I felt Unitarian Universalist blogger Bill Baar (Pfarrer Streccius) shared some of my concerns about formal, rigorous membership in his blog post today, where he quotes the current issue of the Christian Century. Or at least, shares my thought that sometimes you have to try something new without the approval of the powers-that be.

I was going to reply at his blog, but the Blogger blog platform is having some kind of problem and it threw an error when I tried. Here’s what I wrote about his comments:

Very interesting, and not at all surprising. But in addition to the mid-century church organizational style, I noticed some of the hurt voices in the body and comments of that Christian Century article also get lost in a kind of ecumenical jargon that dates to the same era. Body of Christ, for example, among mainline Protestants, but Unitarian Universalists do it too with covenant. Insider language for insider ideas, and no sense of irony with respect to evangelism.

So what’s the alternative? For one, perhaps, to build in an alternative meaning of membership. At this point, I started to write the patented Scott Wells review of parishes and churches in the Unitarian and Universalist tradition, but erased it all. The short version: it might be worth modeling what we see in the United Church of Canada and the Uniting Church in Australia, in a congregationalist way. Make a role for non-joiners (each call them adherents; that sounds too much like a bandage to me) and give them decision-making power on financial matters, if they are donors. This isn’t too different from what Universalists did a hundred years ago from what I can tell.

I’m also thinking of the way Providence has allowed the universal gospel to be spread from a single, even impersonal point of contact.

So, even shorter: recognize the non-joiner and allow for alternatives in word and deed.

In my last blog post, I made reference to the adherent status within the United Church of Canada and the Uniting Church in Australia. I don’t approve of every assumption here, but since I brought it up thought it better to work with clear definitions.

So time to give citations . . . but before that, a commendation: I really like the logical way the United Church of Canada site is laid out, and how the manuals are released under Canada 2.5 version of the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. OK: half a commendation, because it’s the “least liberal” of the liberal licenses, allowing the unhindered, noncommercial redistribution of the resource (with attribution), but nothing else. And it doesn’t apply to their Manual, see below.

Now the documents:

United Church of Canada. Congregation Organization Handbook. PDF. See pg. 9, which refers back to the UCCan Manual. See Basis of Union section 5.8.2, Bylaws section 001 and in passim.

“Adherent† means a person who is attached to a Congregation and who contributes regularly to its life and work while not being a member thereof.

Uniting Church in Australia. See Constitution and Regulations. PDF. See section 3. Adherents do not have a vote, but there is a roll, adherents and considered a part of the congregation with members, and they may be orderly transfered from congregation to congregation. (Regulations 1.1.22–1.1.24)

Adherent means a person not being a member or a member-in-association but recognised as sharing in the life of the Congregation and within the pastoral responsibility of the Church. (Constitution, section 3)

And for clarity, a member-in-association is an ecumenical distinction for “a member of another Christian denomination but not actively engaged in the life of that denomination and participates in the corporate life of the Congregation and accepts the polity and discipline of the Church” or “participates actively in the corporate life of two Congregations of the Church and is enrolled as a conï¬ rmed member of the other Congregation” (Regulations 1.1.11)

Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Dan Harper has been going over one of my more frequent — I can’t say favorite — concerns: the decline in churches in our denomination. Several aspects have come up; let’s think about funding.

It might shock some modern Unitarian Universalists to think that some of our churches were once state-supported, and later supported by pew rent. The current canvass and pledge model is only one model in our history. Why not fee for service? That would certainly cast a light on a programs for which there is little more than a sentimental attachment. Or more earned income — particularly in congregations that have more property than needed? Or sponsoring a grant-supported (even government grant supported) program for the public good. (If we’re worried about, say, LGBT discrimination or theological indoctrination, through government-supported faith-based initiatives, then we really should enter the fray.)

Now that the lede is good and buried, let me describe one mode of funding that will be new to many, but not so radical as to be unapproachable. Some call it crowdfunding. That is, an organized mass appeal, usually of small donors, who fund a particular project. The appeal will usually have a defined time-span and a financial goal that indicates success. If people fund the project fully, it will go ahead. But not if not.

In a church setting, I would probably fund something non-core and non-capitalized this way. Say, a regional conference, a youth trip or to develop a training plan for evangelism. But not the minister’s salary or the light bill. Or a new R.E. wing. And I would make the crowdfunded part only one source of funding, say, with a challenge grant or a large, lead donor.

There are variations on a theme, but Kickstarter is one of the largest. I featured a Kickstarter initiative a few months ago on the sidebar, for a tool to improve internet privacy, and they raised almost $87,000: far more than their goal. But unless it’s a creative project — say, perhaps, to create a new hymnal — Kickstarter won’t accept the project. (And perhaps not even then.)

But there are alternatives and the model itself — with the side effect that those who believe in it will have to promote it — is worth exploring. (IndieGoGo and Invested.in are others.)

So while I’m at it, why not support a campaign in progress? The Red Theater, co-founded by Aaron Sawyer, is going to stage Red Hamlet this August in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and it needs funding help. You might know Aaron through his other work: DiscoverUU.org. (As the husband of a Fringe writer-producer, I hear the call.)

Be sure to give. Donations start at $5. 13 days and about $2,100 to go.

It’s been years since I’ve read in full Hosea Ballou’s influential masterwork, the Treatise on Atonement, from the last print edition (UUA, 1986) which itself was reproduced from a mid-nineteenth century edition.

But this was the revision of the mature Ballou, and I’ve been meaning to read the more direct and homspun theology of the thirty-four year old man who wrote the first edition, published in 1805.

For some years, I have owned an original 1811 “surreptitious” or “pirate” edition, which has the same text, but it’s hard to cuddle up to a book that’s two centuries old.

Fortunately, I’m more than happy to read a book on a screen, and Google Books has a copy of the 1805 original available for download.

Which I have. Go and do likewise.

It is written, in the book of the Exodus, chapter 9

Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain.
And the Lord shall sever between the cattle of Israel and the cattle of Egypt: and there shall nothing die of all that is the childrens of Israel.
And the Lord appointed a set time, saying, To morrow the Lord shall do this thing in the land.
And the Lord did that thing on the morrow, and all the cattle of Egypt died: but of the cattle of the children of Israel died not one.

And now, the end of cattle plague, or rinderpest. It has been globally eradicated. Something to be grateful for, and worthy of praise.

(I first learned of rinderpest about a decade ago, when the hoof/foot-in-mouth outbreak in Britain occasioned the revival of a rinderpest hymn.)

“No more deaths from rinderpest” (World Organisation for Animal Health, May 25, 2011)

“Churches called on to resurrect plague hymn“  (Telegraph, March 25, 2001)

As Google Books and other scanning projects bring the works of past generations within easy reach, formerly obscure works in Universalist history and theology become so easy to acquire that they deserve to be reviewed fresh.

As late as the late 1990s, I used interlibrary loan to borrow microforms of Universalist periodicals, to print pages and transcribe important passages. Indeed, some of my earliest work on the web was to share what I had found.

One such resource was Richard Eddy’s multi-part essay series, published in the Universalist Quarterly and Review called “Universalist Conventions and Creeds.” I’ve excerpted parts from that series at my UniversalistChurch.net site. At one level, he was doing in part what I have done: preserve documents from earlier sources. And now, you can read most of his series within a single (1875) volume of Universalist Quarterly and Review.  See this page at Google Books for the volume and an automatically generated table of contents.

Note: the 1875 volume does not contain the whole series, and the reference to “article I” means the first article in volume, not the series. If I find the installments that come before or after 1875, I’ll link them from this blog post.

I’ve often written about the potential quality of church publications — that churches with the money and wherewithal can and sometimes do produce amazing print pieces, but that the technology is exists to help the rest to improve, even if that doesn’t mean a professional job. I’ve gone back and forth about TeX, LaTeX and related typesetting languages, and the reason I’ve not committed it that it doesn’t pass the ease-of-use test. And word processors are meant for easy of use and not beauty of product.

I’m experimenting with Graphite, a text-rendering technology, for Microsoft Windows and Linux. For Linux (and perhaps Windows, which I don’t use), it’s supported in the free- and open-source office suites OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. It can substitute gylphs (the particular shape that corresponds to a letter) making use of an advance typeface’s true small capitol letters, text figures and other typographical features. (Most typefaces the average person uses lacks these features, and it’s one of the almost-imperceptible features that differentiates good printed items.) It’s also free- and open-source software, and there’s support for one of my favorite typefaces, Linux Libertine.

I won’t go any further: this could very well be another dead-end, but will report back if something pleasing comes of it.

Excuse the pun and, urm, backseat driving. This is a pointed question to the British Unitarians out there.

Why are there no Unitarian churches in Milton Keynes, a postwar “new town” with more than 200,000 residents? Not even one. And, given the usual caveats about growth, it’s set to double in population in the next twenty years, in part by growing the direction of the legally distinct but adjacent town of Newport Pagnell.

Now, except to change trains, I’ve never been in Milton Keynes, and all I know of Newport Pagnell is that (1) it’s next to the M1, (2) it has an offramp service center/road services/rest stop and (3) it’s mentioned in a Smiths song. But it’s 13 miles from the church in Northampton, and that’s the nearest one.

Is it really so strange for such a large residential area be targeted for a new church?

I’m a miserably slow reader, so it’s a good thing I’m taking the bus to General Assembly (and that I don’t get motion sickness.) In no particular, order. this is far more than a month’s worth. Perhaps more than two.

• Alain de Botton. 1997. How Proust Can Change Your Life.
• Adin Ballou. 2003 reprint of 1846 ed. Christian Non-Resistance.
• The Journal intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel. 1885.
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 1960. The Divine Milieu.
• John B. Buescher. 2004. The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience.
• Jospeh Morgan Lloyd Thomas. 1907. The Free Catholic Church.

 

I’ve been told I have an evil twin.

That alone calls for this classic. And I need a plexiglas floor to sing into.

I was giving some advice today to a colleague about an “occasional service” — it doesn’t matter which kind — and remembered one of my bugbears: having enough people in the service to make it go smoothly.

Ministers or lay worship planners — so I gather — often talk about distributing responsibilities to include more laypersons in worship, but it’s been my experience visiting churches that this gets translated into reading lections and taking up a collection. Or, it is manifested as more responsive readings or other speaking roles for the people in the pews. Some, of course do it well; this is intended for those who don’t yet. And this is one area where large churches, perhaps out of necessity, have the advantage.

So: how many of us have been in worship where too few people have fumbled liturgical actions that would have been made perfect with more people. Anything with a hand-held microphones or paper certificates (or flower or other tokens to share) come to mind: an assistant to hold (or pass around) one and distribute the other make a neater presentation. The alternative is the worship leader trying to hold too many thing, or awkward communications to move the the next liturgical step.

Where candles are used, ushers can make lighting candles safer and pass off a taper used to light the candles. In membership induction services, special honors can be given to poor speakers by giving them the role of formally welcoming the new member by shaking hands or sponsoring them, if these roles aren’t already filled.

Equipment for worship — I’m thinking here specifically for communion or baptism, but the idea is widely applicable — needs to be tended, set up, used and removed or replaced. There are opportunities for learning and trust that can give members of a congregation a low-risk, low-commitment way to serve, provide there’s the imagination and a plan to provide for it.

Scattered reports suggest the heavy storms near Springfield and Boston — there was a tornado watch — last night blew the steeple (photo at Flickr) off the Monson, Massachusetts Unitarian Universalist Parish church building.

Confirmation and a link to a news story would be appreciated if readers know of one.

Update. Here’s a photo of the damage. #54 in the series. Looks like some people also lost their homes.

As I mentioned the other day when the elect weren’t raptured into the heavens, I prefer to mark our heavenward walk on Ascension Day, which is today.

It is rich and complex with meanings and associations. Just one: that Jesus being raised up — this time in glory towards heaven — both pulls him out of the particular setting of time and space, making him a universal savior and yet re-imagines and transforms his other raising-up; that is, his crucifixion.

A Collect for Ascension

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe that thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

(I wrote about it more-than-in-passing in 2009,  2004, and 2003.)

I wanted a e-book reader since I’m reading more these day, and particularly in time for General Assembly, including the bus ride to and fro. Discussed this last year, and had ruled out the Kindle as being too wed to a proprietary e-book format.  Interested, initially, in the newly-released Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch Reader — which seems to be poised as a basic Kindle competitor — until I held actually one and read the specs, and found them wanting.  In short, I thought it too wide (even if lighter) and I wanted to read not books and other documents, but also listen to music and I do appreciate the color images, if not the lower battery life. But the lack of PDF support was the killer.

So I bought the Nook Color, even though it’s more than $100 more.

But I’m still learning it and not completely sold. Indeed, I’m not Barnes and Noble’s ideal reader; for one, I’m more likely to download historic, public domain PDFs from Google Books or Archive.org than buy a new composition, for which I’m still prone to paper. And that’s the rub. It seems that the Google Book PDFs have encoding that make them unreadable, and must be altered — and I’ve got to figure out how to do that — first. Or the Google Books epubs, because they’re generated from a converted scan of the original are thick with typos and gemlins, which makes some practically unreadable.

So I may take it back and do without if I can’t come up with a good solution.

And if I do come up with some solutions, I’ll post them here. Also, I need a way to convert the documents I’ve published a PDF — minimally James Relly’s Union — as an epub.

I’m a gay man of a certain age: young enough to have missed the first ravaging fires of HIV and AIDS, but old enough both to see people get sick and die, and to be carefully tutored in the paranoia-inducing art — remember, there was no test for a few years — of safe sex. It was a perfect companion piece to the Cold War, but it ended and (despite vastly more sophisiticated treatment options) HIV/AIDS hasn’t.

And now thirty years have passed. Thirty years today since the Centers for Disease Control issued a report about five gay men who had the tell-tale infections associated with the then-unidentified, then-nameless AIDS.

A moment of silence please, before the labor continues. And spare a thought for the District of Columbia, which has the highest infection rate in the country.

For more background, see this article today at Towleroad. The lede:

It was thirty days ago today, on June 5, 1981, that the Center for Disease Control first published a report on the mysterious epidemic that we have now come to know as AIDS. Today, we remember the 30 million who have passed from the disease and and the 32 million who currently live with either AIDS or HIV. You can read the original 1981 CDC report on the disease on the agency’s on-line archive here. Other relevant reports about its can be found here.

• I manually upgraded the firmware from 1.1 to 1.2. This added some features but didn’t solve the PDF problem, where the images of Google Books show as red xs. (Using the now-available store to download these books gives me the typo-riddled EPUB not the PDF.)
• I opened one of the offending PDFs in the default GNOME/Linux PDF viewer and “printed” it to PDF. The size ballooned from 1 to 31 megabytes. It works but not well: the text is grainy and the original page size is superimposed on a letter-sized sheet — if that’s even a meaningful statement. I’ll find another way.
• I’ve installed Calibre, a ebook manager. I’ll see if that can do any good.
• I can’t find the six-year-old file that I used to generate the PDF of James Relly’s Union. That’s what I planned for generating an EPUB, with pandoc. But I’ll keep looking or use another Relly title as a trial first.

A somewhat frivolous question follows.

I noticed a tweet saying the Fourth Unitarian Society of Westchester County, New York, has “become a Welcoming Congregation,” which is denominational language meaning a congregation has enrolled in a program of the same name showing its intention and welcome persons in sexual orientation minorities. It’s been around since 1989 and isn’t that controversial these days, so that’s not what I focused on. You see: I like church names.

Fourth? How did that one pass me. I had, of course, known of the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, in Manhattan. Then there’s the First, Second and Third churches in Chicago, plus the Seconds in Omaha and Worcester. And then there’s the well-known example of the defunct Twenty-eighth Congregational Society in Boston, founded as a platform for (and continued for a few decades as a memorial to) Theodore Parker.

So the question: is there any Unitarian Universalist Association-member church extant — perhaps existing legally thus, but not common known as — numbered higher than four?  Does anyone know of a church within living memory that went as high a five?

• A rookie mistake on my part. I didn’t have the cups-pdf package installed at home. So when I tried to create a PDF of the Google Books PDFs — thus stripping them of extra data that made them unreadable — it wasn’t doing anything. I “reprinted as PDF” a book (in A5 size, to keep the margins approximately correct) and the result is satisfactory.
• I’ve reinstalled Sigil, an EPUB editor, and I think I’m going to go back to by web roots. I started online by transcribing valuable but unavailable Unitarian and Universalist texts. (I was the first to publish Unitariana on the Internet: Channing’s Baltimore Sermon on Gopher; that is, pre-web.) The lack of edited Universalist EPUBs really bothers me. I think I will start with The Life of Murray, using a print copy I own. (To avoid the problem of trapped text in gutters.)
• I’ve noted the copy of The Life of Murray before. It belonged to Minnie M. Moon of Blanchester, Ohio — a town in the southwest corner of the state. She got the book in 1899 as a Christmas present from “Vesta”. Minnie was the YPCU contact for the Blanchester church in 1895, attended the Young People’s Christian Union meeting in Akron in 1903, and opened the 1905 Ohio state YPCU convention, held at Blanchester, with a “Praise Service”. Sara Stoner would have been her minister for some time. She sounds like a young woman worth knowing. (There were once Moons at my first pastorate in Canon, Ga. I wonder if it’s the same family.)

Be sure not to miss the blog post where Unitarian Universalist/United Church of Christ minister, blogger and friend Adam Tierney-Eliot plans to accompany church services this summer with the ukulele.

I can see that; certainly, I can see it better than hymns accompanied by another stringed folk instrument — the psalmodikon — and yet the Norwegians endured.

Plus, thanks to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, I have grown to love the uke.

(If you don’t know Kate Bush’s brilliant “Wuthering Heights” watch it to see how amazing the UOBG’s version is.)

But the question I have (not to Adam, who seems much more confident about this) is what mainline hymns are appropriate for the ukulele?

If you’re going to the 2011 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, in Charlotte later this month, be sure first to sign up at http://eventmobi.com/uuaga2011/. I did — and you can register (as distinct from registering for GA) yourself. To show others you’ll be there, no? And to see the schedule, map of the exhibit hall and other useful tidbits. It’s good on a desktop — loads very quickly — but it’s real utility will be on phones and other mobile devices.

That said, a mobile version of UUA.org would be welcome, too.

I have a goal to publish a first, complete, if graphically unsophisticated edition of the John Murray autobiography — The Life of Murray — in the EPUB format before General Assembly: the first such edition of this important Universalist work, and the first edition of The Life of Murray of any kind in decades.

I can see the appeal, if you can get past Murray’s florid style. He was a young man, very strictly brought up, who sees the work of God through different phases of his life and changes of religious opinion. (I’m particularly pleased by his somewhat cutting take on John Wesley, who as personally appointed the teen-aged Murray as a class leader.) He’s just breaking into adulthood in my editing, and is living far beyond his means in London.

I can especially understand his failures, borne out of curiosity and desire to spread his wings after a repressive childhood. What I don’t understand is the interconnections of the family relations; also, a map would help. He talks much about “the tabernacle” on Moorfields.

This one I do know. This was George Whitfield’s Tabernacle. Murray would have known the newly constructed brick building — far nicer than — but not actually that far from — the little chapel he would later preach in as a new Universalist.

As I’ve written: I’m making Universalist pioneer John Murray’s autobiography into an EPUB for book readers, and I’m amazed by what a page-turner it is. I’m about halfway done of the first, complete, if unattractive, version.

It wouldn’t take much adaptation to make it seem very familiar to many readers: a distant, harsh father who protects his children by smothering them; an understandable, if selfish, impulse to flee at the first opportunity; crushing, confusing deaths; the power of big-name preachers, megachurches and small groups; and the unspeakable crush from betraying friend and acute poverty. Some situations are particularly poignant reading in a world after Marx and Freud.

Otherwise, you’ll have to be a patient reader. The language can get a bit florid at time, and I half-wonder if that’s an influence of his second wife, Judith Stevens, who was a published author and influential person in her own right and time. (She was his editor, and finished the work.)  Be be prepared for rapt circumlocutions, and many tears on bosoms &c.

The one extant abridgment – The Cornerstone — is more than a century old and was written for young children. It’s an even faster read, but (for this adult) not half as interesting. I used to have it at UniversalistChurch.net, but it seems to have fallen away in one of the site re-launches. I’ll see if I have the files and will restore it.

It’s well known now that a medical crisis is more likely to push you — let’s limit this to the United States — into bankruptcy than any other single cause. This was true, too, for Universalist church founder and inspirer John Murray and his first wife, Eliza around 1768.

The text follows, but first to set the scene.  Our brother and our grandfather are literally Eliza’s. She was raised by her grandfather, but had been disinherited — at one brother’s scheming; he got her inheritance as a wedding gift — for marrying Murray (for being a follower of George Whitfield, rather than being a Universalist.) Though reconciled, the grandfather’s new wife — who had been the older man’s servant; John had found her — cut off the family. On top of this, both Murrays had recently become attendees of the notorious (Universalist) James Relly’s worship, and so were cut off from the main of London evangelical fellowships. Their avenues for relief few, and thus their risks high . . .

We had a sweet little retirement in a rural part of the city. We wanted but little, and our wants were all supplied; and perhaps we enjoyed as much as human nature can enjoy. One dear pledge of love, a son, whom my wife regarded as the image of his father, completed our felicity. But, alas! this boy was lent us no more than one short year! He expired in the arms of his agonized mother, whose health, from that fatal moment, began to decline. I was beyond expression terrified. Physicians recommended the country; but my business confined me in London, and my circumstances would not admit of my renting two houses. I took lodgings at a small distance from town, returning myself every day to London. The disorder advanced with terrific strides. My soul was tortured. Every time I approached her chamber, even the sigh which proclaimed she still lived administered a melancholy relief. This was indeed a time of sorrow and distress beyond what I had ever before known. I have been astonished how I existed through such scenes. Surely, in every time of trouble, God is a very present help. I was obliged to remove the dear creature, during her reduced situation, the house in which I had taken lodgings being sold; but I obtained for her a situation about four miles from town. The scenes around her new lodgings were charming. She seemed pleased, and I was delighted. For a few days we believed her better, and again I experienced all the rapture of hope. My difficulties, however, were many. I was necessitated to pass my days in London. Could I have continued with her, it would have been some relief. But as my physician gave me no hope, when I parted from her in the morning, I was frequently terrified in the dread of meeting death on my return. Often, for my sake, did this sweet angel struggle to appear relieved; but, alas! I could discern it was a struggle, and my anguish became still more poignant. To add to my distress, poverty came in like a flood. I had my house in town, a servant there; the doctor, the apothecary, the nurse, the lodgings in the country, — everything to provide; daily passing and repassing. Truly my heart was very sore. I was friendless. My religious friends had, on my hearing and advocating the doctrines preached by all God’s holy prophets ever since the world began, become my most inveterate foes. Our grandfather was under the dominion of the woman I introduced to him, who had barred his doors against us. The heart of our younger brother was again closed, and, as if angry with himself for the concessions he had made, was more than ever estranged; and even our elder brother, who, in every situation, had for a long season evinced himself my faithful friend, had forsaken us! I had, most indiscreetly, ventured to point out some errors in the domestic arrangements of his wife, which I believed would eventuate in his ruin, and he so far resented this freedom as to abandon all intercourse with me. Among Mr. Relly’s acquaintance I had no intimates, indeed, hardly an acquaintance. I had suffered so much from religious connections, that I had determined as much as possible to stand aloof during the residue of my journey through life. Thus was I circumstanced, when the fell destroyer of my peace aimed his most deadly shafts at the bosom of a being far dearer to me than my existence. My credit failing, my wants multiplying, blessed be God, my Eliza was ignorant of the extent of my sufferings! She would have surrendered up her life, even if she had feared death, rather than have permitted an application to either of her brothers; yet was I by the extremity of my distress precipitated upon a step so humiliating.

But she did die, and in time Murray was locked up in a sponging house, a prelude to prison proper, where the inmates, locked up in a bailiff’s house were squeezed (hence the sponge reference) by having to pay their own bed and keep, at inflated prices. His brother-in-law William paid his debt and set him up in a business. Within two years, he had left “to retire in” the wilderness of America, a kind of living suicide and the rest — they say — is history. And providence.

Another interesting passage from the Life of Murray, this later in his career. He left Gloucester, Massachusetts, his new home, when prosecuted — one might say persecuted — for performing marriages illegally, though his congregation contended he was properly ordained, if not in the way commonly known in the Standing Order. Because the cumulative fines would have absorbed fortunes, he left for England while the state legislature could provide relief.

In this context, though see:

But the following advertisement appeared in a London paper:—

“Mr. Murray is an American, the most popular preacher in the United States. In the conclusion of one of his sermons, preached on that continent, he endeavored to enforce with all the powers of eloquence, the necessity of establishing in those States the same Olympic games, which were for many ages established among the Grecians.” But this was not all; it was storied that he had left America in consequence of a criminal prosecution.

Murray, promoting the modern Olympic Games more than a century before their resumption! Fascinating. I wonder if they would be held only among the Americans, or simply to be hosted here.

If your church relies on visiting speakers, don’t make them hunt for the details essential for a successful visit.

Back in Ye Olde Days, the Unitarian Universalist Association (and predecessor groups) had information about what the main service was — as well as where — and at one point what the hymnals in use were.

Of course, with individual congregational websites, such a responsibility can be laid aside. But that means the congregation should step up.

Over the weekend, I ran into a page on a site of a church in one of my favorite-named denominations: the Countess of Huntington’s Connexion. It’s the organizational heir to George Whitefield’s Calvinist Methodism, and I have run across it again in preparing the Life of Murray for republication.

Consider this page at Mortimer West End Chapel‘s site. It gives what a visiting speaker needs, and a careful and interested visitor can intuit much about the service by what is included, down to AV details. (And what is not: there’s plenty of parking but no reference to public transportation. And the nearest rail station is four miles away.) An effort worthy of emulation.

Well, I’m done with raw “pre-first” edits of the EPUB of Life of Murray. Which means the text is all there.

Alas, I’ve now got to come up with (at least) a placeholder solution for the small caps in the test — I have an idea; just want to make a schema for future CSS — and then there’s the problem with the voluminous footnotes, which neither HTML or EPUB handles.

But I should have something to share at General Assembly, and it was a fun read.

Capital Pride hosts the BGLT pride parade for metropolitan Washington, D.C. — this took place last Saturday. Here are some pictures of Unitarian Universalists who participated.

Not a bad turn-out, though Hubby thought the text of the placards too long and complex for the speed at which the parade moved! (He suggested God Is Love as an alternative, and I had to explain how that might not fly so well.)

Some religious groups did better, some worse; I thought of a few things that might be improved. Perhaps for later this week. Fow now, the photos.

The portrait of the blogger as a young man. Fresh from receiving my bachelor of arts degree in history and religion from the University of Georgia.

I’m a bit grayer and have better (and bifocal) glasses now; and not much the worse for wear. I’ve still not framed that diploma.

Pfft to James Joyce. Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of the third album by The Smiths, “The Queen Is Dead.” (Thanks to Sunlighters past and present for the info.) It’s hard to think of an album that makes as much a daily impact upon me. Gen-Xers, do I tell the truth?

And while I love “Bigmouth Strikes Again” “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”  “Some Girls Are Bigger than Others” and “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” (2 Corinthians 12:7?) the one song I’d rescue from a burning building is “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out.”

There have to be other couples who get sappy and affectionate at the thought of being crushed by a double-decker bus because of this song.

(For you David Tennant fans, and those who didn’t get the “Viva Laughlin” reference during NPH and Hugh Jackman’s duet on the Tonys. This is from “Viva Blackpool” (US)/”Blackpool” (UK) from which it was based.)

Oh, great. The Southern Baptist Convention has affirmed the reality and eternity of hell. Let’s recall this fact — and that it’s the largest Protestant body in the United States, despite recent shrinkage — whenever someone makes the silly assertion that “the Universalists won” the moral or intellectual battle.

I’ve got a — how should I put this? broken version of the Life of Murray available for download. I’m looking for testers — just to see if it will load into your e-book-readers.

1. It’s not for Kindles, and I won’t even try a conversion until this version is much, much cleaner.
2. Links to internal notes don’t work.
3. Images need to be resized. I think.
4. The CSS needs a good tweek. That’s the last thing I added and its super-rudimentary.
5. Small caps in the original haven’t been accommodated. Sometimes they appear as ALL CAPS; other times In Title Case. Sometimes Both In The SAME SENTENCE.
6. But the whole text is there, and is pretty clean. With proper quotations marks. (Mostly.)

But I’d love to know how it looks on your reader. Please comment here. Your experience will help me get out a 0.2 version — I hope — before (or during!) — General Assembly.

Download (802 kb)

My first General Assembly was in Charlotte, as it is this year — and I went hungry. The city was less developed then — so the weekday lunch places were closed, the remaining restaurants were out of reach (and packed, with attendees) and there weren’t any grocery stores. I subsisted on Coca-Cola, from vending machines.

Times have changed — I’d be sick if I tried that again — and Charlotte has a grocery store. But don’t call it downtown; it’s the uptown location of Harris Teeter.  I love Harris Teeter: a North Carolina chain that’s made it to D.C. Higher-end. Not as precious as Whole Foods and not at capacious as a Publix. But the right place to get a tub of pimento cheese and some nectarines. And there’s probably an olive bar. Pop Tarts, too, if you like.

Because going hungry at General Assembly is miserable, and (I suspect) a bit too common . . . .

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Not a review of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship Communion Service yesterday, but a reflection on something Kathleen Rolenz, Unitarian Universalist minister and UUCF past president, said during her sermon to the effect that sometimes Unitarian Universalist Christians must practice their faith alone.

I thought of a quotation from James Martineau, which I abstracted at more length in 2008.

Certain Christians without churches

are wanderers unattached, not from any churlish indifference to fellowship in spiritual things, but because they cannot have it without engagements which they dare not take.

This morning a good friend read aloud the lead story on the General Assembly in the Charlotte Observer. Some parts are not news to many of us — a review of the history say — but we agreed it was balanced and accurate, and a pleasing break in the proceedings.

My overall impression of this GA, likewise, remains warm — in large measure to the clever and giving ministers I’ve met, new introductions and old friends alike

So I had my e-book reader out, waiting on a meeting with a colleague during General Assembly.  I noted to him — no names, but he’s a solid Humanist, by means of showing the perspective — that I was reading  Handbook for Unitarian Congregational Churches. He said it was written by unanattributed Samuel Eliot, and that parts of it are still useful (especially that related to ordinations and installations) and it — with a Universalist manual I’ll describe later — should be required reading for ministerial candidates.

Downloadable from Google Books.

Can’t argue with that.

It had been eight years since I had attended a General Assembly in person, and even though I have been careful to watch streamed video and keep up with GA in social media, I knew there would be some surprises. Or more accurately, I expected to be surprised by some things.

The one thing I didn’t expect was how much the message boards — standing bulletin boards, divided alphabetically, where people would leave and collect messages — were diminished. In the pre-mobile-phone age, it is was how individuals and groups connected over the convention; accordingly, it was an important landmark for meetings. Today, not so much. I even heard from a friend how he missed an alumni event because it was only so announced.

But it does still have two important functions. Since it will still be some time before a General Assembly is likely to have good wifi — the costs and technical demands are still too much for a large convention; can you imagine having to supply connections for 6,000 computers and mobile devices on a GA budget? — the message boards will be useful for people arranging ride shares. (A map of the U.S. or the immediate region would be helpful here, so people could post their requests and offers directly to the destination. One college I attended did this, ages ago.)

And then others have made a social experiment/art project of the boards.

I liked this very much, and there were others I didn’t photograph. Fun.

That’s not a racial assertion, but an aesthetic one. At General Assembly, some booths in the exhibit hall were visually attractive and others were bland, and it was largely a function of the use of color. But there are some steps to make a booth more interesting.

Let’s consider how exhibit halls are set up. These are usually barn-like facilities with concrete floors and neutral-colored walls and ceilings. The carpeting is an added cost, which explains why some of the larger areas were uncarpeted. The space is subdivided by a “pipe and drape” system. The tables are draped. The carpet and “drapes” are chosen from a limited color pallet, with a decided bias to dark blue, white and gray. Having a uniform color scheme — this year: dark blue carpet and booth drapes; white on the tables — simplifies exhibit administration and probably controls cost. So I don’t expect that to change.

Booth layout, decor and purpose shape the look. Of course, a booth serving as a boutique for colorful clothing will be more visually attractive than a row of tables piled with printed reports, but that’s little comfort if it’s your report that needs to get distributed. This is what I would do.

Assuming there are not hoards expected, but rather you’re hoping to interest by-standers, do place the tables along the back of the booth, or along either side, but not parallel to the aisle like Lucy’s psychiatric help stall in Peanuts; it literally keeps people out and necessarily focuses the eye to the paper. The next idea will be less popular. Have one and preferably two agents standing in the booth. The posture of standing (wheelchair users excepted) is a signal of attention for those passing by. Two? One to engage bypassers and another to assist those already attracted.

Colorful, printed cards might be the best handout: something that advertises the program and, if appropriate, shares a link where interested persons can download the resources, saving money, paper and the effort of hauling print pieces. Modern Postcard and Vistaprint are two good, affordable printers I’ve have first-hand experience of.  If you want to collect info, be sure to provide a clipboard and have plenty of pens at hand. Not as sexy as QR codes or using some a computer or tablet or what-have-you but very cheap and unlikely to fail.

Props help make a booth attractive, though I think video is over-rated for exhibit halls (unless your project is nothing but video). The clip played needs to be short enough to interest a passing person to stay put — a hard sell — and be large enough to be seen, which rules out most laptops. I’d not bring a TV or larger monitor either. When you add an electrical plug, a wired Internet connection or both, you might well double the cost of your exhibit. (Assuming they’re available; they weren’t years ago, if I correctly recall.) That doesn’t bear up as good value, but you might have reasons to disagree.

Better to use a banner, I think. Not the kind congregations carry at the General Assembly opening ceremony, but rather one that has grommets or loops at the top, can be made rigid at the top with the insertion of a dowel or pipe just below that, and has drape weights at the bottom. Use “S”-hooks to hang it by the grommets or loops from the pipe that frames the booth. If a table is set against the back of the booth, and an undraped table is an option, a matching tablecloth is a good option, too. Consider the basic colors of this banner and tablecloth as contrasting with dark blue, gray and white unless you can change it each year and learn what the default colors are before GA. The “Standing on the Side of Love” gold would be ideal, but might be best avoided to give your program a distinctive look.

I have other ideas, but I’ll share those with those I work with. Your thoughts?

Should you wonder that my favorite Facebook group is the Society for the Promotion of Preaching Bands? (a.k.a Geneva bands, preaching tabs.)

I’m not one to promote Facebook as much as use and tolerate it: the privacy concerns and unannounced changes of service, you know; I’m hoping for better things from Google+. But this is a fun group, with an amazing theological breadth that very politely, and with some humor, discusses exactly one subject.

After more than two years’ of hiatus, Unitarian Universalist minister, newly minted Doctor of Ministry and blogger (Beauty Tips for Ministers) Victoria Weinstein has resumed her first and signature blog, PeaceBang.

Readers: go forth and enjoy.

One of the nice things about working at the Sunlight Foundation — apart from the important, engaging mission and working with fabulously talented people — is early access to technology, especially digital and Internet technologies.

Enter Google+, the Internet giant’s newest (and third) entry to mass social organizing. Much buzz (if you’ll excuse the reference), plus more than a little hope of escaping Facebook. I don’t like Facebook’s management, user experience or (above all) anti-privacy culture. Many of us put up with it, not because it’s good, but because it’s big. Like Walmart, you have Facebook or loose access to many of the people you know. I put up with Facebook because I want to plant and develop churches and need it as a resource.

But should Google — which is huge and not without concerns — take over its business and push it aside. Well, I’d like that. Plus, after a brief review,

• You can segregate your outbound messages (wall posts) by self-selected constituencies.
• You can use video chat within it. That alone moves its use for churches from promotion to more active group building.

And, from I understand, the default settings are for greater privacy.

The demand was unexpectedly large, so there have been delays in getting out invitations. Indeed, right now there aren’t any going out. As quickly as I can, I’ll be sending out invitations to my friends. Spread the love.

I’m not done cleaning up from the 2011 Charlotte General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association and I’m planning for the one in . . . Louisville, Kentucky. In 2013.

Let me be plain: I was never going to go to the General Assembly in 2012 in Phoenix, Arizona. So no protests from me about being scarred, or abused, or manipulated or whatever. I hadn’t been in eight years as it is. Fort Worth is bad enough, but Phoenix in summer is hotter than two hells (and you can only do so much inside for five days.) I’d have to pay my own way, and it’s much farther away than either of two which follow it. I’m not going to be there because I wasn’t going anyway.

And I get the bind the UUA Board found itself in. Just cancelling G.A. isn’t a internally legal option. (Even in the middle of World War II, under severe civilian travel pressure, the AUA had a minimal General Assembly to conduct business. I forget which year.) Moving it, while probably the best principled decision, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars the UUA doesn’t have, and so would probably result in something very unfortunate, like staff cuts. The “Justice G.A.” approach attempts to redeem a bad situation, and because it was born out of compromise, I’m willing to be a bit flexible about how it’s managed. But then I can be: I wasn’t going to go, and it won’t really affect me.

But there are a lot of open questions.

The “all justice, all the time” format seems heavy-handed. Half of the attendees this last G.A. were not delegates, myself included. That’s because its power is shared with it being a training vehicle, a “big church experience” and a personal and professional reunion. I suspect some who go will quietly opt out of the official program and find a nice air-conditioned venue to self-organize meetings for their own needs. (I’m thinking about doing a video training or online meetup at that time.) And an unknown number will regret or resent the lack of practical programming, which, if anecdotal evidence is correct, is of very uneven quality in the districts. (I’ll leave for the moment if there’s an unstated and un-voted-upon endorsement of open immigration.)

And what’s the character of the program that does continue? One quotation (and another following) from the UUWorld blog suggests an option:

Margy Engle, also of Phoenix, was arrested last summer in immigration protests. She appreciated concerns of people worried about the Arizona heat in July. And she reassured them that most of the immigration work she does is indoors in air conditioning. She focuses on registering people to vote and helping with citizenship paperwork. “Thereâ€s plenty of work to do inside,†she said. “I never envisioned this as a GA where everyone was going to be arrested.â€

That — and common sense — suggests a mass public-facing event from within the Convention Center, or perhaps busloads of participants to area service centers, say, for voter registration. Now combine that with a strong stated value (how commonly heartfelt it is I will leave for you to decide) for visible, unified public action, like Phoenix arrests or yet another retelling of James Reeb’s murder — events not intended to occur. And subtract the absence of “fall in line” culture among UUs.

I predict attendees will remember a big, interesting (for extroverts) rally, long stretches of boredom and how unavoidably hot the whole thing was. And how their fair compensation (or what have you) questions had to wait.

I’ll see you in Louisville.

Some of you may get the meanings here; if not, please move on with my apologies.

This year, I got as birthday greetings

• 2 cards
• 2 emails
• 2 telephone calls
• 7 tweets on Twitter
• 83 87 greetings on Facebook, plus 5 direct messages

I also got three automated emails from business that required my birthdate to register.

The people who greeted me on Facebook ranged from close family (including my mother, who also called) to new acquaintances at G.A. There’s a lesson here about what works today.

As you may know, I’m planning a new Universalist Christian church, and I’m working on a document that describes it shape and mission, particularly in light of the by-laws revision that passed at General Assembly this year. It’ll take a second passing vote — pretty darn likely — and conceives of non-local congregations within the UUA. (PDF; see page 1, line 131.)

I am, admittedly, thinking of a hybrid. So with the distinct theology that this new congregation brings and a generally dormant culture of evangelism, I thought it a good idea to gather a team to reflect and advise me.

Your thoughts?

The new church is still in the conceptualization phase, and so I’m taking the time to consider what unquestioned habits in everyday church life were developed when communication, city life and transportation were very much different than they are today. Habits which, however loved, make less sense in a church getting started.

The conspicuous and central Protestant sermon is one of these. 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. Another option is to take the high-flown or superstar route, but that so often leads to a lack of substance. For those who can manage extraordinary weekly preaching with integrity, at what opportunity cost? (It’s worth remembering that colonial preachers exchanged far more than ministers today, and I’m sure time management for preparing sermons was a part of the calculus.)

At the same time I thought about that fossil: the pastor’s printed book of sermons. I can hardly think of a printed genre that goes staler, and I hope its age is past. But it did make me think of the future. 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.

Dear friend, colleague and Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Weinstein is on her way to that “sceptred isle” to lead worships, workshops and other meetings. I hope she’s able to work in some milky tea, mash and pie. Most of her time will be in and around London, but there are other events, and if you’re Over There and have meaning to meet her — and catch a glimpse of her alter-ego PeaceBang — please review these details at her blogs.

• “Moving Through the Liturgy†Residential Retreat For UK Clergy July 25-27
• PeaceBang In London
• PeaceBang in Milton Keynes, July 22
• PB Leads Worship Renewal Retreat In the UK July 25-27 (sure, a duplicate)
• PB In the UK! Victoria Weinstein Preaching/Consulting in London

This is a bleg, or a blog beg. Is there a brand of portable speakers you like and can recommend — the kind connected by an ordinary audio jack and powered with batteries — that would be convincingly clear and loud for a group to listen to. Say, a podcast sermon or — don’t wince — a hymn track to sing-along to. I’m trying to avoid tinniness, and this is not an area I know well.

A bit of light lunchtime blogging.

Well, whatever the future of preaching, it’s been so long since I’ve had to preach in any way that I’m long overdue to resume a preacher-like discipline. So, I’ll try to get out something each Sunday that puts me back on that path. I’m sure it won’t be a sermon, but thoughts, notes or at least a little research.

Keyed not to the newer Revised Common Lectionary, but to the older one-year western lectionary that set-liturgy Universalists generations past would have more likely known, and which I think makes more sense in a culture with so little biblical fluency and where someone might miss more than the occasional worship service.

July 10, 2011 is the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost. I’ll be meditating on these.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

O Lord, we beseech the mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may by thy mighty aid be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

or

We beseech the, O Lord, to renew thy people inwardly and outwardly, that as thou wouldest not have them to be hindered by bodily pleasures, thou mayest make them vigorous with spiritual purpose, and refresh them in such sort by things transitory that thou mayest grant them rather to cleave to things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

• Epistle: 1 Pet. v: 5-11
• Gospel: Luke xv: 1-10

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

O Lord God, who hast made glorious the name of thy Son Jesus Christ; mercifully grant us, we beseech thee, such a participation of his spirit, that we may even here possess rich measures of heavenly strength and comfort; and that hereafter we may be admitted to the full joy of his blessed presence forever and ever. Amen.

• Same lessons.

So where do you find this one-year lectionary? Lemme tell you: that’s not a question often asked on the left-hand-side of the Christian family, where there’s either a value placed on the ecumenical convergence three-year lectionary or where it’s a moot or alien question. It’s prospering best in conservative Lutheran and breakaway Anglican circle, from what I can see. That doesn’t dissuade me. (Then again, you can say the same thing about Geneva bands if you add conservative Presbyterians.)

I first look to the 1866 Universalist A book of prayer for the church and the home (Google Books) which stands in the center of the now little-known Universalist prayerbook tradition. The pastor of the First Universalist Church, Providence, Rhode Island and friend, W. Scott Axford, identifies in its collects a subtle and pervasive tenderness that, in his assessment, distinguishes Universalist liturgics. (I hope I’m not misinterpreting him, as this came from a discussion some years ago; he’s quite thoughtful and precise on these matters.)

The collects — pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable — are important because they synthesize and “collect up” the thoughts in the lessons.

But the fact that there’s so much overlap between the one-year lectionaries means that it’s useful to examine them for variations. Go back 45 years or so, and the in-use Anglican lectionaries would work, including the 1928 prayerbook that can be found on the web and for a song at many a used bookstore. I also consult the not-online Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929) which is loosely connected to British Unitarian-inspired Free Catholicism, the subject of many other blog posts. One prayer book that uses the traditional forms with modern idiom is the 1965 (Anglican) Melanesian English Prayer Book and I consult it occasionally. Then, too, is the old Church of South India worship-book, of which I have written much. Of course, the current U.S. Episcopal church has a one-year cycle of collects, and that’s a big part of the one-year appeal.

With the prospect of a new church and one with a conspicuous online element, a clear upfront set of participant (much less member) expectations will have to come together almost immediately. But why draft one from scratch when — and this is a benefit of the free culture and liberal licensing, another intended value — when others have paved the way.

I’m thinking of the Code of Conduct of the Ubuntu operating system community. Not a perfect match, and it says nothing about contribution expectations. (Perhaps it shouldn’t. Haven’t got my head around that.) But it gets much of the way there and — thank God — lacks much of the ponderous, overwrought language that deeply theological people cannot escape.

I’ll keep my eye out for others.

I think I may have been the first Unitarian Universalist minister to have gotten a Google+ account. (I’m one of four Scott Wellses, but easy to identify.) That’s the benefit of working at a tech-centric organization: early access to an invitation. And the lesson learned from thinking Twitter was nonsense and a dead-end when I first heard of it, what, three years ago?

Yes, I like Google+ my reservations about Google — so my ever-loving husband reminds me — notwithstanding. Yes, it’s much like Facebook, with the most obvious missing functionality being groups and pages. Also, there’s no real way for a group or business (read: church) to participate, but the word on the street is that Google will have something out for them in a couple of weeks. And I expect new features will roll out, and that Google won’t give up on this foray into networking and have learned from the Google Buzz and Google Wave feature and rollout mistakes. (I want Google Reader integration.) Indeed, Google has made getting an invitation like Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket and, yes, I’ve been doing my part to pass along invites. (Leave a comment if you want one.)

Two things make it better than Facebook:

1. You can parse people you know into distinct groups, which means you can target your voice and can exclude your mother from the saucier parts of your life: the Facebook problem. If this carries to participating organizations, it could help shape its programming and marketing.
2. It has much more fine-tuned privacy and data controls. Facebook has a terrible pattern of privacy over-reach; Google has a better reputation. Google allows you to export your data — like your contact lists; Facebook? forget it.

Facebook is like old Ma Bell. Most everyone depends on it and puts up with its annoyances to keep getting the bit they want. But I know many people who would give it up in a heartbeat if there was a viable alternative, and I hope Google+ is it. Just a few days in — and with most of the people I’m linked in having joined in the last 72 hours — I can feel the switch happening.

Now, I also have heard that Google +1 will be integrated into Google+; this is its “like” feature, so I’ll be adding a +1 button to this blog’s pages. Here’s how and what you get out of it. There’s also emerging plugins for the Chrome browser that allows Facebook integration, which I’ll examine.

Not to sound too evangelistic, but I’ve been using Google+ — a social network to battle Facebook, and perhaps Twitter — for just over a week and it’s changing how I interact with new and old friends and contacts. The key, I’m convinced, is getting enough people in your circles who are past the “gee wizz” phase and actually use it. That took a shockingly fast three or four days.

Now that bunches more people are inside, and Google is able to keep the invitation windows open longer, it shouldn’t be so hard to get an invitations. But that’s easy to say if you have one. (And the rollout for people who have Google Apps — don’t worry if this isn’t immediately familiar to you — is delayed.)

If you don’t have an account and want one, ask me in the comments.

OK — far from a sermon, but as I said: I have to get back on the preaching horse. Here are the notes I drew up when I wasn’t swooning over Google+. I’ll try for more next week.

The text from St. Peter’s letter describes the humility and respectful regard Christians ought to give their (spiritual and literal) elders. A few words about humility are in order because of common and inherited misunderstanding and abuse. Humility takes cultivation and may be identified with the question, “are my needs consistent and able to accommodate the needs of others” including food, water and goods, but also a fair place in the social world, esteem, justice and care. Using the common phrase, a humble outlook means the world “is not all about you.”

But this can be taken too far. For those who are chronically without the means of living — material, social and spiritual — the call to humility can be read as (or imposed as) a means of control. If humility is way to govern the desire to outstep others, then it must also be enjoyed as a way to uplift and encourage those who have been left behind. See the celebration of the woman who found the lost coin. [Reference to the other text for the day.]

That’s about how far I got.

A word to the Unitarian Universalists out there. It’s no secret I ride Unitarian Universalist evangelism and church planting inadequacies pretty hard, but there seems to be one consistent bright spot that I’d like to promote: district-level Chalice Lighters programs.

These are, in brief, individual donation subscription pools to support growth initiatives like building acquisition, improved signage or access for first time hires or ministerial calls. Because they are at the district (regional) level, it’s an added burden to promote them, particularly to those who don’t attend a local church often. But since I intend to apply to to program some day, I’d better start giving. And promote it.

My own district, the Joseph Priestley District — from mid-New Jersey through eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia and northern Virginia — is the largest in the Unitarian Universalist Association and has the largest Chalice Lighters program, or so I’ve been told. And if it doesn’t, it need to be. Fortunately, the powers-that-be make it possible to sign up online.

Go forth and do likewise.

If you have a success story, or know of a similar link in one of the other eighteen districts, please comment below.

July 17, 2011 is the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Iâ€ll be meditating on these.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

O God, the Protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal: grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord. Amen.

• Epistle: Rom. viii, 18-23
• Gospel: Luke vi, 36-42

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, though being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not those things which are eternal. Amen.

• St. Luke vi. 36.
• Rom. viii. 31

I’ll keep this brief. Until UUA.org has a proper mobile version, mobile apps are just gimmicks. (And not inexpensive ones.) It’s a question of convenient, added functionality. By contrast, the Church of the Larger Fellowship app (search for “Quest for Meaning”) rises to a need, though it’s not one I have. A Pavlovian or magical attraction to mobile apps isn’t helpful. Their value should be measured for effectiveness like every other program.

That’s why I was so pleased when I saw Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Cynthia Landrum (Rev. Cyn) of the Unitarian Universalist Church of East Liberty, Clarkelake, Michigan, discussing the technical challenges of getting her church’s website to serve a mobile version. For one thing, she saw a need to support mobile devices and that it was probably coming from newcomers. Be sure to read the posts here and here.

And if your church is running its site on WordPress, there are ready-to-use templates that do the work for you, if in a plain way. (This blog has a mobile version thus.)

Greetings: I’m looking for blogs written by or for independent theological universalists of the “UR” (universal restoration) or “Bible students” variety. I’ve noticed a strong tendency towards conferences there, and a conspicuous use of the Concordant version.

I’m trying to better understand the fellowship (or fellowships). Links in the comments would be helpful. Forthcoming conferences, too, if you have details, and I’ll also add them if and when I find any. Thanks.

Two hundred twenty years ago today the Birmingham, or Priestley Riots began against dissenters, especially proto-Unitarians like scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley. Houses and churches were burned; Priestley left England for America in 1794. (Today, the mid-Atlantic district of the Unitarian Universalist Association is named for him.)

The Romans passage — read long, with two pericopes (passages) from the Free Church and Universalist lectionaries I mentioned — draws me. You can read it here.

I’m gleaned a couple of interpretive passages from the tradition for further meditation.

As appears from Phil. ii. 9. 10, 12. All things were made for him, that as a Son, he might have an inheritance, as a king, he might have a kingdom, as a bridegroom, he might have a bride, and as a head, he might have a body consisting of many members. And, that he might be the Saviour of that body, was man created in a mutable state. “For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,” Rom. viii, 20. That the creature being deceived through sin, and lost in the bondage of corruption, Jesus might have an opportunity of exerting his grace, his wisdom, power and love, in the redemption of their soul by his blood; and in saving them in himself, with an everlasting salvation.

James Relly, Union

Reconciliation is a renewal of love, and love is the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, of which St. Paul speaks in Rom. viii. 2, by which he was made free from the law of sin. The soul, when governed by the law of sin which is in the members, of which St. Paul speaks in Rom. vii. 23, is in a state of unreconciliation to the law of the Spirit. And it is by the force and power of the law of love in Christ that the soul is delivered from the government of the law of sin; the process of this deliverance is the work of atonement, or reconciliation.

Hosea Ballou, Treatise on Atonement, chapter 4, ¶ 122.

There were two portraits made of Universalist minister (and John Murray’s mentor) James Relly, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, but I’ve only ever seen one, as seen in this article about him. That’s surely the one by John June, an engraver who “flourished c. 1760-1770 . . . of no great eminence“.

Sylvester Harding is supposed to have made another portrait, and presumably there’s an image of it somewhere but I’ve never seen it. Have you? Perhaps re-reproduced in a book frontispiece. Putting this out there for a long-term inquiry.

I think the District of Columbia got new business organization laws yesterday. The I think is because of our Home Rule charter, which requires a congressional review period, which is based on the uncertainty of projecting out legislative days. But the new Title 29 was scheduled to become law yesterday.

Based on the Uniform Law Commission recommended acts, the new D.C. code is promised to make us up-to-date and organized and endlessly blissful. Fine. All I care about (for this blog) is the unincorporated nonprofit organization provisions, which I’ve written about several times.

Why, and why for churches? Because our practical polity — the votes, and reports and Board of Trustees part that we associate with “how churches run” — is a legacy of the law, not our theological understanding of how churches should work. We in the United States churches are heirs to a complex set of customs, laws and structures that having grown so complex have been simplified to be manageable and then hallowed with age. Historically, what is “in trust” for the trustees? The building or other assets, and the trustees were apart but related to the congregation. But then the laws changed to allow churches to incorporate in their own name. But why incorporation? Because it protects the property and officers. (Indeed, why pledge? Because the old pew owner system was unfair and — I bet – unreliable.)

But with new laws come new opportunities, if we can make use of them. The unincorporated nonprofits under this law don’t need incorporation to protect the property or officers or members. And without incorporation, no corporate structures. A small congregational church can — should it so wish — operate as a direct democracy. Or the trustees can be retired and offices  like the diaconate — once more practical than spiritual —  can take their former place. And it comes with the hope of easier administration, or at least administration that fits the theology. (A question for Unitarian Universalists: how does your incorporation fit with your church covenant? I bet “not at all.”)

But it’s not an option for many, so far. The revised uniform act (one that’s meaningfully fleshed out for my comfort) is only the law in Arkansas, Iowa, Nevada and now — I suppose — D.C.

Unitarian Universalists come-inters from Evangelical churches might be interested in Paul’s letter to the Romans, included in the lectionary readings today, which holds an extraordinary level of esteem in those churches and so might seem inappropriate in our setting. (I’m reading the Romans passage as 8:18-40.) But the letter has been a touchstone for those who believe in God’s complete salvation, and so I’m not going to attempt to write preaching notes on it. There’s simply too much there and it demands a delicate analysis. If you enjoy a good theological read, consider Jan Bonda’s The One Purpose of God: An Answer to the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment — which I need to pick up again.

Still, even without a close parsing, Paul’s understanding of the world (8:22-23, here KVJ) conceives of salvation in cosmic terms, and certainly not in cherry-picking certain persons out of a lost or hostile universe. And the language of childbirth undercuts a reading of particular favor.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

But matched with the gospel (Luke 6: 36-42), a teaching of Jesus on equity and mercy, and includes “the mote in the eye” also has a tantalizing passage at verse 40: “A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.” (NRSV) From this we have a hope that we grow in faith and discipline to be more like God. More creative, more loving, more relational, more giving and more saving.

July 24, 2011 is the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost. OK — perhaps if I get these up on Monday, the process may be a bit easier. A little improvement each week . . . .

Note the difference of the ending of the two collects. Since the readings are the same, I’ll end each passage with the Free Church book. For Revised Common Lectionary users, the 1 Peter lesson is used on Easter 6, year A and Lent 1, year B; the Luke lesson is used on Epiphany 5, year C.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

• Epistle: I Pet. iii, 8-15;
• Gospel: Luke v, 1-11

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness, and the kingdom of thy Son may prosper in all lands. Amen.

• Epistle: I St. Pet. iii, 8.
• Gospel: St. Luke v, 1.

The least expensive Android tablet was not born to be an Android tablet, but is the Barnes and Noble Nook Color — an e-book reader — with a specially-modified version of Android put on it. I bought one, and realizing that I’ll never get much value out of it as an e-book reader made the next logical step . . . .

That Android version is a flavor called CyanogenMod formatted for the Nook Color, and while still lends itself for phones overcomes the fact that the e-book reader has fewer buttons to control it by putting them on the screen. And, more importantly, you can run it from an installed micro SDHC card — the kind that store photos in many kinds of camera — rather than on the internal memory. Which means I can turn it off, pop out the card, restart and have the Nook as Barnes and Noble intended. And the warranty isn’t voided. I used the directions found here. It does take some technical ability, your own or someone else’s. And while they didn’t recommend it, I was able to make it work quite nicely (thank you) on a cheaper class-4 card. (It didn’t boot the first time, but was fine the second time.)

Android, while built on Linux, is not itself open-source, for which the phone is too small. And Google, Android’s sponsor/owner, is holds access to its apps store closely. But as the story suggests, if you already have a proper Android phone, they don’t mind (in essence) you adding it here. Indeed, I was shocked to see a facsimile of my phone — including the background but excluding third-party apps — when I first logged in with my Google account.

So why not use the phone? Well, it comes back to books. As regular readers know or guess, I’m more prone to read from Google Books’s public domain offerings than buy something from B&N. And the Google Book app is ideal — better than I expected, since the books cache on the Nook and the margins are magically cropped. Perfect for when I’m out of wifi distance. The browser works nicely, and when pivoted into the landscape mode, the soft/screen keyboard is almost touch-typeable. And unlike an iPad, you can hold it comfortably in one hand.  It also plays music and videos (not added any videos yet), and since it’s an Android tablet, I’ve installed Square, a credit card processor should I eventually take donations for the new church start.

I like it.

Unitarian Universalist minister, blogger and friend Victoria Weinstein is in London drinking good tea, among other pursuits.

I love tea, and drink it in great quantities. Apart from being delicious and refreshing, tea is an extraordinarily good value; very good tea can be had at a very small cost per serving. But even good leaves and be ruined with poor preparation and — to a degree — mediocre leaves can rise to satisfaction if prepared well. (The heated pot is important.) There’s a good lesson in making the best with what you have, and in that spirit share this British wartime film on tea.

I was thinking there were lessons — good and cautionary — when I read the fifty-year-old Whittier (Ca.) Havurah, the first Jewish “fellowship” (one translation for ḥavurah) was winding up its affairs. (Jewish Daily Forward, “Whittier Celebrates the Last Hurrah of Americaâ€s First Havurah,” July 13, 2011) Generation-locked, under-organized, perhaps too inventive being the downsides of youth-oriented, free and creative. Little wonder many of the newer ḥavurot blend orthodoxy, egalitarianism, participation and tradition in a way that’s neither/nor, and not Whittier’s model but still new. I’d seek one out — D.C. has its choices — were I Jewish.

I’ve written how this movement (and here) has appealed to me, so I won’t labor that. Instead, I’ll lift up Kim Hampton’s pointed “who’s planting?” concern. Sure it would be nice if there were different kind of church planting and all were well funded. So whether the desired form of church, or the best under the circumstances, consider:

• a congregation of twelve to twenty that aspired to well-crafted worship, individualized spiritual development and mobilizing a pool of helpers to accomplish social ministry.
• where worship is something shared between the members and had wide participation as a stated value.
• not affiliating with the Unitarian Universalist Association, but staying in communication with the district and nearest congregations, and in other ways minimize administration
• assisting new, like groups spring up in unlikely places or among unlikely populations.
• develop its own leadership, but cooperatively develop the resources to do so.
• be prepared to disband — as an option, not a failure — when and if the times demand.

And I don’t mean, “full of Ben and Jerry’s.”

Ran some numbers: if every state (including D.C. and the Virgin Islands) was as densely populated with Unitarian Universalists as Vermont (in the #1 position), there would be more than 950,000 members in Unitarian Universalist congregations today. Think of it as food for thought rather than a meaningful fact. States aren’t fungible.

I’ve left out Puerto Rico because, unlike the others, there are no Unitarian Universalist Association member congregations there, though there is an emerging congregation.

The 52nd position? Hawaii.

This is late, and rather thin, but I thought some readers might like to know of that the Church of Norway has liturgical resources in English translation online.

There are few distinctive prayers that might be useful to mark the Oslo killings, but the funeral service (PDF) might be helpful in identifying a biblical passage to introduce remarks or a prayer.

The more appealing of the two texts this week is the passage (5:1-11) from Luke’s gospel: the story of Jesus, the boat and the overfull nets.

Surely from a Universalist point of view, the idea that Jesus’ promises are overfull is appealing and comforting. But the story needs some consideration before we can get that far. For one, it’s hard for Christians to hear this passage and not think of evangelism. Jesus tells the fishermen to go and fish for men. There will be many pulled in, and it’s easy to leap to a well-populated church.

But I don’t believe that’s what going on here, at least not primarily. First, the idea that grace is a benefit of belonging to the right (Christian) club is antithetical to Christ’s gospel, however common that’s lifted up in big pulpits today. So Jesus isn’t sending out his apostles for some big membership drive: a cosmic version of a PBS telethon with salvation offered in place of tote bags. Instead, it seems to me that the goal is the fullness of life, in concert with God and escaping the peril of sin — a listless state out of communion with God and his will — and also the goal that all should know and enjoy the same. That’s a worthy mission of the church: to give, rather than to receive.

Looking back to Peter’s letter, we get help with the how, including “unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind.”

An aside: it’s not easy to carve out time in a work week to make up sermon notes, but harder still to think like a preacher after having not done so in so long.

July 31, 2011 is the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.

These collects are very different in tone. Since the readings are the same, Iâ€ll end each passage with the Free Church book. For Revised Common Lectionary users, the Romans lesson is used in the Easter vigil all years and for Proper 6, year A; the Matthew lesson is used on Epiphany 6, year A.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

O God, who has prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding; pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desired; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

• Epistle: Rom. vi. 3-11
• Gospel: Matt. v, 20-26.

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

O God, whose promises exceed all that we could desire or understand; grant us, we beseech thee, the greatest of all blessings, thy love shed abroad in our hearts; thy we may render to thee a ready and joyful obediance as true disciples of thy Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

• Gospel, St. Matt. v. 20.
• Epistle, Rom. vi. 3.

My work colleague, Zubedah Nanfuka, has produced a short documentary called Wives of War: Uganda’s Former Girl Soldiers of the LRA, the last referring to the Lord’s Resistance Army.

If you care about understanding the role of women and girls — as soldiers, as sex slaves, as returnees — in armed conflict, I’d ask you to support Zubedah’s project to expand and improve the film.

The project costs $3,000, of which $650 has already been raised. I’m certain your contribution — even $5 is helpful; more is better — would be well appreciated and carefully stewarded.

Again, that link.

Long day and busy. No time to blog, but plenty of love for this video of London’s cafe scene in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Look back in fabulousness.

Enjoy.

Like many people in an office setting, I deal with PDFs. But I’ve long given up any notion that they’re inviolable; indeed, marking on them, deleting some pages and not others and then rotating the whole bunch 90 degrees is one way the format can be useful. Sometimes I do this on the command line, but here are two graphical interface Linux tools — one I’ve been using a while; another I just discovered yesterday — that made today’s office work possible.

The new find was Xournal. Promoted as a hand-writing tool — which I’m unlikely ever to use — it serves admirably to “highlight” on a PDF, and does a nice job typing in extra text. Say, to modify a form for an office or congregation so everyone who signs up for a workshop — assuming there’s not an online sign-in! — doesn’t have to write out the same info each time, like name and address of a congregation.

And there’s PDF-Shuffler, that allows you to combine (concatenate) files, delete and reorder pages and pivot their orientation. Very handy.

Ubuntu Linux users can get both from the Ubuntu Software Center. Indeed, look there for details rather than the rather plain software project sites.

Long, tough week just past. So much so that when not working I preferred simple entertainments to sermon prep, especially knowing that I wouldn’t actually be preaching to a congregation. So the notes following are raw and provisional.

The Romans text appointed (6:3-11) begs to remind us what James Relly once preached: that Christ Jesus was the captain of the whole human family, that be bore our human nature, and that in his victory over death human nature itself — not specific persons, like winners in a cosmic Lotto drawing — was revived and sanctified. God is with us, but not with us in a particular way from which we can take a pride of possession. Indeed, the pride of particular salvation and a exceptional, self-serving place in the cosmos smacks of sin, if not simply folly. The scope of the universe, large in Relly’s day, has moved to the nearly immeasurable. We are part of brilliant creation; indeed, a holy one, and we stand with a humbled happiness within it, rather than lording over a despoiled wreck.

In that context, our needed “righteousness [which] exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees” (Matthew 5:20-26) speaks of a new relationship with one another and with the universe that doesn’t depend on a hair-splitting reading of an inherited law. Judgments ahead of us, as nations, cultures and competing interests multiply, call for generous regard for the other, and a renewed understanding that might does not make right.

In both cases, the lesson is “the world does not rotate around your interests” and that God’s gift is a world where differences need to be understood before decisions are enacted.

August 7, 2011 is the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost.

For Revised Common Lectionary users, a larger version of the Romans lesson is used for Proper 8, year A, which was June 26 this year; the Mark lesson is not used in the Revised Common Lectionary.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

Lord of all power and might, who art the Author and Giver all good things; grant in our hearts the love of thy Name; increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

• Epistle: Rom. vi. 19-23 (end).
• Gospel: Mark. viii, 1-9.

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver all good things; grant in our hearts the love of thy name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and of thy great mercy keep us in the same through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

• Gospel, St. Mark viii. 1.
• Epistle, Rom. vi. 16.

I’ve been off my blogging recently, and I’m not quite sure why. (Too much Netflix perhaps?) But rather than fight it, I’ll be blogging lightly until Labor Day. Just weekly preaching notes, emergency notes and oddments.

Enjoy the heat.

Nothing gets me to blog like the intention not to blog.

I read this brief NPR piece about declining numbers of editors on Wikipedia. I’ve long thought the process was one bit too complex — particularly about flagging biased articles — so I’m hopeful for improvements.

Which raises a question: which Unitarian and Universalist articles yet need to be written or vastly improved? Wikipedia has, and can yet better be, a resource for training and personal exploration. And also, which core articles should be in as many languages as possible.

I’d gladly abandon other Unitarian and Universalist online historical works if the history writers out there could settle on working within the Wikipedia structure.

Just read this post at a Louisville, Ky. urbanism blog (Broken Sidewalks) that’ll I’ll keep in mind when I plan for the 2013 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

There is an extraordinary amount of parking downtown — and so much of it in surface lots — and that means reduced amenities and a streetscape hostile to pedestrians. Or put another way, how far will attendees have to go to get a meal? Will you want to walk from a late-night event to non-adjacent hotel?

Please refer to that map, or a satellite view of downtown Louisville. The convention center is the double-square gray rectangle near the river. That shows two axes — south on 4th Street and west on Jefferson — for non-parking-lots.

Let’s hope one or both offers a cup of coffee on Sunday.

I’ve been corresponding with a good friend and minister about the planning and scheduling of preaching and swapping pulpits. At work, I’ve been doing up budgets for grant funding. So I wondered: how much does a sermon cost, say if someone wanted to sponsor one or if (in some magical world) there was a grant to apply for.

I don’t mean the worship service and its costs, like the building, utilities, musicians and printing. I’m assuming only the sermon, and so the costs are only for a minister’s labor. (Office costs are sunk, and from the schedules many of my friends keep, they’re largely done at home.) I’m assuming a sole pastor in a small — just under 150 members — congregation, living in Geo Zone 3 (the middle of five zones used by the UUA to determine living costs) making the recommended median salary, plus all the recommended benefits, but excluding conference travel. For the sake of health insurance, I’m using the UUA plan and assuming a minister born in 1960, living in a certain city in the Midwest. (I won’t say which because I discovered there was someone very close to this profile.) So immediately, you can tell these numbers can vary wildly, but this isn’t an unfair test case.

Which brings us to the big woolly problem of how to allocate time. Like many other salaried professionals, ministers rarely work 40 hours for full-time work, and it certainly isn’t evenly distributed. But remembering my own habits, folk wisdom and panicked Facebook updates, I think it’s fair to say it takes 10 hours of time per week to produce original sermons, including the actual preaching, long-term planning and getting out those horrible newsletter blurbs. Sometimes more and sometimes less, but if I was planning a budget for reimbursement, I’d go for 10 hours. (You are free to disagree in the comments.) I know describing ministers’ work in hours is out of fashion — the “blocks” model is preferred in the literature — but nothing else makes as much sense here, and it adds the message that a quarter of one’s work week needn’t magically expand just because a minister’s time is undervalued.

So how much is that sermon in my test case? $390. That’s not an inconsequential amount of money in a small church, and that’s mostly what we have in the UUA.

Which makes me think two things:

• This explains, rather than encourages, why in smaller, cash-strapped churches the conflict between getting as many sermons out of a minister but the laity, the minister or both knowing it may not be the best use of his or her time.
• That supply preachers can’t afford to preach original sermons every time on the going rate. And shouldn’t be expected to.
• Likewise, that sermons are a valuable resource and good ones deserve more than one hearing. Indeed, there’s an economic argument for pulpit exchanges, which were more common in horse-back colonial New England than they are today.

August 14, 2011 is the ninth Sunday after Pentecost. The Universalist collect is unusually placed here; it comes from the Church of England 1662 prayer book for the second Sunday in Advent. The Lectionary lessons keyed to the Revised Common Lectionary: the Romans text largely maps to that found at Proper 8, year A; the Matthew passage is not present.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; we humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

• Epistle: Rom. vii. 12-17.
• Gospel: Matthew. vii, 15-21.

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patence and comfort of thy holy word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

• Gospel, St. Matt vii. 15.
• Epistle, Rom. viii. 12.

I’m not one of nature’s optimists, but these last couple of weeks have been worse than usual. The national political theater has become, if anything, farce. A double-dip recession seems likely. The Arab Spring is rotting on the vine.

I’m upset and distracted. Making plans is difficult and suffering fools almost impossible. I’m trying hard to not fall into selfish concerns and betraying my stated faith. I know I’m not the only person who’s tetchy.

Feel free to comment if you need to vent.

Unitarian Universalist blogger Plaid Shoes (Everyday Unitarian) is frustrated by the lack of Unitarian Universalist-produced bible study material and got helpful suggestions from commentors. Dairy State Dad followed up, but otherwise there haven’t been any follow-on blog posts so far as I’ve seen. And I have an idea or two.

I understand the concern, but I’m not aggravated in the same way. For one, there are some denominational materials produced — if you go back a few years — particularly considering the thin demand for the resources and the high cost of producing good ones. Also, to a large degree, denominational materials have given way ecumenically to joint projects. And perhaps even more to the point, adult bible studies are often conducted without step-by-step lesson plan. That’s where I would start, or more accurately with a copy of Walter Wink’s Transforming Bible Study (which was popular when I was in seminary) or another guide on leading bible study itself.

I’d ask potential class members why they want to study, and commission one or two willing persons to learn enough about some basic concept to teach a class that’ll bootstrap further discussions and more self-directed study. Consider four different orientations a class could take:

• better understanding how the Bible came to be as a literary artifact, and its influence in culture.
• making peace with emotionally difficult passages of scripture, or how certain passages have been used in class members lives.
• examining the claims made by biblical figures and themes on personal and political behavior.
• touring the Bible for poetic and inspirational selections.

I’d try to organize five or six sessions around that and then disband or re-commit to another phase or theme. Or even a book study. But if the group is very unexperienced with the Bible, I’d start with the sessions about the Bible as an English document.

• a review of leading English translations
• films (television, music) that depict passages from the Bible
• a how-to session about the general sections of the Bible, the genres they’re written in and the tools and apparatuses (maps, concordances) that of often bound with the text.

And of course, plenty of time to ask open-ended, judgement-free questions about what people want to know and learn.

I’ve made it clear that I’m in a funk, but two things happened today to overcome it. One was a lunchtime conversation with an office mate that helps me with the fork-in-the-road I’ve hit with the church start, so more about that later.

The other is a twenty-two-minute-long musical composition called “The Most Unwanted Song” (or “The Most Unwanted Music”). It’s a hodgepodge of forms of music that rated low in a survey. So cowboy music to tuba. An operatic paean to Wittgenstein. A children choir’s appeal to shop at Walmart for Labor Day. Reporting by BoingBoing (and NPR?) in 2008 gave it new listeners.

It puts me in a good mood from the sheer absurdism of it.

Then around the 18 minute mark, we get a political screed via bullhorn and elevator music (a riff on “Morning Has Broken” I think) followed by a tune  — again, cue the kids — that in isolation wouldn’t be too out of place in certain double-vowelled congregations. Listen to that if nothing else.

Be sure to download the whole thing here. (MP3)

Also, the lyrics from the author/singer.

Attached media: http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/komar_melamid/KomarMelamid_The-Most-UnwantedSong.mp3

In my last post, I mentioned two things that cheered me, and that the second was a lunchtime conversation with an office mate.

He helped me process a basic conflict I have with my planned new church start which, if the conflict continues will surely mean nothing will come of it.

On the one hand, I need help to get this thing started. The weekly lectionary lessons exercise shows that I don’t have the surplus time to work on this church, and I have no intention of giving up my very fulfilling day job. Serious help comes with the expectation that the church would be “full service”: an infelicitous term, better applied to gas stations, intending to suggest paid staff, complex programs and buildings. And I could make the leap to “go there” if — this is the other hand – I had faith that there would be the help I needed. But since those who care about such things are still talking about the need to change Unitarian Universalist culture, I don’t think I can rely on the general fellowship to come through. And then there’s the baggage of expectations — with money comes influence, even if indirect — which means I might have to compromise my vision to get support.

Thus the feedback: in essence, do what you can. Something is better than nothing. Something can be built-upon (unlike nothing). Not rocket science, but it needs to be said.

Thanks to my friend Kevin for pointing out this online newspaper article, that Inman Chapel, a former Universalist church in the North Carolina mountains will get a historical marker. This is the same Inman family treated fictionally in the novel Cold Mountain.

Something for the home team during my low-blogging August. The SocialStudies blog — from the half-off-cupcakes SocialLiving people — has produced a map of the District of Columbia overlaid with not-wrong stereotypes of the different neighborhoods.

Some will only make sense if you live here; say, “mumbo sauce” — a concoction native to D.C. that the Chinese carryouts serve with chicken wings. And I can’t (or won’t) say the large sections called “white people” and “Marion Barry” are particularly insightful since I rarely go to either area.

But I do live in the part called “gay” and walk to work in (or near) the “non-profits & acronyms” so make of it as you will.

Big version

There’s nothing good about the news coming from Somalia. Or the Somaliland area. Or whatever you want to call that drought-stricken place that’s among the most lawless in the world, the transitional government notwithstanding. But serious, concerned people have an interest in knowing what’s happening there and helping, so far as within us lies.

Much of the food aid is being stolen and resold. That makes the starving children — 400,000 are a risk of a starvation death, per the UK development minister (video) — the hostages of those hoodlums who, in essence, holding them hostage before a starving world. (And in essence, the same thing done by that most repressive of governments, North Korea. Let’s not forget them.)

Leads one to despair.

So I’m asking if anyone has heard a good analysis of the situation, or better, know of a group that has been more effective in securing food for vulnerable, hungry people. Understamd, then act.

This and the next couple of non-lectionary blog posts are going to be about community, and particulary the role of community as the end (rather than as a feature) of Unitarian Universalist communities, er, congregations.

Having community is a frequently-mentioned reason for Unitarian Universalist congregations, and the Unitarian Universalist Association — formally a credentialing, coordination and program-providing entity — often serves as a kind of meta-community. But  is being a community the best use of the community itself? I think not. For one, it makes it, by definition, self-serving. (For example, the phenomenon of the Phoenix General Assembly is putatively an attempt to escape self-centeredness, but the discussions have been deeply inwardly facing.) For another, it means congregations have even more competition, not only from clubs, but social networks and very well honed marketing campaigns that depend on creating a sense of belonging through consuming. If it’s all about the community, then churches have to compete with Facebook, play groups and Apple. Good luck with that.

Liberal congregations, with the high value placed on non-coersion, tend to go that much farther and get very fuzzy about the goal of the organization. Add in the unresolved tension in Unitarian Universalism between the social left and the libertarian left (much less the right) who have very different goals, even within congregations, so much more muting the ability to create a community with achievable goals: those values put into practice.

Instead, far too often, we have larger congregations where membership exists in the context of identifying with the minister (a variation of the marketing phenomeon, really) or smaller congregations based on personal friendships. That’s not a formula for inclusion or meaningful being, much less growth. Indeed, formerly lauded goals, like human brotherhood (world community) have been conspicuously missing in the last ten years.

And other groups, social networks and companies are there to fill the gap. Worrying.

Ah! I thought I had posted this. So for the record . . .

August 21, 2011 is the tenth Sunday after Pentecost. So the collects are almost the same this week, save the end. The Corninthian lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary (through verse 17) is appointed for Lent 3C while the Luke 15 reading (from verse 1) would be read the next week at Lent 4C. That’s March 3 and 10, 2013 respectively. The Galatians lesson (in the RCL to verse 18, which is how I’ll read it) on Proper 9C, and the Luke 16 on Proper 20C. Or July 7 and September 22, 2013.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ. Amen.

• Epistle: 1 Cor. x. 1-13.
• Gospel: Luke xvi. 1-13, or Luke xv. 11-32 (end).

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will as revealed to us by thy Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

• Gospel, St. Luke xvi. 1.
• Epistle, Gal. vi. 1.

So the East Coast had a rare earthquake. The shock was of a aren’t we not supposed to have those? kind; the damage seems mainly restricted to masonry and stonework. (Though I don’t envy the bills for repairs to the Episcopalian’s cathedral or the Washington Monument.)

I ducked under my desk at the office for twenty second or a half minute. Coming home later, this was all the “damage” I discovered. The head of an Ethiopian processional cross — wobbly at the best of times — fell from my bookshelf in front of various Universalist titles. It has since been restored to its place of honor.

Thanks to those who asked after my welfare. I hope we make out so well with Hurricane Irene.

Twenty years ago today, as the wold watch the Soviet Union break up, a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds released the first bit of code that became the Linux — named for him — kernel.

If you use Linux on the desktop, an Android device or are reading this — I use a Linux host; most of the web is served this way — then give a moment’s thought and a bit of thanks.

I’ll either be blogging heavily about an odd mix of items over the next two days because I’m bored, or very little because the power will be out (or because I’m enraptured by the storm.) I live-blogged the last hurricane threat we had — in 2003 — and included in that post an hurricane-appropriate hymn and a short litany from historic Universalist sources.

Join in the rapture by listening to the is-this-what-the-future-was-to-be http://youarelistening.to/irene and looking at images, like the one following, from NASA. (Click the picture for the source page.) It’s now my computer’s desktop image.

Stay safe, and spare a prayer particularly for the frightened, first responders and caught travelers.

An open thread, both to advise would-be visitors and to help undecided church leaders. Please note the church, town and whether or not you’ll be open for some or all services and programs.

Thanks.

Fast moving clouds, but no rain. A view from Washington, D.C. towards Rosslyn (Arlington), Virginia.

Feel free to post here if you have news about Unitarian Universalist congregations and institutions affected by Hurricane Irene.

I am particularly concerned about Murray Grove and the churches of the southern New England coast and up the Hudson River valley, Vermont and along the Saint Lawrence. Please share news if you have it.

For what it’s worth, the District of Columbia was largely spared and I appreciate words of concern shared with me.

I’ve been lately trying to get my head around a hodgepodge of old feelings about the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. I won’t pretend it’s organized, or that it rises above a perverse nostalgia, and comes with the twentieth anniversary of the attempted August coup that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and some deep concerns about the state of a world run by oligarchs. And that makes me think about broken promises of prosperity, alternatives to our consumerist form of prosperity, and how miserable life can get (and the follow-on plague of grinding down generations). Or put another way, it’s easy to say you want a less materialistic life when they’re aren’t bread lines. The Arab Spring has, so I gather, roots as deeply economic as political. Perhaps more so.

That’s a huge prelude to what I found the other day. Back when the Soviet Union was opening up and later failing — these were the days before the World Wide Web — I listened to the world by shortwave radio, and especially Radio Moscow, which was changing as fast as a summer storm. But with the ‘web this workhorse technology was cut back, particularly with transmissions to North America. But Radio Moscow’s successor, the Voice of Russia, and a handful of other continued. But it wasn’t enough to justify the kind of better radio that could cope with steel-framed apartment buildings.

Well, lo and behold, the Voice of Russia has acquired two United States AM-radio stations, and provide a limited measure of local programming. 1390 AM in Washington, D.C. and 1430 AM in New York twenty-four hours a day. Low powered and nice and crackly, like shortwave. (But why? This article suggests a post-Cold War turn-around.)

Or online at http://english.ruvr.ru/, without the static.