May 2001

• UUA Presidential Elections
• Sermon: "A 40 Year Journey," by Rev. Diane Miller
• Sermon: "Acts of Ministry," by Rev. William Sinkford
• Attention CLF Members
• "Election Essay: At the Threshold," by Rev. Rebecca Parker
• Notice to all members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship,Unitarian Universalist
• From Your Minister, by Rev. Jane Rzepka
• REsources for Living, by Laura Cavicchio
• "Your Gifts," by Rev. Rebecca Parker

UUA Presidential Elections

Thankfully, the Church of the Larger Fellowship belongs to the Unitarian Universalist Association, where congregations unite to provide services they wouldn't be able to provide on their own. Representatives of member congregations will gather this June in Cleveland to elect the Association's president, moderator, financial advisor (CLF member Larry Ladd is running un- opposed), and various committee members (www.uua.org/elections offers lots more information).

The CLF is entitled to 22 delegates, including two young-adult delegate positions. CLF members are receiving invitations by mail to share opinions about the candi dates, so that our delegates will have a sense of the membership's preferences.

We asked each of the candidates for president to "preach" us a sermon, in Quest, CLF style—each one is a minister, after all. They responded enthusiastically, and we offer you brief biographical sketches and their words of inspiration here. Jane Rzepka

The Rev. Diane Miller
Diane Miller graduated from Macalester College in Minn. and from Harvard Divinity School in Mass., and received an honorary Doctorate of Sacred Theology from Starr King School for the Ministry. She has 25 years of varied experience as a minister. Diane is a member of the UUA's Executive Staff and currently serves as director of ministry and, with a staff of 13, manages theological education and internships, ministerial fellowship, settlement, continuing education, and compensation and ministerial aid funds. She has been a denominational leader, serving, for example, on the UUA Purposes and Principles Committee, the UU Historical Society Board, the Affirmative Action for Women in Ministry Committee, and the Common Ground conference where YRUU was envisioned. Diane lives in Belmont with her husband, Michael Durall, and their two teenage sons. Diane's web address is http://www.dianemiller.org

The Rev. William Sinkford
William Sinkford is the Director for Congregational and District Extension Services. He supervises the 31 District-based Field Staff and the Extension, Young Adult Ministry and Congregational Fundraising programs. A Unitarian Universalist since the age of 14, he was very active in the UU Youth movement, serving as President of Liberal Religious Youth in 1965-66. Bill left Unitarian Universalism following our struggles around race in the early 1970s, but found his way back in the early 1980s. He was called to the ministry in 1991 and attended Starr King School for the Ministry. The First Unitarian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio is his home church. Bill has two teenage children, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bill's web address is http://www.sinkford.org

A 40 Year Journey
by the Rev. Diane Miller

One significant feature of this year in Unitarian Universalism is that it is our 40th year of being an Association—a voluntary association of congregations. The UUA was born of the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists in 1961. Come June, we will celebrate these past four decades.

Forty is a significant anniversary. Forty usually signifies maturity—for an individual, an institution, a relationship, or a merger.

For groups, 40 years is about what it takes to forge a new identity. That's how long it took the Israelites to move from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land. From the dramatic escape from Pharaoh, the story retold in the Passover Seder, to the arrival in the Promised Land of Canaan, the Israelites spent 40 years surviving in the desert. Those were four decades of "figuring it out"—creating agreements, falling short, entering into renewed covenants, and making laws (lots of laws!).

For four decades, two full generations, they survived against all odds. At times, when they were close to

starvation and dying of thirst, some wished they were back in bondage to Pharaoh instead of forging a new life of freedom. But they never went back. Comfort was not their primary goal, nor their central value.

At times, when Moses and his authority as the spokesperson for Yahweh seemed too much to bear, they murmured against their leader. Yet they followed him, forging a new covenant and finding a direction for their future.

When the time came, and they were ready to cross the River Jordan and enter the Promised Land, Moses said goodbye. His life was ending. He could see the future, but he would not accompany his people. He reminded the people of the miracles, the hardship, and the blessings of God, and sent them on without him.

From the beginning, in 1961, the UUA has been on a journey of defining our hopes, and finding the path. It wasn't all settled and finalized at the point of merger—that was when our new journey began. Since then we've had challenges aplenty. As an Association, we have experienced a journey that has some parallels to the Exodus story. As I look back over the past 40 years, I see a story that looks like our own version of the desert sojourn.

Like the Israelites, we sometimes have problems with authority figures. We've been known to murmur against a Moses now and again, to say nothing of challenging Yahweh directly, claiming our own authority in matters of faith and belief.

We have turned to our Golden Calves—competing values and differing ways of worship. Sometimes the symbols of our worship seem to be distractions from what is important; sometimes they lead us in wonderful new directions in our faith journeys. Like Moses, who smashed the worship idol, we have sometimes been iconoclasts. Like the people who shaped the golden calf, we celebrate earth images. Over the past 40 years we have shaped our distinctive symbolic presence in worship: the flaming chalice.

We have our own Golden Age of History, our equivalent of the fleshpots of Egypt, and sometimes we want to go back from something hard and demanding and find familiar comfort in the past.

We have had six presidents who have led the UUA over the past 40 years, and I have known all of them personally. Each faced challenges not imagined before, and in every case, the Association survived and, mostly, emerged stronger than before.

There was deep dissent about the war in Viet Nam—protests, marches, draft-card surrenders (and burnings) at Arlington Street Church in Boston, and the Sanctuary movement for draft resistors. We moved along, but not without some pulling in all directions.

We faced the wide river of racism, and began to cross over into the promised land: we built a bridge of civil rights work, but the river rose over it, and we needed another bridge. We started building a higher bridge from opposite shores—but the Black Affairs Council (BAC) bridge and the Black and White Action (BAWA) bridge didn't meet up in the middle. We camped for a time in the politics of confrontation, but moved on toward the politics of working together for justice, voting to pledge ourselves to a Journey Toward Wholeness.

In the 70's, we ran out of "bread," leavened and unleavened. Survival was at stake. Even so, the FBI came to investigate our bank accounts in order to harass us for publishing the Pentagon Papers. We might have starved were it not for manna from the bequest of Caroline Veatch to the denominationally minded congregation on Long Island. We crossed that river and have moved increasingly toward generosity, and stewardship of our resources.

The women in our band murmured about unequally distributed leadership within the faith, and the ancient history of oppression both symbolic and real. We organized to shape a better society, equality of opportunity, and representation in worship. The Women and Religion Resolution set forth a new vision of gender justice.

Tablets of Covenant—known as Purposes and Principles—were chiseled once again, this time with language and concepts inclusive not only of females, but inclusive also of the full range of our theological views.

Like the Israelites, we've been an irascible bunch at times. But we have not, in the end, given up. We've had some wonders along the way. We've lived a story that is our own. We've matured in many ways. We have continued to move, as wandering, worshipping, communities on a journey to freedom—freedom of faith, freedom of personhood, freedom to be together as covenanted communities—churches, fellowships, congregations.

We have survived many challenges in these 40 years. The UUA is stronger than ever before, deeply committed to continuing our work for justice, to strengthening our congregations, and to claiming our voice in the public arena as a faith of values and leadership in these rapidly changing times.

I believe we are ready to cross the river into a new era of Unitarian Universalism. The time has come for moving forward boldly, confident that we can cross the river and find our way into the promised land.

We have the ability to create a great future, so that 40 years from now, people will look back on our efforts with appreciation and gladness. For this I am grateful, and feel blessed.

Quest May 2001 Contents

Acts of Ministry
by the Rev. William Sinkford

Acts of ministry take many forms and are done by many persons. I have received so many.

I think of the welcome I received on my first visit, at the age of 14, to what became my home church. The religious educator, Pauline Warfield Lewis, brought me into that community. I was a bright, young Black man who loved to trumpet my stand-up atheism. Pauline let me know that I could be a part of that community and not check any part of myself at the door. Hers was a radical hospitality. I was delighted to see Pauline's smiling face in a picture of one of the earliest gatherings of LREDA (Liberal Religious Educator's Association). I am glad that she was receiving ministry and collegial support.

I think of my minister in LRY (Liberal Religious Youth), Peter Baldwin. Peter had the very good sense, at a time when I was feeling particularly downtrodden, to tell me to "get a grip." I was feeling sorry for myself: an only child, being raised by his mother, far less affluent than those I associated with, and a person of color in a largely white faith. Peter was at first sympathetic, but then reminded me of the gifts I had been given—intelligence, health, a loving parent. "Get a grip," Peter said. One colleague calls his approach "kick-ass pastoral care." It worked for me.

I think of Bea Percival, a friend from First Unitarian Church, Cincinnati, who showed up on my front steps after my mother's death with a casserole to feed my family, and stories of my mother to soothe my soul. She helped me begin the process of grieving. Her simple presence and her sharing of what my mother's friendship had meant to her were the most significant acts of ministry I have ever known.

I think of William Sloan Coffin, United Church of Christ minister and former pastor of the Riverside Church, who tried in seminary to teach me how to preach. Bill offered me both care and candor. He tested me thoroughly, hoping, I think, that I would call myself a Christian and find the support he had found in his relationship with Jesus. But he accepted that I could not and his acceptance was an affirmation of my calling to ministry. He also constantly challenged me with his language. He said Unitarian Universalists had a very thick ethic to have so thin a theology. I'm still working on that one.

I think of my UU ministerial colleagues of color, who so generously share both their stories of struggle with this faith and their hope that this community can live out its values and help the universe bend toward justice. They are a community that knows the need for the prophetic word, but also trusts the simple acts of honesty and presence.

I think of my current minister, Mary Harrington, who blesses me with her concern and friendship. Mary travels from Marblehead, Mass. to Boston to meet with me. I am, without a doubt, the most complicated congregant in her congregation.

So many acts of ministry. I know their transformative power.

My work at the UUA is not what I expected to be doing when I was called to ministry. I expected to be serving a congregation at this point, ministering to the pastoral needs of its members, working to center the community on its mission, leading worship, and calling the congregation into a ministry in the wider community. Instead I honored the request of an old friend, John Buehrens, to serve on the Association staff.

Make no mistake: my role requires both pastoral and prophetic ministry. I think of the congregations and ministers I have had the privilege to counsel; I think of the hundreds of congregations that the staff I supervise has helped in so many ways. I think of the support I have been able to provide for our burgeoning Young Adult Ministry. I think of the voice I have claimed on the staff, and within the leadership of the Association, to remind us of what we are called to do together.

But I also find myself ministering to the UUA Field Staff and our district structures, helping them to improve and deepen their service to our congregations. I find myself working to support the growth of our faith. I find myself advocating for Young Adult/Campus Ministry, caring for and about our stewardship and our structures. Laurel Hallman, senior minister at First Unitarian Church of Dallas, calls what I do "administrative ministry." Perhaps so. An institution of our size requires good administration that is grounded in our values.

Now I feel myself called to ministry in the role of president of our Association. Though the role calls for real focus on fund-raising, budgets, and personnel decisions, it also calls me to help us create an effective liberal religious voice in the wider world. My experience at the Association, my work across the continent,

tells me that there is potential in our faith that we are only beginning to know.

Our pluralistic religious communities have knowledge to offer a world hungry for both justice and love. We know firsthand the power of our radical affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of each person. We know that such an affirmation calls us to lives of both honesty and compassion. We know the transformative power of covenanted community. We know, because we are living it, that sustainable communities can be created in which religious differences are seen as a blessing and not a curse. We know that spiritual work on gender and sexual orientation justice can enrich and not impoverish a community. We even know that it is possible to commit ourselves to work on race, and even class, despite the reality that we have much to learn and far to go.

These are our gifts. I am called to help us live them out and share them. So much of the world we live in is like an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with hope and possibility. We can offer both.

Quest May 2001 Contents

Attention CLF Members

We want you with us at General Assembly this year—whether you can travel or not! Here's how it can work. Just send us a picture postcard of your hometown, or a photograph of yourself or your family, to help us create a member wall for our CLF booth at General Assembly in Cleveland. After we display your photos and postcards at GA, we'll attempt to create a collage that can be photographed and put up on the web or published in Quest for everyone to see. So look around—we want you with us at GA! Please send your postcards or photos to Lorraine at the CLF Office at 25 Beacon Street,Boston, MA 02108.

Quest May 2001 Contents

Election Essay: At the Threshold
by the Rev. Rebecca Parker, president, the Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, CA

The first church I served as a young minister right out of seminary had an extraordinary front door. It was a pair of doors, actually, that formed a high, arched opening that led from the outer world into the sheltering space of the sanctuary. The doors themselves were made from 2-inch by 12-inch planks of rough-cut, Douglas fir, massive and heavy. Each had a large, iron ring that you grabbed to open the door. If you were five foot two like me, it took your whole body weight pulling on the ring to swing the door open.

It was no easy matter to cross the threshold into Wallingford United Methodist Church. It was difficult in more ways than one for me. The congregation had been quite clear that they did not want a woman for their minister, especially one right out of seminary. But in the Methodist system the vote wasn't up to the congregation. It was up to a small committee that was evenly divided three for and three against my being there. Jim Hewson, the chair of the committee, broke the tie in my favor. His reasoning was, "Why not give her a chance? Maybe she can preach!"

The Sunday I arrived to take up my duties as the minister, I climbed the 20 steps that led up to the massive front doors with trepidation. I knew I had to preach to a congregation that was sharply divided about women entering the ministry. After church that Sunday, I would stand in the same doorway as people exited. The 40 or so congregants would shake my hand politely, and, one after another, would say, "I just want you to know that I don't think women should be ministers." At least they are straightforward, I thought to myself.

But, before church, as I climbed the steps, I didn't know what it would be like. I was hopeful and anxious, determined to win them over, and doubtful that I could—in short, I was a nervous wreck.

By the time I was halfway up the steps, I saw that the massive doors had been pushed open from within. A big, bosomy woman stepped across the threshold. Mildred Hewson.

She was waiting for me. Later I would come to know Mildred well. I would learn that her life had been changed by the year she spent at the bedside of her critically ill, 20-year-old daughter as that daughter slowly died of cancer. People respond differently to the heart-wrenching tragedy of losing a child. Mildred responded by forming a resolve that no person would pass within her sphere of influence without finding out that they were loved. She would personally see to it. Mildred became a representative of the hound of heaven—with cheerful determination she made sure that every lost soul she encountered was found by love.

That morning, I was the soul at risk that Mildred was watching for. There was no way she was going to let me cross the threshold into that sanctuary of people who were opposed to women in ministry, without my first being hugged, without my first being encompassed by a maternal love so strong, so sure, that I could not miss it, and would never forget it.

And sure enough, when I got to the threshold, Mildred, whom I had never met before, took me in her arms. "I am so glad you are here," she said. "God has sent you to us."

It matters what happens to us at the threshold times and places.

This is the lesson I was to learn many times at the Wallingford church, which I served very happily for seven years. It didn't take long for the people to decide it was o.k. to have a woman minister. When they discovered I could fix the broken addressograph machine in the church office, something that had flummoxed my male predecessor, the church and I made peace about women in the ministry.

The congregation faced a challenge, however. The church was on the verge of closing. Most of its members were over 70. Only a handful of young families and people at mid-life were involved.

I was allergic to evangelism, and detested church-growth strategies. I didn't think I had a right to impose my beliefs on anyone else, and wasn't about to tell people what they should believe, or feel, or do. I didn't want to have to build up the church membership, but we were desperate, so I devised a modest plan. I would take note of anyone who visited the church and I would go visit that person and ask him or her to get involved.

All I knew was that we needed them. And that's what I told them. Just about every Sunday someone would cross the threshold of the church who hadn't been there before. They'd make their way through the arched doorway into the sanctuary. Tuesday evening you'd find me in their living room, telling them we needed them—to teach Sunday

school or sing in the choir, to put out the newsletter, to be the church treasurer. Everybody I visited came back and got involved in the church.

But that is not the significant thing that happened. The significant thing is what they told me about why they had come to church.

Elizabeth and Tom came because they had just had their second child, and their marriage was in a crisis. Could the church help them forgive each other and find a way to keep their commitments?

John came because his father had just died of alcoholism. He was grieving and he was angry. Was peace of mind possible?

Eduardo came because he was tired of not having any community outside of the gay bars. Would the church welcome him to be himself without fear?

Mariko came because after six miscarriages she had given birth to a healthy girl. How could she express her gratitude and joy?

Mary came because she was having nightmares about nuclear war and the environmental crisis. Wasn't there something she could do to lessen the danger for the planet?

No one comes to one of our congregations on a lark. The visitor on the doorstep of any church is a human being who is in the grasp of life's exhilarating blessing or life's painful turn toward sorrow.

I learned to do for others what Mildred did for me. To meet people who cross the thresholds of the church with love, to give them attentive respect, knowing that life in all its messy pain and beauty comes with them. Life has brought them. They come asking: Is there help for pain? Is there support for one who is afraid? Is there amplification for joy? Is there something I can do to help a troubled world?

Our small church was changed by these encounters. And our job was to be there for our new people, and to take the church as seriously as they did.

This is a threshold time for the Unitarian Universalist Association, and for all of us. The threshold times need all of us to accompany the ones who are crossing over, coming or going, to hold them in blessing, to greet them with warmth, to thank them with sincerity. It is at the threshold that we need the assurance that love holds our lives in an embrace that is unshakeable.

This is the most sacred task we do for one another—to be there, at one another's going out and coming in. And to learn the lesson Mary Oliver spoke:

To live in this world
you must be able to do three things—
To love what is mortal,
to hold it against your bones,
knowing your own life depends on it;
And, when the time comes to let it go
to let it go.

Notice to all members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship,Unitarian Universalist

Per Article Vll, Sections 1 and 2, of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) Bylaws, the 26th Annual Meeting of the corporation will be held on Friday, June 22 at 5 p.m. in the Vice President's suite, the Renaissance Hotel, Cleveland, Ohio. The purpose of the meeting is to:

• Elect a Moderator from among members present to preside at the meeting
  
• Elect members of the Board of Director, the Nominating Committee, the Clerk, and the Treasurers from the slate of candidates presented on the ballot and mailed to members in April 2000
  
• Recognize retiring directors for their service; and,
  
• Transact such other business as may legally come before the meeting
  

Who gets to drive a stagecoach?
Is it possible to direct the horses while quoting Virgil and Horace?
How much status should be assigned to the job?
Why should anyone want to drive?
To what extent can the driving be shared among the passengers?
How much should the driver listen to the passengers who are leaning out of the windows of the carriage shouting directions?

I've had a complete education—gone through all the gradations of buggy, gig, and dog-cart, tandem, curricle, unicorn, and four-in-hand—neglected nothing—dash'd at every thing—tool'd a mail-coach—and now having attained the credit of being "bang up," have met the reward of all my labours, by being elected a Member of a Society who are famous for having repeatedly saved their necks by sheer management and dexterity.

Your Gifts
by the Rev. Rebecca Parker, president, the Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, CA

Your gifts—whatever you discover them to be can be used to bless or curse the world.

Any of these can draw down the prison door,

to search for the sources of power and grace;
native wisdom, healing and liberation.

More, the choice will draw you into community, the endeavor shared, the heritage passed on,

the companionship of struggle, the
Importance of keeping faith, the life of ritual
and praise,

waiting.

Last updated June 12, 2005