Today’s the day we can decide to mend the fabric we divide…
Today is the day…
The church is a community of both memory and hope.
Memory. The church brings forward the wisdom, the stories of the past. It also brings forward the structures and the habits of the past.
Memory. That is the church’s conservative function. The goal is to preserve what is of value.
Memory…and hope.
The church invites and calls for transformation to move us forward. The church helps us address new challenges and challenges that have remained unaddressed.
As Martin Luther King preached, when the church is doing its job, it functions as a headlight, not a taillight…
Hope. That is the church’s progressive function…to create a more just, equitable and compassionate world and to liberate us all.
Leadership in the church takes place in the tension between that conservative function and the progressive hope of liberation…that place between…revering the past, but trusting the dawning future more…to quote one of our hymns.
Leadership in the church is therefore not a simple matter.
James Luther Adams was one of the most important Unitarian theologians of the 20th century.
James Luther Adams, JLA, as he was affectionately known, asked our faith to use theological resources…concepts of conversion and guilt, sacrifice and discipline…concepts from our religious past…that many UU’s would have preferred to forget…Guilt? Discipline?
But he was not pessimistic. Far from it. He described his theology as a pragmatic approach to becoming human religiously.
Adams pushed our faith…or tried to…to address real, current challenges.
In 1935, Adams went to Germany to study with the great liberal theologians of his day. But he learned most from observing the German churches as they responded to, and failed to respond to Hitler’s rise.
He admired the German “Confessing Church” movement whose members did oppose Hitler at great personal risk.
Returning from Germany, Adams taught at Meadville, Harvard Divinity and Andover Newton Theological Schools. He brought a clear-eyed reassessment of traditional liberal optimism about human nature, interpreting history not as a tale of progress but as a drama always facing the possibility of tragedy.
“The aim of religious…life,” Adams wrote “must be radical change.”
Mark Morrison Reid summarized Adams’ views of the way this way:
“Things do not simply work themselves out; human beings must push.”
In our time, with authoritarianism and ethnocentrism out in public once again, it feels deeply appropriate to call on JLA for some wisdom.
Leadership is my topic this morning and Adams had important things to say.
He began with the Priesthood of All Believers…that proclaims each of us has a direct line to that transcending mystery and wonder, however we name it. “Unmediated” is the theological term. No priests needed. No scripture necessary. A direct line.
But he added the notion of the “Prophethood” of all believers, the responsibility to manifest the hope that we find…to manifest that hope in how we live and how we shape our world.
His theology leads both to a faith deeply engaged with the world, but also to a radical broadening of the concept of religious leadership…and a focus on empowerment of leadership.
It is almost a corollary of our first Principle…the inherent worth and dignity of each of us…that each of us is…or at least can be…a leader…
In the words of our Responsive Reading…”We are needed now. All of us. …We must shine.”
Here at the church, I think of our relationship with IMIRJ, the Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice, which is now one of our most important justice-seeking partners. Our relationship with IMIRJ was built…not by ministers…but my lay leaders…I have to name Wendy Rankin for her leadership but there were and are many others…
I think of our Friday evening Vespers Services…created and led by our lay ministry team: Karen Shawcross, Sophia Douglas and Stephanie Kaza…
I think of the cardboard houses our Kindergarten classes used to build…won’t it be good when that can happen again…religious homes for our young people…Evie Zaic and Sharon Dawson are still teaching Kindergarten and 1st again
I think of our religious witness by members and staff during the protests, of the classes led, and the Wellspring groups, the committee work done, our Public Health Team, the Music Council, the Real Estate Development Task Force, the Audit Committee, the Ushers, the Bookstore…I could go on and on…in every part of the ministry of this church. This entire sermon would not be enough time to name them all.
In this large congregational system, the Prophethood of all Believers…the belief and the practice of broad leadership…well…sometimes thanks to the formal structures and sometimes in spite of them…broad lay leadership is how we do things around here.
Can you tell I’ve been spending some time thinking about what we have accomplished during my time here as your minister?
I am going to resist the temptation to try to say everything I think worth saying in these last weeks. But for this congregation to be able to move forward with a new minister, “we” (points to congregation and self) need to be able to finish my ministry..this ministry that we have done together…we need to finish “our” ministry well.
Jim Adams was a believer in ordained ministry…a deep believer. He spent most of his professional life helping to train UU ministers.
But in a church committed to broad lay leadership…what is the role of ministers? Of ordained leadership?
According to Adams, “the test for clergy is our capacity to elicit radical laicism”…to call forth lay leadership.
In my twelve years here, I have done many things. I‘ve preached and prayed, married and memorialized, dedicated children, led the staff, asked you for money…spoken out for justice…there are many parts of the job a Senior Minister does.
But, more than anything else, I have tried to help hold the ministry of this church…
To hold the ministry…the ministry done not just by me or by the extraordinarily talented and dedicated staff with whom I have worked…
But the ministry that we all have done together.
To hold the ministry of this church…the vital ministry that was here before I arrived…
To hold it, to encourage it and empower it…and now to pass it on.
Leadership in church…leadership in life…is not the loneliness of the long distance runner…it is a relay race.
We receive and then pass on the baton…
Or to use the metaphor from our reading, we drop a few more white pebbles in the moonlight so that those who follow us have a better chance of making it through…
One of the most positive pieces of energy at First Unitarian is the 8th Principle. From the Alliance to the Foundation Board and in so many other parts of our ministry, the 8th Principle has become an organizing focus for this church’s work toward Beloved Community.
I know that my leadership…my voice…was important in introducing and …”pushing” the 8th Principle as a path to transformation.
That is true. My voice was important. Perhaps you might expect no less from the first African American minister of this congregation…
But the impact of the 8th Principle is in direct proportion to the extent that it is NOT about me…that it is about “we.”
Engagement with diversity and racism was part of the charge I was given…or at least part of the hope that was articulated in the search process when I was called…the request to focus energy on race and racism came from the congregation…from you.
And I kept trying to provide opportunities to engage. Early on we tried the Beloved Conversations…more than a few of you took part. Then I added my energy to the New Jim Crow…and other folks engaged. The immigrant justice issue mobilized some.
I kept trying…
But it was not until there was readiness… Perhaps it was George Floyd’s murder. Perhaps it was Trump. Perhaps it was the meltdown around race at the UUA, or the protests here in Portland, or the pandemic…or the brilliance of Paula Cole Jones…or all of those things… I don’t know.
But I do know this. First Unitarian was finally ready to engage.
The church moves toward liberation…toward Beloved Community…when we move together…or not at all.
I want to say a word about structure and leadership in the church First Unitarian is governed in a system called Policy Based Governance. The Board, elected by the congregation, sets policies. The Sr. Minister, called by the congregation, and an Executive Team, manage the operation of the church within those policies. It is a system that has been broadly adopted and often adapted within UUism.
We have a tendency to believe that structure can be our salvation…that we can design a system so perfect that we do not need to be good.
And our work on dismantling the Culture of White Supremacy has raised real questions about hierarchy as a structure, recognizing how hierarchy often, so often, embodies privilege that we want to dismantle.
And yet, churches of our size, need to authorize leadership because you can’t run this church if every decision needs to be made by a congregational meeting. The church would simply grind to a halt.
In our faith, and in the progressive community broadly, shared leadership…with co-equal job sharing…has become a new approach…a new structural approach to avoid hierarchy…
I’ve seen that approach work…I’ve been part of that approach working at the UUA in very specific circumstances…and I’ve seen that approach fail out in the world.
The relational system will always trump the formal system in my experience.
But the spirit of collaboration…that seems to me to be critical. In fact, our Board here now calls our governance model Collaborative Governance…and I like that impulse. It makes space for authorization of leadership while calling ministers and other leaders into accountable relationships. It is not salvation by structure…no…but it points in the right direction.
I encourage you to think about…to reflect on collaboration as an organizing idea as you enter into a relationship with your new Sr. Minister.
There is a final theme I want to hold up…another important leadership theme…
What will you, what will this community decide to lead toward. What is the goal? The vision? The dream?
You will want to ask any potential minister that question, of course. But, in my humble opinion…and humility is our theme this month, any minister worthy of this pulpit will first want ask that question of you.
We have embraced the language of Beloved Community to hold those questions of vision.
But that language is intentionally vague…so that it can be renewed with each new generation of leaders and sometimes refreshed with each new leadership challenge.
Here is the question though. Who gets to decide? Who gets to say what the Beloved Community should look like for us…today…as we emerge from 2 years of Covid…
Who gets to decide?
Is it those of us who are regathering in person…that’s a relatively small number still. There is a real in-person kind of accountability that churches have traditionally relied on.
Is it the community that gathers on line? That’s many more of us. And we know that church will be both in-person and on-line from now on.
Is it those two groups of us that should decide? That own this church?
How about the children in our families? Too young to be members, most of them…isn’t there an accountability this church should have to them? And to the children who are not here? To future generations more broadly?
How about the individuals and families who may be yearning to find a spiritual home like this one. Don’t we have some responsibility to folks who have not yet found First Unitarian…here in our block-sized campus….or on-line?
How about our houseless neighbors and the marginalized communities within the larger community in which we live…
Don’t we have some accountability to the history of this church…to the wrapping of this block in red ribbon…to the proud parts of our history… but even to the manifest destiny of the founders? Don’t we have a responsibility to that part of our history even if it is to repair some of the harm that resulted?
Don’t we have some accountability to memory as we revisit what hope can look like for us.
Who gets to decide? Who owns this church?
A new minister will be called soon, voted on by the official members of First Unitarian.
But that minister and all of you who lead in this community will be called to serve the larger vision and mission of this church…the vision that calls for and calls out leadership from all of us here and all of those who will be or may be here tomorrow.
The First Unitarian Vision, created during my ministry among you:
First Unitarian Portland is a beacon of hope for us and for our community, a spiritual center in the heart of our city that helps each of us to find our moral compass, calling and challenging us to build the beloved community with an ever deepening sense of spirit, diversity and inclusion.
The building of Beloved Community requires strong bonds of community among those who are gathered, but it is in the service of a hope that transcends our single lives…
James Luther Adams spoke to the vertical dimension that grounds our hope with these words:
‘It is a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit. The goal is the prophethood and the priesthood of all believers… It aims to find unity in diversity under the promptings of the spirit ‘that bloweth where it listeth…and maketh all things new.”
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Truth of the memory out of which our faith grows…
Truth of the rich and complicated legacy of religious witness that has been bequeathed to us…
Presence of hope that calls us to the work of healing and the possibility of progress…
Hope that helps us insist that Beloved Community is a possible dream…
Be with us.
Help all of us…who lead in so many ways…sometimes even by following the leadership of others…
Help all of us hold to a vision of a world that can be…
We…none of us…were ever the water…only a wave
A wave that finds its fulfillment in the movement to shore.
May the ministry of this church continue to be a blessing in our lives and in all the lives that will follow…
May our leadership be one that spreads blessing…blessing ourselves…blessing all who enter these physical or virtual doors…and blessing our world.
May blessing be what we do in this church and in our lives.
Amen
Topics: Humility