took a swig of fair trade coffee while I told every particle of my being that, no, I would NOT roll my eyes.

You can’t be a Buddhist-Humanist. You just can’t.

Here's the thing: Yes, you can.  And that's part of what Unitarian Universalism is about.  She says, "Be a Buddhist or a Humanist and do the work, because I suspect that claiming a hybrid philosophy might have something to do with wanting to be “spiritual” without the messy work of transformation."  But sometimes "doing the work" of theology is in studying and understanding multiple religious traditions and understanding that each of them have to be adapted in some way to fit with one's own spiritual beliefs.  I know there are critics of Building Your Own Theology out there, but I think it had a lot of things right.  In Unitarian Universalism we do pick and choose and create hybrid theologies.  And in many cases this is because we have "done the work" -- a lot more so than your average non-hybrid-believer.  By way of example, a recent Pew study showed that atheists know a lot more about religion than the average believer. 

It's frankly very easy to see how a UU can be a Buddhist-Humanist.  Those two faith traditions have a lot in common.  And neither Buddhism nor Humanism is a dead, unchanging, ungrowing thing.  They both have flexibility in them.  But one who sees the definitions of Humanism or Buddhism as so rigid that one can't find a home in both?  Well, it's not surprising to me to hear that person doesn't feel at home in Unitarian Universalism.

Not everyone is comfortable with ambiguity, with gray areas, with the lack of rigid definitions, of course.  I often say that what makes UU Christians and UU Buddhists and UU Pagans and UU Humanists all UU is that we all believe we don't have all of the answers, and that we can learn from one another.  We believe in the value of coming together in religious diversity and sharing our religious journeys. 

So blessings on your journey, Wondertwisted.  I'm glad you've figured out where your religious home is.  And it's okay that it's not us. 

As many of you may be aware, I have my bachelor's and an M.A. in English literature, and I often teach introduction to composition at the local community college in addition to ministry.  I'm teaching again this fall, and am thinking over my point of view about pronouns, specifically the use of "they" as a singular gender-neutral third-person pronoun.

My previous perspective had been that I was there to teach them to abide by the MLA style, and that the MLA style did not (yet) allow for the singular use of "they."  Therefore, I have been marking this as a pronoun/noun error on papers for years.  As far as I can determine, the MLA, Chicago, and APA style manuals all still recommend "he or she" or "he/she" or making the subject plural.  The Chicago Style Manual states:

A singular antecedent requires a singular referent pronoun. Because he is no longer accepted as a generic pronoun referring to a person of either sex, it has become common in speech and in informal writing to substitute the third-person plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves, and the nonstandard singular themself. While this usage is accepted in casual contexts, it is still considered ungrammatical in formal writing.

 The Chicago Style Manual recommends all the usual work-arounds: "he or she," plural subjects, imperative mood, rewrite the noun, revise the sentence, etc.  I couldn't find as clear a statement out of the MLA or APA, but my understanding is that they offer the same options.  The textbook I'm using for my class, The Little Seagull Handbook, offers these same work-arounds. 

My job, as I saw it, was to teach them to learn to use the MLA style and their handbook, and so I followed its rules.

However, there is one big problem with the he/she-type work-around: it leaves out people who do not use male or female pronouns to describe themselves.  And in the transgender community, use of alternative pronouns is becoming more common, particularly use of "zhe" or "hir."  Not everyone considers themselves as someone either male or female--we don't all fit neatly into two little boxes.  I could have students list all the pronouns, but as awkward as "he or she" is, certainly something like "he, she, zhe, or hir" would be more awkward. 

There's an interesting story here about how we took a situation that was understood as sexist--the use of "he" to mean people of all genders--and then created a popular usage, "he or she," that was still discriminatory.  And the grammar handbooks are still fighting the first problem and sometimes not even acknowledging the second one.  For example, the Little Seagull Handbook says, "Sexist language is language that stereotypes or ignores women or men... Writers once used he, him, and other pronouns as a default to refer to people whose sex was unknown to them...  Use both masculine and feminine pronouns joined by or."  The Chicago Manual of Style similarly gives this as an option without recognition of the justice problem that it creates in section 5.225--Nine techniques for achieving gender neutrality: "Use he or she (sparingly)."

There's one clear answer to this justice problem, and it's the one they all avoid: "they."  I try to avoid it in formal writing, but I do it in speech all the time.  It's being used commonly in speech, and grammar rules should follow usage, not dictate usage, is one argument.  It's a similar situation, one can argue, to what happened with the word "you."  "You" was originally a plural pronoun, and the singular was "thou."  Now we use a plural pronoun as a singular one with no issue, except for the need to create a new plural such as y'all.  (Heavens, let's hope we don't get a "th'all" emerging!)

We don't really, however, use "they" in a complete singular way.  We switch our sentences mid-stream to plural.  So we don't take the sentence, "A student can use whichever pronoun he or she wants" and replace "he or she" with "they" and say, "A student can use whichever pronoun they wants."  We say, rather, "A student can use whichever pronoun they want."  We change the verb there at the end to reflect the fact that "they" is a plural pronoun.  If I'm allowing for a singular "they" it should be followed by a singular verb, yes?  But that's not what we're doing in speech.  And we're not going to drop "he" or "she" as pronouns anytime soon and just move to totally using they and having plural verbs for singular subjects.  So it's still all mixed up.

I've explained all this to my students, and told them that I want them to learn to use the style recommended and that I think this will change in the next few years and the style manuals will accept "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, but until they do, I want them to be aware of how they're using their pronouns and follow the style manual.

But I'm swayed now by the justice argument.  I was told of a situation in which the University of Michigan, my alma mater, dealt with this in a policy and ended up rewriting the sentences to avoid "he or she" or the singular "they" in order to be both grammatically and politically correct, when the justice advocates and the rhetoricians couldn't agree.  The UU Ministers Association, I learned recently, embraces the singular "they" as a solution. 

I would like to allow my students to use the singular "they," but at the same time I want them to be aware of what they're doing.  I'm thinking of some sort of solution where they indicate their awareness through asterisks or brackets or italics: they, *they*, [they].  That would show they're aware of the singular pronoun, and I would like them to be.  But that's as disruptive to the eye, on an aesthetic level, as people would think something like "z/s/he" would be. 

So what will I do?  I think, in the end, there's only one solution: explain it all, but let the student do whatever they want.  There's still no reason I can't crack down on apostrophes.  Thank goodness, because as fond as I was of pointing out pronoun/noun disagreements, the apostrophes are where my real passion is. 

A few months ago, as Borders closed some of its stores, I wrote this blog post.  This week we get the word that Borders is completely liquidating and will be no more. 

When I came to Jackson, Michigan, seven years ago, we had several small bookstores.  None of them were great.  Almost all of them are now out of business.   What's gone?  Best Books in Jackson Crossing, a small bookstore in a strip mall on West Ave., another small bookstore that was on West Ave. (I can't even remember their names), the Nomad Bookstore on Mechanic (which both came and went during these years), and now, we'll see the Waldenbooks in Jackson Crossing close, as well.

Where can you buy a book, other than online, in town?

• You can buy textbooks at Baker College and Jackson Community College.
• You can buy Christian books at Agape in Jackson Crossing.
• You can buy children's books at the Toy House and a lesser number at Toys R Us.
• You can buy comic books at Nostalgia, Ink. 
• You can buy used books at the Jackson Book Exchange.
• And you can buy bestsellers at Meijer, Target, and I think K-Mart and Wal-Mart (I seldom shop at these two). 

Honestly, our book selection won't be much different with Waldenbooks gone -- which perhaps was part of the problem.  The real loss was the Nomad, which carried a somewhat different selection from all the rest, although it was still not the selection I was usually looking for. 

But since we don't have much selection here, much less a bookstore with a comfy chair to curl up in, I did most of my book shopping in Ann Arbor or Lansing.  In Ann Arbor, there were three big Borders a year ago, and one Barnes and Noble.  I suspect that Barnes and Noble will become very overrun unless another big store pops up in town.  Ann Arbor, you would think, could support at least one more bookstore in town.  Hopefully Barnes and Noble or Books-a-Million will seize the opportunity.  Meanwhile, I may head to Lansing, which still has all of its big bookstores -- two Barnes and Nobles, and, even better, two Schuler's Books.  I've just discovered they have weekly online coupons, which makes them more price-competitive, and they're locally owned--like Borders once was.


*sigh*  I will miss it.  Goodbye, Ann Arbor institution.

For the record, I'm not really opinionated about what is being called the "hot mess" -- the resignation of two members of the GA Planning Committee. I don't know enough about the internal politics of the GAPC or the UUA Board to really weigh in on the issue.  Kim Hampton's post about the roll of worship and the SLT in the Justice GA is informed and informative.  And I think Tom Schade is right on point to say, "It's always useful to remember that the future hasn't happened yet."

I am opinionated about the "Justice GA," on the other hand.  And I know for every person who was sitting in the Plenary Hall when we voted for a "Justice GA" there was a separate opinion, and not all of our expectations can be met.  Half of us probably think that there should be a Service of the Living Tradition, and half of us don't.  Half of us think there should be an exhibit hall, and half of us don't.  And the half that do and the half that don't for each item are a mix of those interested in the idea of the Justice GA and those that aren't. But I know this: there are a lot of people who've never gone to at GA before who are considering going to this one, because they understand that this year our denomination is doing something important and meaningful and different.  There are people who can only go a GA once in a while who are making a special point to be at this one.  The energy and excitement about the possibilities are high.

What we voted on was, to my mind, instead of doing business and usual and in lieu of cancelling or moving the 2012 General Assembly, to have a Justice GA where business as usual was minimized.  My fear is that "business as usual" will be taken to mean only the actual business of the General Assembly -- the business resolutions, Actions of Immediate Witness, and other such business of the plenary. 

On the other hand, I am also concerned that for people with mobility issues there will be nothing that they can attend if more and more is focused on off-site justice work.  I'm personally dedicating myself to starting to learn Spanish this year in preparation for the Justice GA, as suggested to us in one of this year's Responsive Resolution--this represents a real investment of both time and money, neither of which I have a lot to spare. 

And at the same time, I'm worried that I won't be able to even attend GA because I don't handle a lot of heat well, nor a lot of walking and standing, and if everything involves a combination of the two, it will be extremely difficult for me.  This year and past years have been a "hot mess" for me when it comes to how we handle accessibility.  During one GA (Ft. Worth), I very badly sprained my ankle -- it dislocated and then popped back into place in the process.  I needed help with mobility.  The planning for GA didn't include extra scooters; I was very lucky that one person who had ordered one had never shown up.  This year, when our Standing on the Side of Love rally was a bit of a hike in the hot weather, I heard the announcement that if we needed to take a cab, we could get reimbursed later (already not the best system), and that cabs would be waiting outside the conference center.  I didn't hear that it was at a different door, so I followed the crowd out the side door -- no cabs.  I went back in and found out where I was supposed to go, and went out -- no cabs were waiting.  This was not a particularly well-orchestrated initiative, from my point of view.  It's very important for the Justice GA to remember that what is a "short walk" for one person in a huge obstacle for another, particularly in heat that many are not used to dealing with.

So, with all that said, here's what I, personally, would love to see:

• No exhibit hall.  It's become more and more pointless anyway.  All of these agencies can be found online.  We can shop online, and we can see their justice issues online.  Instead, create a virtual exhibit hall that people can visit from anywhere.
• A Justice Hall instead.  If people need downtime and a place to wander or socialize, give them small tasks to do, like letters to write to elected officials. 
• One or two workshop slots only.  There may be some workshops that are essential to hold, or exiting lecturers that we really want to feature, and there can be a some large justice-oriented workshops on how to build a movement, how to do social justice, how to engage cooperatively with other organizations, ARAOM work, etc.  
• Instead of workshop slots, we have justice slots.  As for the all-justice slots, I would like to see not just large social justice rallies in these spots, but places where small groups go off into different parts of the area to work with local organizations on different projects.  There needs to be great variety.  And this probably means a sort of schedule where we commit to what we're doing in advance.  And it means buses. 
• I would like to see the following cornerstone elements of GA: the Ware Lecture, the Service of the Living Tradition, and the Sunday morning worship service (which I would love to be the SLT again, but that's a whole other argument).  I think all can be themed around this justice work, and all are important to what makes up a General Assembly.  For the newcomers to GA, they would give the important taste of what GA is usually about.
• All Reports -- all reports -- given in written and video ahead of time and no reports -- no reports -- presented verbally during plenaries.  We can do our homework ahead of time.  
• A single plenary session to deal with all remaining business that we haven't been able to put off or voted this year to do next year.
• Yes, more worship.  When we can't be doing justice work, we should be praying, singing, and celebrating.
• I would like to see Ministry Days themed around the Justice GA in the following ways: a Berry Street Address that's on theme; minimal business; a group action project; drop the "collegial conversations" element in favor of group social action; drop the usual conversation with the UUA President in favor of having him lead us in justice work as well.

Most of all, I want this experience to be meaningful and transformative for me and for our movement.

Obviously I'm not going to get all my wishes.  Nor is anybody else.  Meanwhile, let's have patience and understanding with the Board and Planning Committee as they do the hard work of creating a GA experience unlike any other.

It turns out I was over-thinking the maps option.  I had created a page called "Directions" which had the address and phone number and an embedded customized Google map of  the church in it (200x300 pixels).  This was entirely workable.  Someone could change the size of the map and move it up & down and so forth, to see what they wanted to see.  It was pretty much like this:


View Larger Map

But this wasn't what I really wanted.  I wanted to click on it and have the option pop up of going to my navigation app on the phone.

I discovered that if I clicked on the (plain text--no hyperlink) address itself that I had typed above the embedded map, I would get such a pop-up asking if I wanted to do that.  But this wasn't intuitive enough and some people might not know their phones work this way (and some phones might not do it, for all I know).

Then this weekend someone sent me directions to an event using Mapquest. When I went to print the directions, Mapquest asked me if I wanted to send the directions by text message to my phone.  When I did this, and the text message had a simple link.  When I tried clicking on that link, I had the option of using my navigation app or going to the browser.  Unfortunately, when I clicked navigation, it didn't work right -- it didn't put in the address.  When I went to the browser, however, I was then able to go back over to the navigation app and have the address appear in there to navigate to.

So I tried just putting a Mapquest link to the church on the mobile Directions page that was like this:  MAP.  My phone, when I clicked on it, didn't offer me the navigation app option.  So much for that. But it did take me to a very nice little Mapquest mobile version (which I do have to say seemed to offer more choices than Google's). 

So then I went back to Google, wondering what would happen if I just linked to the map rather than embedding it, like this:  MAP.  Success!  Clicking on it offered me the directions of going to Google's very nice mobile version of their map, or using my app.  I switched my directions page on the Mobile home page to be linked to the map, rather than linked to a page with the link on it, and it's done! 

Moral of the story: Whether you have a mobile version of your church webpage or not, instead of embedding the map, it would be good to provide a link to the Google map (or do both).  That way mobile users--at least those with Android phones like mine--will have the option of getting their navigation app to give them directions on how to get to your church as they drive there.  And even if it doesn't, Google will automatically route them to a mobile version of their map, which will be sized more appropriately for the phone than your embedded map is.

Why?

Some time ago I installed a button from Extreme Tracking on the bottom of my church website, inconspicuously, I hoped.  I don't pay for the service, so I only get the free version, which tells me about the last twenty people to visit the website.  At the time, I was noticing the diversity of browsers people were using--the usage had changed from almost exclusively Internet Explorer to a diversity of browsers with Explorer representing the largest percentage, but less than half, and Firefox hot on its heels.  The big question then was how to design a page such that it looked good at different resolutions and through different browsers.  That was just a couple of years ago.  Earlier this week when I looked at data on the last twenty users, six were from mobile phones (one of which I could rule out as mine).  With one-fourth of the users looking at the website from mobiles, I knew I needed a church webpage that was friendlier to mobile usage.  I suspect that mobile phone users are more likely to be "seekers" than members, but I have no data to back that up, except that I could see search terms and know that some were coming from Google, some from my blog page, and some were going to the site directly.

So this week I've been working on a mobile version of the webpage.  It's available at http://www.libertyuu.org/mobile, if you want to check it out.  (Our regular page, for comparison, is at http://www.libertyuu.org, although I hope to redesign it next week because I'm pretty unhappy with its look currently.)  I suggest you check the mobile site out on a phone, as that's what it's made for, and it looks strange on a PC.  I don't yet have the script in place that would automatically route mobile users to it, but am working toward that goal.  And there's a big question about iPad and other tablet users, whether they should be directed to the mobile site or the full site.

Content

I don't have any digital video or audio capability at my church, so both webpages are heavily text-based, and the mobile site more so, since I didn't want to direct them off too often to outside pages.  The goal here was to keep information as brief as possible, and put up the things that seekers would most want to find.  Brevity is not my strong suit, as anyone who knows me can attest to, so I'm still working on trimming it down.  But I finally settled on nine links: Sunday Services, Directions, Religious Education, Social Justice, Newsletter, Beliefs, Shop, Phone, and More Information.  I figured that what seekers want to know is when, where, and what they'd be getting from us, so "Worship" tells the "when," "Directions" (and "Phone") tells the "where," and all the rest are the key pieces for the "what" -- worship, religious education, social justice, and newsletter.  The "More Information" lists staff members and the church e-mail and phone (again).  "Shop" lets people go through our Amazon Associates account to shop on Amazon.com, guessing that some people might do this from their phones (although maybe, like me, they go through their Amazon apps, so this might have little appeal).  There's a lot on our regular webpage that there's no link to here -- staff bios, church history, sermons, forms, by-laws.  All that is stuff I'm guessing the average mobile user doesn't need.  But I do intend to go back and add a link to the full site.  And then, at the bottom, I have links to our Facebook page, Twitter, and all the icons that usually appear to tell people we're welcoming, accessible, etc.  The other icons are all linked to a page that explains what they all are.

How to Do This:

The biggest question for me in doing this wasn't the question of what content to put on the page, but how to make what I call "the box" -- how to size my page correctly so that it's the right size for mobile phones.  This is particularly complicated since mobile phones have a wide range of screen sizes.   My father, William Landrum, is my tech support, but he hadn't done this before either, so we went through some trial and error before we got it to where I think it's right for most phones.  It turns out it's not so much about creating a page where we create everything in a small box.  When we did that, we got a phone screen where all the date was in a smaller box on the corner of the phone screen.  The key is having a piece in there that tells the phone that this is designed for it.  In the code, before head, even before where it says html, it says:

{?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?}
{!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd"}

except that { and } are lesser-than and greater-than symbols -- I can't seem to type them in my blog without it becoming the code.  I'm too lazy right now to figure out the work-around which I assume is pretty simple although complicated to Google, so I'm going this route. If you look at the code on the page, you'll see everything easily.  It's in pretty-straight-forward html without bells and whistles.  Anyway, that code does the trick, and the webpage is sized correctly.  As long as whatever tables (and the cells in the table) you're using don't have a specified width or height, everything will wrap to fit on the mobile screen.  Then it's just a matter of designing it such that you're not putting too much text up there, so that people don't have to scroll too much.  You do want fonts and icons bigger than usual to make them easier to tap on.  I'm going with font sized 5 (18pt), and it's workable, although perhaps still on the small side for larger fingers.  My icons on the bottom are sized about 32 pixels high, and again they're on the small side to easily tap on. 

One trick we've learned is that just like you can make a link on e-mail addresses that opens up an e-mail program to send mail, you can make a link that will have people's phones go straight to their dialer.  This is something that often really irritates me when browsing the web on my phone, that I can't just tap on the phone and have the phone dial.  It turns out it's because people haven't coded the phone number to do so, because they're assuming browsing from a PC, where you can look at the number and pick up your phone and dial it while still looking at the number.  I can't count the number of times I've had to search for something to write on while holding my phone, so that I could dial and look at the phone number at the same time (no, I can't remember a ten digits easily, and that may be true for more people than you think, especially with a small child in the back of the car making all sorts of noise).  So even if you don't design a mobile webpage, go to your existing page and hyperlink your phone number, people.  Inside the angle brackets just type something that looks like a href="tel:5175294221", only with your phone number instead of my church's.  It's that simple.  Can you believe that every company isn't doing this?  Ridiculous, when you think about it.  But, like many of us, they're not realizing yet that a) a lot of their traffic is coming from phones and b) those people want to call for information or reservations or something, and c) it's this easy!  Yes, if you're using an app to find your restaurant or other business, the app will often do this.  But sometimes people search through a browser, too--and maybe more often for a church than for a restaurant. Can you tell I feel strongly about this?  Nobody is clicking on your phone number from their phone hoping to be able to write it down on paper and use it later.  They're happy it goes straight to the dialer, where they can hit "send" or they can save it in their contacts for later.  Trust me.

Now, if only I could figure out how to link the address such that it opens up their navigation app, I'd be set.  And, sadly, the Twitter and Facebook go to the mobile browser version, not to the often nicer apps.  I want to put a link up for Gowalla and Foursquare to our locations, although this will have the same issue.  And I'm thinking adding a "like" button for Facebook and a "+1" button for Google wouldn't hurt, either, although then I'm getting into space limitations again.  And then if the church gets a Google+ presence, there'll be that to deal with, too.

Ironically, what takes up the most space is the name of my church -- Universalist Unitarian Church of East Liberty.  It wraps to take up three lines of space once I put it next to a chalice picture.  For a seeker site, I don't like the acronym option, so I think I'm stuck with it, but it's wasted space on a phone.  That's something that, for example, Micah's Porch or our local nondenominational Westwinds has right.  I remember when the first church I served, the Northwest Community Unitarian Universalist Church, whose acronym is nearly as long as "Westwinds," took a vote, which narrowly failed, to change their name.  I can't remember for sure what the other option was (a lot had been discussed, and this is ten years ago now), but I think it was "Harmony Church."  I'm guessing when any of you are designing a mobile page you'll be wishing, as I do, for a name more like "Harmony Church" and less like "First Unitarian Universalist Society of Eastern Suburb of Big City."  I appreciate the desire to have our heritage and denomination present in our naming of ourselves, and I wouldn't propose going through a name change, having seen how difficult a subject it is, but never has it been more awkward than in designing for a screen about 200 pixels wide.

Well, that's all there is to it.  I appreciate comments & suggestions for improvement, and am happy to answer questions if I know the answer.  I've often felt like saying, however, in my best Bones McCoy voice (if I had one, which I don't--really), "Damn it, Jim, I'm a minister, not a website designer!"

In Part 1 of this series I wrote about a proposal being generated through blog discussion about shorter sermons tied to social media in new ways.  In Part 2 I wrote about some of the limitations as I see it.  The main take-away there is that while some populations of some churches may be ready for this, others are not over the threshold yet.  The problem is that we're on a cusp right now, where some "digital natives" are ready for something different, not everyone is comfortable with the use of it.  As you go up by age/generation, a smaller percentage of people are using social networking. 



So what can we do?  Well, there's still a lot.  I think for now it still means that for many congregations, having a physical space in which one holds worship is still necessary, and the cornerstone of that service is still the sermon.  And, at the same time, the UUA General Assembly changed the definition of congregation such that this is no longer the only way (except for CLF) to be a congregation. The possibilities of what that can look like are endless.  And social media is evolving so quickly that whatever one creates right now has to be dynamic and flexible.  This week, for example, I got on Google+ for the first time.  Will it make other social networks obsolete?  Will it be a big failure?  Only time will tell. 

What I can do, right now, is dependent upon what will be supported by my congregation and has the most ability to be attractive to newcomers, as well.  We don't have a critical mass on Twitter or MySpace, and responding to blog posts is sporadic but increasing.  Facebook conversation, however, is plentiful.  So what is possible is putting out, primarily through blog and Facebook, a conversation starter leading into the worship service that helps shape and inform it, and after the worship service putting out some summary that continues the conversation.  This could be tied into a way to also have this conversation in a physical space before and after, for those wanting the face-to-face connection.  We have no way to record audio or video digitally at the church--when we do, it's with borrowed equipment--so that remains in the future dreams list.  The degree to which social media shapes the worship, then, is the degree to which people participate in these types of forums.

What I think is that for a time, this is going to look like not much happening.  But eventually, it has the power to shape and transform worship.  What it amounts to now is just an opening up and demystifying of the process--less of me going into the office and shutting the door and emerging with a worship service like Athena coming fully-formed out of Zeus' head, and more like writing with a bunch of people chatting around me in a coffee shop and sometimes stopping by the table.  Can I write that way?  Time will tell.  I've gotten lots of practice by having a child popping in constantly -- about ten times while writing this blog post alone.  Having constructive adults popping into the conversation should be a welcome change.

Phil Lund suggested we turn the sermon inside-out.  I'm not doing that yet, but the first step to turning something inside-out is opening it up and showing the center.  That's where I propose starting for now.

So in my last post I talked about a proposal being generated to look at worship, particularly the sermon, in a new way in the light of social networking.  I think it's worth noting that the authors of the three posts I cited are all people who are not full-time solo ministers with the corresponding preaching schedule that such demands, and that Dan Harper, who comes the closest to that role in his role as Associate Minister, is in a large church with presumably some staff, and in Silicon Valley, as well.  What he describes seems less doable in a small country church such as I serve.  So here's what I see as the limitations to the model he proposes:

1.  Podcasting/Live streaming/any audio or video component -- Much as I love the idea of it, I don't have the technology for it.  And should I have the technology, I still don't have the tech support that I personally would need.  I could acquire the know-how to do it all on my own, given the technology, but right now that's beyond me.

2.  Level of feedback/discussion -- right now, when I do post a sermon on my blog, or just on blog posts in general, I'm getting one or two comments, at most, and often times none, from members of my congregation.  I think that some would be interested in the types of discussions Harper suggests, but it'd be hit or miss on participation.  In a small church there just might not be the critical mass to have this kind of discussion going.

3.  Receptivity -- My cell phone has no bars at my church.  Now, I'm on the comparatively lousy Sprint network, and I know some church members have better coverage at my church, but not all of them.  So Twittering during the service is narrowed down from just the people with phones that can tweet to people with phones that can tweet who aren't on roaming.

3.  Accessibility -- I'm guessing about 75% of my church is on e-mail and Facebook, and another 10% are on e-mail but no other social media, but the other 15% (mostly seniors) are not online at all.  (All numbers pure guesses, although I could go person-by-person and get real stats later.)  If the entire nature of a sermon is changed such that it doesn't feel complete without online participation, what does that mean for the 15%?

This brings me to the expectations.  Both Lund & Wells talk about the changing expectations for a sermon.  Wells talks about thinking that if he were to give a 20-minute sermon that people would be fact-checking his data on their smart phones.  I regularly give 15-20 minute sermons (I think my average is more like 15 minutes, really), and have yet to have someone whipping out the phone and telling me my information was wrong.  Sure, I do occasionally get a fact wrong.  But that culture hasn't pervaded the sanctuary yet.  The assumption of both Lund and Wells is that people are wanting something different out of their sermon than the model we've been using for hundreds of years.  I think that they're right for the percentage of the culture that is digital natives, but the question is when has an individual church reached that point?  My church, I'm feeling, is not there yet.  People generally seem to like the longer sermons (to a point), and when the sermons are shorter and there are more other elements in the service, I get more complaints.  So my reality is not matching with what the new media guys are suggesting. Of course, and here's the rub: maybe the people who want something different are not coming, and our adherence to old forms is limiting growth.  Is it?  Quite possibly.

And so, with those limitations & expectations  in mind, next I will address what I think the evolving model could looks like, and what I think is currently possible in a small, low-tech church.

An interesting conversation has been going on in the UU blogosphere starting with Scott Wells at Boy in the Bands, then with Dan Harper at Yet Another Unitarian Universalist, and finally Phil Lund at Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie.  All three are UU ministers--Scott Wells works for the Sunlight Foundation; Dan Harper is the Associate Minister for Religious Education at the UU Church of Palo Alto; Phil Lund is on staff at the Prairie Star District of the UUA. 

Diving in--the original notion that Scott Wells posted is that in a digital age, the sermon is too long.  He writes, "It made sense in a education- and resource-poor (and frankly, entertainment-poor) age, but if I held forth for twenty minutes or more every Sunday, I expect to be regularly challenged (perhaps mentally, and in an unspoken way) by people who would Google for facts during my oratory."  Phil Lund echoes this: "Thing one: settling into a cozy pew for an hour or so to listen to a ripping good sermon may once have been considered a relatively inexpensive way to be entertained on a Sunday morning, but nowadays if I want to listen to someone talk about something on Sunday (or any day), all I need to do is logon to the interwebs and visit TED.com…for free."

Scott Wells suggests a different model: "It might make sense for a minister to preach briefly — tightly, eloquently, perhaps around a single point — to the “live congregation” and have it spelled out later in another way. Not print necessarily, but perhaps a podcast or video, or forgoing these perhaps a live event more in common with an interview or discussion than fighting with hymns and prayers for attention."  Dan Harper spells out some concrete steps he's proposing in response: posting a reading on a sermon blog on Thursday; on Sunday before worship post the text of the sermon, along with links; give a hashtag for twitter conversation for during and after worship; stream the worship service live; continue conversation after on the blog.  Phil Lund shares these thoughts and suggests turning the sermon inside-out, a process he promises to describe soon in an upcoming post.

That's all by way of background.  I'll post my response soon, as well.

*amended 8:31pm 7/8/11 to reflect Harper's title correctly.  Sorry!

Just FYI, the UUA is in the process of designing a UU app.  A couple of weeks ago they put out a page where you can submit ideas.  As is often the case, however, I can't find it easily by searching for it through the UUA's page.  Problem number one is that "phone" and "app" are too common.  "Submit ideas for mobile phone app" doesn't turn it up, either.  Fortunately, I have found it for you.  It's at http://www.uua.org/about/184350.shtml. 

But, if you can't wait to see what the UUA will turn out, the Church of the Larger Fellowship just put out a very nice app, "Quest for Meaning."  The Android version is available; the iPhone version may still be "coming soon."  It was free when I downloaded it during GA, and features four options -- reading joys and sorrows, posting a joy or sorrow, lighting a chalice (along with a reading), and podcasts.  It's a nifty little thing.  I found it hard to located.  In my apps store, I searched under "Quest" and then under "Unitarian" and then finally found it by searching for either "Quest Unitarian" or "Quest Church of the Larger Fellowship" -- I can't remember which. 

This morning's plenary sessions at the UUA General Assembly dealt with several housekeeping bylaw changes (some of which will have to be voted on at next year's "Justice GA"), and the Actions of Immediate Witness.  Four AIMs were proposed, and three passed.  Interestingly, the one that didn't pass was on opposing the war in Afghanistan.  Arguments against ranged from that it's not an immediate issue (since it's been going on so long) to that it instructs us to instruct the people of Afghanistan in how to run their country, which is inappropriate.  It's significant to note that a similar AIM was rejected last year at the General Assembly.  But both of these also follow on the heels of the 2010 Statement of Conscience on Creating Peace.  AIMs have to pass by a 2/3 majority.  The AIM on the war was so close that our moderator had to call for the vote three times before it was clear that it didn't pass.  Those we did pass were on supporting supermarket workers in California, protesting the Peter King hearings on "Muslim radicalization," and opposing the "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision. One of those was by a pretty close margin. 

Later in the day, after I had already left, the General Assembly passed some interesting Responsive Resolutions.  Apparently I am urged to go learn Spanish, as are you.  Let's do that.  Seriously.  I'm sure I can take classes at JCC.  And next year at GA there will be no AIMs.  I think this might be something we're sorry about later, but hopefully not.  And then the following year and thereafter we're limited to 3 AIMs per year, rather than six, for the delegates to vote on.  What worries me about that is that I think the way we decide which ones go before the delegates are which ones get the most signatures, which may just mean that the ones proposed by the most efficient or persistent people, not really the most popular, are what we'll end up seeing.  This year, for example, I signed a petition for an AIM titled "Solidarity" that was on workers and unions, but it didn't apparently get enough signatures for us to see it in the plenary.  Was this because not enough delegates were interested in the subject, or because the person gathering signatures wasn't persistent enough?  I may never know.  So the AIM process is definitely problematic to begin with.  Hopefully the changes made today made it better, not worse.  I know others felt like the AIMs were not researched enough, and sometimes poorly written. But I don't see how lowering the number we can vote on improves that necessarily.  Nobody, I think, is reading the whole proposed AIM before signing the petition. 


Well, that's it for GA for this year.  I've left Charlotte.  Now we'll just have to see if I can learn enough Spanish plus do everything else we're urged to do to make ourselves ready for Phoenix next year.  It's a tall order, I think.  I'm already trying to figure out what will happen to my child in GA childcare if I'm arrested.  I think they add on an additional charge for every 5 minutes you're late picking up...  Meanwhile, send me the links to everything we're supposed to be doing to ready ourselves.  No, this isn't cynicism, I really do take this seriously, but let's also remember that there are people sometimes new to our movement and sometimes of limited means who join us at GA, and not be too high in our demands, too, okay?

As a Meadville Lombard Theological School alum, one of the regular GA events I attend is the Meadville Lombard alumni dinner.  After everything Meadville Lombard has been through this year, I wasn't sure what the mood would be of the room this year.  Often the event is a mixture of school pride, nostalgia as we hear 25 years and 50 years in the ministry speakers, and silliness as we hassle the president or scribe and bark (literally--it's a long story) our approval for various statements or motions. 

This year, after Meadville Lombard has sold its historic building and cancelled the plans to join with Andover Newton in forming a new theological university, and has now leased space in the Chicago loop area (location still mostly undisclosed, but alums are in the know now).  It's been such a whirlwind year that when you go to www.meadville.edu, you land now on their news page -- that's what they're putting first on the web, because it's so significant.  Compare that to the front page of Starr King's at www.sksm.edu -- you get the picture.

So what was the atmosphere?  We're mourning the loss of 5701 S. Woodlawn -- the Curtis Room, the Stairwell, the Stacks.  But beyond that, there's a cautious optimism.  I think the alumni are largely glad not to be worried about losing identity in this institution with Andover Newton, and glad for Meadville Lombard to be going it alone and to be self-sufficient.  We're also glad that there's now, finally, an answer to the question of where Meadville Lombard's physical home will be, and that it will be in Chicago.  Our reservations are mostly around things that have already been in place for a while -- the touch point program and the loss of the strong relationship to the University of Chicago that was there in days past.  The touch point program is a big change from the residential program most of us went through, but it's been going on a couple of years, and the students (as well as faculty and supporters) are speaking of it as a strong program that's meeting all their needs and doing what it needs to do. 

I was cautiously optimistic heading in.  I come out of the Meadville Lombard annual event much more hopeful and with a lighter heart. 

President Lee Barker invited us as alumni to come by 5701 this fall and say goodbye to the building.  I'm thinking I want to take him up on that.  It's only a three hour drive from Jackson to Chicago, so it would be easy to make it a day trip or an overnight trip.  They have a very nice blog for sharing memories of our home in Hyde Park, but I think I need to make the pilgrimage. 

There were only a couple of workshops on social media this year at General Assembly, and one of them was at the same time as another big lecture I wanted to attend the other day, so I happily grabbed the one today that was sandwiched between the plenary sections.  It was led by four ministers who talked about how they use social media.  What was really nice was that they all saw use of social media as a valid piece of ministry -- not just something they do on the side -- and they also talked about how it shows the congregation a different side of the minister, through seeing snarky blog posts or goofy cat videos or exposure to the different interests and social groups a minister interacts with.  And they all seemed to think this was largely positive for congregations to see this side of ministers.  As someone who has friended congregation members on Facebook, I have to agree.  My facebook friends see more of me than they would otherwise, and that's largely good.  (Although an amusing question came up about seeing the minister in online dating communities -- a question that's pretty touchy, considering the topics of discussion at UUMA these days.  For more on that, see my last few blog posts.) 

One fun thing about this workshop was seeing other people I know from social media and seeing them interact with each other, and then having our workshop itself interact with social media when one of the presenters took a picture of the crowd and posted it to Facebook.  The picture isn't wide enough to see me, but she tagged me anyway (I'm Facebook friends with 3/4 of the presenters), so if you're on Facebook with me, check it out.  We're all being flaming chalices for her.  (Please be aware that I don't friend UUs from other congregations unless I have a secondary connection with them in some way, like friends or relatives or working together on something where Facebook connection would facilitate things.)

Today the UUA General Assembly had one main issue before them in the short (comparatively) plenary session: to vote on the proposed Statement of Conscience on Ethical Eating.  There were two main debates that were held about the SOC.  The first was about the elephant in the UUA room: classism.  The proposal put before us in plenary included two lines that urged us to tell food sellers and producers that we will buy and pay more for ethically produced food.  One fellow from my own economically devastated state of Michigan urged people to vote against the SOC because of this.  He shared with the gathered delegates that while he wishes he could pay more for food to follow ethical eating guidelines, he's on food stamps.  As another person put it, it's all about the math. 

The second issue was around a sentence that says, "Minimally processed plant-based diets are healthier diets."  The complaint was that this speaks for everyone, and calls on all UUs to be vegetarian.  We heard from people saying that it's simply not true that vegetarian diets are better for everyone -- one woman spoke of her partner, a previously committed vegetarian, who was forced to add meat to her diet to survive due to increasing food allergies and other health issues.  Another person said he just didn't believe that vegetarianism wasn't always the most healthy option for everyone.  One person argued that the focus of the sentence was on the issue of processed foods.  Yet another argued that the sentence talked about plant-based diets not vegetarianism, and that meat can be included in a plant-based diet.  An amendment to strike this sentence was proposed, and struck down. 

Later, we went back to those lines about money, and an amendment was made to strike them, and was passed with no argument. 

Unlike Actions of Immediate Witness, which are proposed at General Assemblies and voted on at the same one, the Statements of Conscience we pass are much longer and thoughtful procedures.  Ethical Eating started as a study-action issue for congregations, and then out of that process comes the statement of conscience.  That this is now a statement of conscience makes it an important document for our faith, and UUs might be interested to read it and consider what it asks of us as individuals and congregations.

Okay, so I've now figured out what was unclear to me before.  Here's what we've voted in that is now in our "Standards of Professional Practice" (our unenforced part of the document, or "best practices):

G. Personal or Romantic Relationships
1. A minister of a congregation, or a community minister affiliated with a congregation, who engages in personal friendship or pursues a romantic attraction with a member or participant of that congregation, or whose family members or existing friends join or participate in that congregation, must take into account the following considerations:
 a. Such relationships will change the dynamics of the congregation as well as of the ministry, potentially in negative ways that may persist beyond that minister’s tenure.
 b. Members of the congregation who have special relationships with the minister must often refrain from positions of visible leadership or systemic influence for which they might otherwise be eligible.
c. It may be advisable for a potential romantic partner to refrain from visible leadership or systemic influence for which they might otherwise be eligible in the congregation, agency or enterprise, at least until the nature of the relationship with the minister is clearly established and can be made public.
 2. Ministers who pursue such relationships should seek and heed the advice of colleagues as to how the conduct of that relationship may affect their ministries and their congregations.
 3. It is unfair and destructive to congregations for the minister to ask them publicly to accept a succession of several romantic partners, whether or not these partners have been previously connected to the congregation.
4. Community ministers should be guided additionally by the expectations of the agencies or enterprises where they work, and by the standards of professional organizations to which they may belong, regarding the establishment of personal friendships or romantic relationships with those they serve.
 5. In all cases, ministers must be careful not to take advantage of those they serve, or damage the integrity of the congregation, agency or enterprise in which they serve.

And here's the stronger language under review (with the agreement that the final language would avoid he/she language in preference to the use of "they" as a non-gendered third person single pronoun.  The justice advocate in me agrees.  The grammarian still has problems with the singular use of "they" and would prefer other work-arounds such as consistent use of a full noun or pluralizing of the entire sentence):

1. A minister who initiates or responds to sexual contact, sexualized behavior, or a sexual relationship with any person he/she serves or serves with professionally must take into account that such relationships will change the dynamics of the congregation/work site as well as of the ministry, potentially in negative ways that may persist beyond that minister’s tenure.
2. A minister who initiates or responds to sexual contact, sexualized behavior, or a sexual relationship with any person he/she serves or serves with professionally agrees to:
 a. Either the minister or the other person will leave the congregation/site of ministry for 6 months before the relationship can be pursued
 b. Fully disclose to the potential romantic partner the implications for that person of a relationship with the minister, including the change that the person could lose his/her congregation or work site regardless of the success of the relationship.
 c. Fully disclose such decision to the chapter Good Officer of the UUMA.
d. Fully disclose such decision to the congregation/work site if at the end of 6 months the relationship is pursued
 3. It is unfair and destructive to congregations for the minister to ask them publicly to accept a succession of several romantic partners, whether or not these partners have been previously connected to the congregation.
4. Community ministers are guided additionally by the expectations of the agencies or enterprises where they work, and by the standards of professional organizations to which they may belong, regarding the establishment of sexual contact, sexualized behavior, or a sexual relationship with any person served professionally.
5. In all cases, ministers must be careful not to take advantage of those they serve, or damage the integrity of the congregation, agency or enterprise in which they serve.

It may also be under review for the "Code of Professional Conduct" (the enforceable part of our document) to read: "I will not engage in sexual contact, sexualized behavior, or a sexual relationship with any person I serve professionally."  That piece of it was still confusing.  We didn't vote on this, I believe, but it seems like adding this is the goal that we're still working towards.

At any rate, what is clearly the difference between what was voted in and what is under review is that what was voted in has much more to do with the role of the minister's partner in 1.a-1.c., and the review version is very explicitly laying out steps that should be followed if a minister is to date a member of the congregation in 2.a.-2.d.  While we'll take this year to review it, I think the proposed version is very good, and these steps of contacting good offices, ending the pastoral relationship, and disclosing to the congregation, are important and necessary.  People might argue over the six month period, I suppose. And I can certainly see that if one was dealing with a very new member to the congregation that this might be excessive, but this is also "best practices" and, as such, in consultation with good offices, it seems that sort of case-by-case situation could be negotiated. 

Special thanks to James Kubal-Komoto whose comment on my last post prompted me to go back and read through it all to understand it.  Balancing my laptop on my knee and trying to see where the differences in the two versions were proved not to be the most effective way for me to do business.  Now that I can look side-by-side, the situation is more clear.  That one sentence deal in the whole explanation threw me off and was, I think, unnecessarily confusing, but perhaps only to me. 

Today I dropped my daughter off at the UU Kids Camp for the first time.  She had a good day; they took a field trip to the science museum.  She's in the camp for three days, and it's field trips each day.  I confess to a little disappointment around this.  I've been so longing for her to have a UU camp experience.  (See this article from a UU World blog on more about UU kids camps.)  It seems like this great opportunity at General Assembly to have a camp that's integrated around UU principles and heritage and to tie it to our values.  What is in fact the case is they contract the kids camp job out to a local child care provider to run.  I suppose this is not the primary goal of GA, to provide UU experiences for children, but it's a wasted opportunity, if you ask me.  All the same, I hope to continue doing this bringing my daughter to GA and putting her in the camp, hoping that I'll have additional opportunities to expose her to the larger world of UUism beyond the local congregation.  She went with me to the Banner Parade last night and will walk the exhibit hall later in the week.  We watched a bit of the Service of the Living Tradition together tonight.  So those pieces of UUism will still sink in, perhaps.  And if it doesn't, well, at least the kids camp was fun, eh?

After dropping the girl off at camp, it was a workshops day all day today.  In the past, the days have been a mixture of plenary and workshops.  This year plenaries are all stacked into the weekend, with the workshops packed into Thursday and Friday.  I see the logic in this model, but I'm not enjoying it.  It makes for a long day if the two aren't mixed. 

One workshop I went to today was the first part of a two-part series by Galen Guengerich on "Church of the New Millennium: Formula for Failure."  I'll probably miss part two, because it's in the same slot as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.  Guengerich structured his remarks around an imagined future in which his daughter's grandchild is writing a thesis about why Unitarian Universalism failed and disappeared.  He suggests that she would write that it's because we were "spiritual but not religious." 

I'm reminded of when I was asked while interviewing for my current ministry whether I was "spiritual or religious."  "Religious," was my response.  I love the institution of Unitarian Universalism.  That's what's so wonderful about being at General Assembly -- it's an embodied representation of this great thing that is Unitarian Universalism that I love.  I love the moment the gavel is pounded during the opening plenary and the General Assembly is declared to be in session.  I love the swirling frenzied excitement of the banner parade.  I love running into colleagues between sessions and catching up or exchanging hugs.  I love shopping around the exhibit hall.  I love my mind and heart being stretched in program and worship.  Heck, I even love discussions about our bylaws.

Guengerich expanded on what he meant by religious and spiritual, but you need to go hear it for yourself when it's available, as I'm sure it will be.

Today concluded with the Service of the Living Tradition, in which ministers and religious educators are honored for their service.  Ministers who have passed are listed in the "roll call," and ministers receive preliminary and final fellowship, and are acknowledged when they retire.  Similar milestones for religious educators are marked.  I needed to go back to the hotel so I could be around my little one for one evening, since my next two are booked, and I needed to hear how kids camp went, so I opted to watch the service on line.  It was clear from the service itself and from the comments of my colleagues on Facebook as well that this was the best service in years.  The feed went in and out a bit (probably the hotel connection), but the sermon was awesomely good.  Everybody seems to love that this year instead of admonishing people not to cheer and clap, this year it was encouraged.  Every bit of the service was just right on.  If you want to know what a Service of the Living Tradition is and what it means, watch this one.  I can't remember a better one, including those in which I got preliminary and final fellowship (one of which was pretty darn good, one of which was awful, and I won't say which here on the blog).  This was it.  Seriously.  This was religion.

Today was "Ministry Days" (a misnomer, because it's one day and one evening, really).  The two highlights for me of Ministry Days are the 25/50 worship service and the Ministerial Conference at Berry Street.  The 25/50 worship service features a speaker from that group of ministers who have been in the ministry 25 years, and also one from that group who have been in the ministry 50 years.  It's always a delight to hear their stories of their experiences and how things have changed and yet been the same.  We have a similar thing at the Meadville Lombard Theological School alumni dinner, which will be later in the week.  Can you imagine about 800 Unitarian Universalism ministers singing "Turn the World Around"?  (We were some fewer than that, I think, but I can't remember the number.  The total number of UU ministers is now in the 1700s.)

The Berry Street lecture is, we were informed, the oldest running lecture in the United States.  It was started by William Ellery Channing in 1820.  I can't explain the exact words shared of what the purpose of the Berry Street lecture is, but my understanding is that the person giving it is called to bring a new understanding around an issue of their choice to the UU ministers assembled.  For example, Mark Morrison-Reed in 2000 talked about how we leave congregations.  His discussion was fresh and informative, and I know congregations that have used his Berry Street words as study when their minister is leaving.  Today the Rev Dr. Deborah J. Pope-Lance took us to task on an issue that's been plaguing our ministry for decades--clergy misconduct.  It was incredibly timely.  The UUMA has been wrestling with what language to have in their code of conduct for, well, a very long time.  We had voted in some new language this morning, in fact, with an immediate amendment of stronger language following right on its heels.  The tension is our ministry is between those who believe it is always wrong for a minister to get involved with a member of his or her congregation, and those who say that if done carefully and openly, ministers can and have built successful marriages with members of their congregations, and for single ministers in isolated locations, it's unreasonable for them not to be able to pursue romantic relationships within their congregation.  Pope-Lance made it very clear that we need to take a hard line here.  And in an increasing number of states in the U.S. it's already illegal for a minister to get sexually involved with a congregation member.

The votes this morning that we took were very confusing--it seemed like we voted to put certain language into place and then voted to study that exact same language for a year.  I'm still sorting that out.  But whichever it is, what seems to be in place for UU ministers starting now or soon is a best practices recommendation (not enforceable) that says that before ministers get sexually involved with someone in the congregation, that person must leave the congregation, or the minister must leave the congregation, for a period of six months.  The minister must inform the UUMA Good Offices person.  And then after six months, the relationship can be pursued, but the congregation must also be informed.  There are a lot of further details, but that's the heart of it.  And there's less detailed language in the enforceable part of our code, but that's where, I think, we're still also working on strengthening up the language. 

I got into Charlotte, NC yesterday afternoon for the 50th annual UUA General Assembly, which begins tomorrow evening.  Before GA begins, however, there are "Ministry Days," and before Ministry Days this year there is Chapter Leader Training, which began yesterday evening and continued through the day today.  As Heartland Chapter President, and still feeling my way around the job, it was a welcome opportunity to hear what other chapters were doing well and where we all were struggling -- mostly around membership questions, welcoming, and technology.  It's become clear to me that something we need is a Chapter Connections/Technology officer in the Heartland.  Luckily, I seem to have found someone for the job, and it's not me.  Members of our chapter will not be surprised at the wonderful techie colleague who has indicated her willingness to step forward.

Don Southworth, the UUMA Director, started us off in worship today at Chapter Leader Training by talking about those moments when we feel really blessed to be able to do the work we do.  It was a feeling echoed in our opening worship for Ministry Days when our Charlotte Colleagues reminded us how blessed we are in this work.  And, yes, when we get together at this time of year we like to tell stories of how busy we were and how tired we are.  But it's an amazing gift to get to do this work.  And what a joy, really, to be together here with all these wonderful UUs engaged in the work of faith and love and justice.

Today was lobbying day with the HRC Clergy Call.  We started out with a little lobby training, then each state was assigned an HRC staff person.  We all went to the press conference, and then off to the lobbying visits with our staffer. 

The press conference was at a beautiful spot with the Capitol in the background.  It was, unfortunately, extremely hot and sunny.  The press conference offered no shade, and few of us had worn hats.  Only one seemed to have brought sunscreen, but as she was a UU she offered me some.  (I'm sure she would have happily offered to any denomination, but it was a small tube, so I was grateful to get some.)  We put up umbrellas, but were told it would ruin the pictures.  Since most of the cameras were pointed at the speakers, and we were not behind the speakers but seated in front of them, I opted after a while to go back into the shade.  Clergy can be long-winded at these sorts of things, after all.

Once I was happily back in the shade, I was much more attentive.  And they were wonderful speakers.    The press conference started off with a Buddhist invocation from the Hawaii delegation.  Joe Solmonese of the HRC spoke.  Several heads of various denominations spoke, as well.  Unfortunately UUA President Peter Morales was unable to attend.  He had flown out the day before and had dinner with the UU group gathered there at the UUA Washington Advocacy Office, but he got sick somehow and was unable to be with us for the press conference.  His piece was ably picked up by Taquiena Boston, Director of Multicultural Growth and Witness.

After the press conference ended, my HRC staffer, Tim Mahoney, came to find me.   There were supposed to be three of us lobbying for Michigan, but one UU colleague had things come up and was unable to make it.  The second Michigan person, a non-UU from the Detroit area, had checked into Clergy Call the previous day, but never showed up for the lobbying.  So Tim cancelled the visits with their congressmen, and he and I went to visit Senator Levin, Senator Stabenow, and Congressman Walberg, after a lunch in the cafe of one of the Senate buildings.

Two years ago when I went to the HRC Clergy Call I was surprised to learn that you usually don't get to meet with your representatives.  This year I was prepared for that.  Our schedule said that we would see staffers at my senators' offices, and perhaps meet with Rep. Walberg if his schedule permitted.  It was a very busy day on Capitol Hill, so we didn't see Rep. Walberg, either. 

It was a very friendly visit at Sen. Levin's office with a staff person who was extremely knowledgeable on LGBT issues.  Sen. Levin is co-sponsoring ENDA, one of the pieces of legislation we were there to talk about, as is Sen. Stabenow.  Sen. Stabenow's legislative aide who met with us was very courteous and asked good questions, and that was also a good meeting.  After those two meetings, we dropped off packets at three other congressmen's offices on our way to see Rep. Walberg's staff.  At Walberg's office I stressed the anti-bullying legislation that we were there to talk about.  The staff member agreed that certainly no child ever deserved to be bullied, and so I talked about how children of LGBT parents, children who are LGBT, and children who are perceived to be LGBT are particular targets of bullying.  I talked about how no matter how one felt about LGBT issues, nobody could believe those children deserved violence against them for what they were, or what they were perceived to be.  And I talked about the high suicide rate of LGBT youth, as a direct result of the years of discrimination they face.  It was a cordial meeting where we talked about values and the importance of protecting our children. 

I have to brag a little and say that after each meeting Tim Mahoney, who was wonderful and helpful, told me that I did a great job and hit all the points that we were hoping for out of the event.  And I am thankful for all the people who gave me their stories to take with me to Capitol Hill.  I shared those stories with the staff members I visited with, and stressed their importance, that these letters represent real people in Michigan with stories about how things affect them.

So, after that I skipped the HRC Closing Reception back at their offices, an opted for one cab ride rather than two, and headed back to where I'm staying with a Methodist colleague.  I've got sore feet, but high hopes. 

Opening invocation from the Hawaii delegation.
 Taqueina Boston speaking for the UUs.  You can just see the tip of her head there.
Me.

Right now I'm in Washington, D.C. for the 3rd biannual HRC Clergy Call for Justice and Equality.  There were many wonderful moments today worth talking about, but I want to tell you about some recent poll's results.  HRC just commissioned a new poll to study religious responses to GLBT issues.  The amazing and wonderful results are that people of faith overwhelmingly -- yes, overwhelmingly -- are now in support of LGBT justice issues. I know this may seem hard to believe.  The media keeps showing us the voices of hate and telling us that's the faith perspective.  But the truth is it's not. 

Some specifics:

When asked "Do you favor protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations?" 70% of all people said yes, and 68% of Christians said yes.

85% of people say their faith leads them to believe in equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

76% of all people and 74% of Christians favor a law to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people or the children of GLBT people against bullying and harassment. 

People also think that when faith leaders condemn GLBT people it does more harm than good. 

When the Christian numbers are broken down, the Catholics are most in support of these things (both practicing and non-practicing), but even the non-denominational Christians, which includes evangelicals, are in favor of these GLBT justice issues. 

These are wonderful results.  Now if we can only get our politicians to hear them tomorrow during our lobbying time.

Just a quick note here to say that the book is now available on Amazon.  And, no, there aren't any used copies yet!  It's cheaper to go through CreateSpace, as described in the last post, and use the coupon.  I get a larger amount, even with the coupon, than I do through Amazon, so it's to my benefit as well.  But if you're determined to use Amazon, if you follow this link, my church gets a percentage through their Amazon Associates account.  And it is a little thrill to see it available through Amazon.  It makes it just a little more real, although I've yet to see the final project in physical form -- my proof has arrived, but I'm out of town.  More on that later.

My new book, An Extremist for Love & Justice, is now available!  It'll be up on Amazon in a day or two, and I'll link to it then, but it's better for me if you go through the publisher (CreateSpace, Amazon's self-publishing arm): https://www.createspace.com/3593257.  To encourage such, here's a coupon code for $2.00 off -- Q2MVMHDY.

I thought some readers might be curious about the self-publishing process, so I'll write a bit about it here.

Self-publishing has been an interesting process.  I've learned a lot by doing it, one of which is how many typos I make, and another of which is that it always pays to document your sources while you're writing rather than having to go back later and look them all up again.  Being consistent about MLA or Chicago style doesn't hurt, as well. I spent more time straightening out my footnotes than I could possibly imagine.  They're still not perfect, which bugs me, but eventually I just had to move on.

As for self-publishers, I looked into various self-publishing options, including iUniverse, Outskirts, XLibris, Lulu, and CreateSpace.  I heard good things from colleagues about both CreateSpace and Lulu, so those are the ones I looked into more--also they were two of four that were very responsive to providing information to me, iUniverse and XLibris being the others.  Lulu seemed like a good option that I'll consider in the future.  They're one extreme of the options--you provide your own book in PDF form with all the layout done, including page numbers, table of contents, fleurons, and the works. You also have to provide your cover as a completed PDF file with the correct spine width, and bleed margin and so forth.  My graphics capabilities are pretty weak, but they have some templates you can play with, and I created something that I think was every bit as good as what I ended up getting.  They'll give you a free ISBN, you upload your files, and you're basically done.  All that is free.  They make a larger percentage off of each book that's printed, but there are fewer up-front costs.  But you don't get much for that -- the book is available through Lulu, but to make it available elsewhere there are additional fees (although still smaller than other publishers).  Honestly, now that I've gone the other route and seen it all, I can't remember what turned me off of the idea of doing it through Lulu.  I know I wanted the comfort of having it be formatted for me, and felt that a less-do-it-myself approach would yield a more professional result.

Once I ruled out Lulu, I ended up going with CreateSpace, because when I added in what I wanted, all of the others seemed pretty equivalent, and I had a colleague who had a good experience with CreateSpace, and since they're connected to Amazon, I felt that would make things smoother.  I wanted something that would do the interior and cover layout, would provide an ISBN, and which would make it available on Amazon and other booksellers, particularly Borders and Barnes and Noble.  To get all those pieces it seemed to work out to around $500, no matter which publisher I went with.  (For example, iUniverse was $599, but would've included the Kindle file; xLibris was $449 but had extremely limited templates.)  So CreateSpace was as good a pick as any, to my mind.  For $499 they take your file and format it according to one of several templates.  The templates have less flexibility than I would like, but they worked with me to find a reasonable compromise.  Then they took my picture and words and created a cover according to one of several templates again.  They have templates for the front matter of the book (title page, etc.), as well to choose from, and a list of several different fleurons and fonts for the cover and interior.  I thought CreateSpace would give more flexibility here than Lulu, but in the end it was about the same as the one I had created myself on Lulu.  CreateSpace did throw in their distribution services, so it can be available through just about any bookstore in the country to order.  Lulu had the disadvantage of not doing Kindle format, and since I have a new Kindle, I thought I would like to have it in that form.  Unfortunately, the Kindle file is not part of the CreateSpace package.  It's something I can add on or do myself, so I'll probably look into doing that this summer and make it available on Kindle. 

The CreateSpace process took more time than I thought it would after uploading the files in early April to today when I could finally approve the physical proof (and that's without actually getting my proof copy in the mail yet--I approved it sight unseen).  There were several steps along the way where I was unclear what would handle next and how long it would take.  But in the end they were very responsive to my calls, and I'm happy with the final result.  I would recommend them for a first-time self-publisher, based on my experience so far.

My colleague Tony Lorenzen recently wrote a blog post on James Luther Adams' "Five Smooth Stones."  As a refresher, even though I know many of you can rattle them off the top of your head, James Luther Adams was a Unitarian and UU theologian and professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School.  He wrote an essay on the five smooth stones of religious liberalism.  The "smooth stones" metaphor comes from the story of David & Goliath, wherein David used 5 smooth stones in his slingshot and killed the mighty Goliath.  JLA's Smooth Stones are:

• "Religious liberalism depends on the principle that 'revelation' is continuous."
• "All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion."
• "Religious liberalism affirms the moral obligation to direct one's effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community. It is this which makes the role of the prophet central and indispensable in liberalism."
• "[W]e deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation." 
• "[L]iberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism."

Tony neatly sums these up in his blog post with one word each.  My summary is a bit longer.

The first smooth stone tells us that there is no one religious truth that has already been told and that is handed down in one particular sacred text.  Revelation can happen at any time, and is still happening.  The second talks about democratic principles and freedom -- particularly important as JLA wrote this in response to experiencing the rise of fascism in Europe.  The third tells us that we have a prophetic faith and we are all prophets -- we must all be voices for the social good, for the betterment of society.  Fourth, good is created by us here and now, not something that is done just by God.  The third and fourth stones are very linked.  And lastly, that we have the resources to affect change, and so therefore we should have hope. 

I refer to the five smooth stones often and had actually used the 5 smooth stones in the sermon that I had already written that I'll be preaching this Sunday.  I'd been thinking on the 5 smooth stones the past couple of weeks for no particular reason except that I've been working on our program for Ohio River Group next year on "The Future of Liberalism," and one of our reading items might be the 5 Smooth Stones.  This got me thinking--If I were writing the 5 Smooth Stones now, what would the Smooth Stones be?

I don't have my answer yet, except that Tony is exactly right when he says what's missing from the five smooth stones is love.  That would be my first smooth stone -- a radical universal love that embraces all people.  I love all of JLA's smooth stones, and think they're all vital now, but maybe I would combine the third and fourth to make that space for love and call it a day.  But there may be something I'm not thinking about right now that is more vital for us to talk about in what distinguishes liberal religion.  I'm still thinking on it.

So I'm still working on my five smooth stones.  Meanwhile, what are yours?

The merger of the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations took place 50 years ago -- the official date was May 15, 1961.  So, of course, I started thinking about my experiences at the merger.  But, wait!  I wasn't born yet!

That's right, one of the neat things that we can celebrate is that there are generations now of people who are Unitarian Universalists from childhood on, some even with ten years or more in the ministry, who were raised in, influenced by, and in turn influenced themselves this new association that was created 50 years ago.

Many argued then that without this merger, Universalism would die.  I look around me here, and I really believe that.  At the time of merger, there were three little rural Universalist churches between ten and fifteen miles from Jackson.  My church, a small rural Universalist church, joined the new UUA, and it's still going strong.  The Universalist church in Horton, MI did not join the UUA, but eventually became Congregationalist.  There's a church and a congregation thriving there, but no Universalist church.  The Concord, Michigan church, the furthest from Jackson at 14 miles, floundered for a while and then went out of existence.  They still have special programs there every year, such as a Christmas concert or service, but there is no longer a worshipping Universalist body.  There is no church there, even though there's a church building there. 

Without the merger, we might have died.  With it, we have generations of Unitarian Universalists to spread our saving message -- our Universalist message of love and acceptance.  All that, and Unitarianism, too.  What a deal we got.  Happy Birthday, UUA!

Sunday night as I was watching television after a long day, I, like much of the nation, heard that there was going to be an upcoming announcement from President Obama.  An unplanned late-Sunday-evening announcement from the President is clearly unusual.  My immediate thought was that something horrible had happened--horrible, that is, for citizens of the United States and its military.  So it was with some joy and relief that I learned that instead of our soldiers or civilians being dead, it was Osama bin Laden.  I admit to some immediate partisan joy that this had happened under this particular president's watch.  And I shared in some joking about the timing of the president interrupting Celebrity Apprentice.  I admit to some joy at him being removed from a position of continued threat, and some relief that this was news of success for our country. 

These are my first reactions, my gut reactions.  They do not necessarily represent my best reactions or religious reactions, and that's the point that I want to make today.  I understand why people want to go out and be with other people in the streets and celebrate.  It is a natural reaction after a long period of cultural grief that we pin on this man, Osama bin Laden. 

But at the same time I felt immediate sorrow that this hunt for Osama bin Laden, our figurehead for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, had ended with a killing.  I wished immediately that we had captured this man alive rather than taking another life.  I am not a pacifist, although I do believe that war always represents a failure, and I am also against the death penalty.  To me, this killing, although it was done in a combat situation, it seems, represented a failure on our part to some degree, as well as, of course, the enormous political success of having finally captured this man our government and military was looking for for so long.  I don't say "failure" to blame the military--I think it was a failure on Osama bin Laden's part that led to this outcome, for the most part.  He chose a path of hatred and violence, and I grieve that he chose this path up until the end.  But every death that ends in violence is also to some extent a failure on the parts of everyone involved, including us, the American people. 

I think our best reaction, as a people, is not to celebrate, but to mourn.  A quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that's been making the rounds illustrates the sentiment:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence and toughness multiples toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

(Note that many of the versions being shared have a sentence tacked on the beginning that was not King's, but the rest of the statement--all of that quoted above--was his.  Jessica Dovey, Facebook user and English teacher apparently wrote the now oft-quoted sentence, "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.")  One of the quickest ways we justify rejoicing at Osama bin Laden's death is by dehumanizing him, by making him pure evil, almost the devil himself.  That's the response I heard from friends and acquaintances as the discussion launched from one Facebook friend's post to another: "He was evil."  Once we make him evil, he becomes less than human, and we can respond with pure hate and pure rejoicing at his death. 

There have been a lot of good articles about the Christian response to Osama bin Laden's death.  A Vatican spokesperson said, "In the face of a man's death, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibilities of each person before God and before men, and hopes and works so that every event may be the occasion for the further growth of peace and not of hatred."

Emotions are high about this.  When my colleague James Ford used the word "glad," he got some apparently heated responses including one suggesting he could no longer teach the Buddhadharma.  On the other hand, I've seen some pretty heated responses to some friends suggesting that gladness is the wrong approach.  We're quick to chastise each other on both sides.  I can't condemn anyone for a feeling of gladness--I experienced that same lifting of spirit myself, instinctively.  (And it appears Ford wasn't talking about gladness at death--read his own words for an explanation.)  What I can come back to is to say that feeling gladness at the death of Osama bin Laden is not my best self, nor my religious self.  It does not reflect my values nor my theology.

What is the Unitarian Universalist response to this man's death?  We have no set creed, but freedom of religion, so of course there is no one set response.   But in our religious tradition we also know that we believe people are not inherently evil.  Our Universalist heritage reminds us that no one is damned forever.  And so I experience sorrow that we were not able to find the good in Osama bin Laden and that he chose a path of violence and death, and that we followed, chasing him on that path, and being on it ourselves.  Our principles, while not a creed, also serve as a touchstone in times like this.  The remind us of the inherent worth and dignity of every human being--every single one.  So at times like this, when it is easy to fill up with hatred, I remind myself of the inherent worth and dignity of anyone that I might want to call "enemy."  I look, too, to the principle that we strive for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.  There are many quick to say that Osama bin Laden's death is "justice served."  Perhaps it is -- although, I think justice is better done by a court than by a bullet.  But it is not "compassion served," certainly.  Can we feel compassion for Osama bin Laden, individually or as a people?  What would that look like?  I'm not there yet.  I don't feel compassion for him.  But I think I would be better for trying to.