by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, June 6, 2004
I want to begin with a note of apology for any of you who are brand new among us this morning, because of the nature of today's sermon. Every once in a while it seems to me a good idea to preach a sort of "state of the congregation" message, and this is one of those Sundays. If you're a newcomer it might make you feel a little as though you've wandered into someone's inside conversation, and that's why I apologize.
I also assure you it doesn't happen very often! I did it in 1994 when we began to discuss the large and complicated decision to expand to two Sunday worship services, and I did it again two years later, in the fall of 1996 as we actually began those two services. I did it in the fall of 2002, when we started our long construction project.
We're now near the end of our first congregational year in our new sanctuary. About this time last year, when the end of construction chaos was in sight and we were giddily looking forward to occupying this space, a colleague informed me that popular church wisdom claims that it takes a year for a congregation to really settle into a new space. After that first year, the people feel ready to look ahead and focus outward again. That may or may not be true -- I think we're pretty settled! But as it happens that one-year mark coincides with some big new changes for us, not in our physical space but in our staff and programs.
By the end of the summer we will welcome onto our staff a brand new Director of Religious Education, Michael DeMarsico, after an interim period that's been longer and more complicated than any of us care to remember. At the same time, thanks to the Partnership for Growth, we will hire a full-time Membership Coordinator who will help build the sustaining connections among us in ways we have never been able to try before. So a new chapter is opening up at USNH, and like some of our other recent chapters, this one has to do with growth.
I titled today's sermon "A Bridge Made of Faith" because I believe that our congregation has stepped out onto a metaphorical bridge, a kind of crossing from one sort of incarnation to another. The metaphorical bridge has some things in common with the real bridges in our lives. It can feel a little precarious and scary as we start to march across it, depending on how sturdy the bridge feels and whether or not we seem to be close to the ground or high up in thin air. It isn't a place to take up permanent residence, not a place we'll linger for very long. A bridge is a passage: it's supposed to help us get from where we are to some new place beckoning us, while keeping us out of the mud or the flood waters below.
In the case of this congregation, the bridge we're crossing is the one that leads us from the midsize congregation we have been for decades into the larger faith community we are becoming. Walking across that bridge means that sometime over the next four or five years we are likely to grow from somewhere around 400 adult members to something approaching 600.
That's a big change, in ways that go far beyond numbers. And it's worth talking about and thinking about, because unlike a real bridge made of concrete and wood, this passage of ours, this metaphorical bridge, is one we're building even as we walk across it. How soon we get across, and how gracefully and joyously, will depend a lot on our careful attention, our open hearts, our willing hands, and our faith -- in ourselves and in the message of our liberal religious movement.
Most of you know that I've been trying for many months now to do some fundraising with our denomination on behalf of this congregation, and that a couple of weeks ago those efforts finally bore fruit. I first started knocking on those doors at the Unitarian Universalist Association nearly two years ago, and in the beginning I was motivated by two things: panic and jealousy.
The panic came out of my glimpse down the path we'd set our feet on when we decided to build a new space. We made the decision to make room for more people, and we had a vision of how we wanted to build and strengthen our programs, but there wasn't any clear way for us to afford the staff that would help bring those things to reality. It looked to me like some very lean years up ahead on a bare-bones staff. Panic seemed a more or less reasonable reaction.
The jealousy was born from the rumors I heard, which turned out to be true, that the UUA had decided to invest in an effort to start a new church in Texas. The church, which is starting from scratch, is following a new sort of model, closer to the kinds of "church planting" that's often engaged in by conservative -- and fast-growing -- Christian denominations. The plan is to open the doors of this new church this coming September with 300 charter members, and then grow to at least 500 members in two more years. And this feat, never before tried in our denomination, is slated to cost about a million dollars.
I hasten to add that not all the money is falling from the UUA like manna from heaven -- half of it comes from people on the ground in Texas who believe in this vision. I've come to feel some grudging respect for the vision and I wish them well. But still, my first -- petulant -- reaction was along the lines of: " What about us -- ? What are we, chopped liver??" That was the jealousy.
But panic and jealousy don't usually take us very far -- aside from the fact that they're not among the most edifying of emotions. Luckily, something much more infectious and energizing took their place, and that was a new vision that reaches way beyond the immediate growing pains of this congregation. Through a long series of brainstorming sessions with USNH leaders, UUA staff members, ministerial colleagues and lay leaders from other congregations, this new vision took shape. It helped to lift my own sights beyond our immediate needs, and it turned out to be inspiring for a whole lot of other people. It places our congregation smack at the front of the line in denominational leadership, and makes us a pilot project in a new experiment in how to grow Unitarian Universalism.
Just a few weeks ago, the UUA Board of Trustees and the key UUA staff members, including our President Bill Sinkford, agreed to join us in the Partnership for Growth. They will give us significant funding over the next four years to help us hire the staff we need in order to make our dreams a reality. But the Partnership plan reaches beyond USNH. A key part of the vision is that we will work in close collaboration with four other congregations in our district that are also ready to cross the bridge from midsize to large, sharing with them what we're learning as we go along.
This collaboration with our local sister congregations is one of the most exciting parts of this new model. In Unitarianism's long-ago past, back when there were over seventy congregations in the Boston area instead of only seven, our churches knew what it meant to help and support each other. There was lots of collaboration and sharing, there were systems by which new congregations were taught and mentored, and the wisdom gleaned in one place quickly made its way through the grapevine to become practice in other places as well. But for decades now our churches have tended more toward a go-it-alone habit, in which every congregation more or less reinvents the wheel in figuring out how best to live out the purpose of our liberal faith. Each congregation is tied to the UUA, but we are very rarely keyed in to one another, on the look-out for common areas of struggle and success so we can move ahead as though we really belong to one another.
One of the things that has most energized the UUA about the Partnership for Growth is that it really is a Partnership. In the next few years we will be forging new bonds of support and creativity with our sister congregations in Hartford, West Hartford, Northampton and Worcester. We will see our Boards of Trustees meet to share their stories; we will see our Membership Committees sift through programs and strategies and share the results, and our ministers and staff consulting and trouble-shooting with each other. We expect that the result will be new energy, new strength and new growth in all five congregations, with the success of each one counting as the success for all. And at the end of the four-year Partnership we will have a model for growth that can be used in congregations around the country, and the UUA will therefore have a new blueprint for the expansion of our faith.
So this beloved community of ours here at USNH is not only on the path to significant growth in membership. We are the leader on that path, and we are helping to create a model that may well usher in a whole new era of growth and strength for Unitarian Universalism around the country.
Like every other change that visits our lives, this one will not be something we will embrace without a bit of ambivalence. Some of us are eager and enthusiastic when we think about growth, some of us are reluctant and resistant, and the rest of us are somewhere in between. But the truth is, every member of this community represents a stage in its growth, from the few founding members still among us to the person who signed our membership book last week. Each one is here because at whatever point we entered, others made us welcome, invited us in through the doors and then shifted over a bit to make room.
Growth isn't new to us; it is woven into the fabric of who we are. It is in fact our purpose, in the larger sense, because each one of us was drawn here by the hope of growth. We came in order to open our minds to new ideas and grow in wisdom; or to explore new avenues of spirituality and grow our spirits; or because we wanted a community that spoke out for justice so we could grow the strength of our voices; or because we are raising children and we want them to grow in knowledge, wisdom and compassion. In these senses, growth is what our lives are for.
Nevertheless, it can make us anxious to think about USNH growing a significant size larger. One fear is that we'll lose our sense of ourselves, and lose sight of our real purpose. We'll be driven too much by numbers, and will get so hooked on growth that it will become growth for growth's sake. Another fear is that we'll lose the sense of community that is the heart and soul of this place. We're afraid that getting bigger will mean loss of intimacy, of connection and familiarity, and that our own voices might be lost in the crowd. And a third fear is that what we'll get will be what one of my colleagues once called "floodplain growth": it will be wide but shallow. We will be diluted by newcomers who don't know our history and don't understand Unitarian Universalism.
The bad news is, these fears aren't silly hallucinations. If we aren't careful and attentive, what we worry about can actually become our reality. But the good news is that there are things we can do to keep from losing what we love the most about this community. Our fears are reasonable ones, but that doesn't mean that they'll inevitably come to pass.
The most important thing we need to do as we move across our bridge to the future is hold to a clear vision of who we are and what purpose we serve. Why do we exist as a religious institution? As John Gibbons pointed out in our reading, it is not in order to serve ourselves and make each other comfortable. Our world is deeply imperiled by social, religious and political teachings that diminish human dignity, reinforce bigotry and erase the most basic standards of justice. We exist as a religious community because a different voice has to speak out to that imperiled world.
These are the core teachings of our faith:
-- the mysteries of life and death are much too large for the boundaries of any creed, and they demand wide open minds and hearts;
-- every person is precious, and we must learn to see that inherent shimmer of worth and holiness across all the tribal divisions in our human family;
-- diversity is the true wealth of human life, and we must learn to honor and be stretched by our differences;
-- we are bound deeply into the fabric of the planet and must learn to live from that truth;
-- our own spiritual growth is meaningless unless we make it manifest by how we treat one another as we move through our lives.
That's about as close as we'll ever come to a creed. That is what we stand for, what we preach and what we consider the bedrock of our faith. I believe that if we keep the visionary message of our faith at the forefront of all we do, we will feel ourselves buoyed, energized, and enriched by our growth. I also believe that we have to remember our faith calls us to something that resembles ambidexterity -- "on the one hand" and "on the other hand".
On the one hand, we must be deeply invested in how our religious message might echo out in the larger community and make a difference in the shape of our world. On the other hand, we must care just as deeply about each singular, amazing human being who wanders through our doors, and remember that that one, the one we have just now seen, is the unknown brother or sister to greet, to welcome, to make room for. It's for the sake of that one particular person, each one, as well as for ourselves, that we should remember one of the teachings embedded in our practice of Small Groups Ministry: intimacy is not a scarce commodity. It does not depend on being a small or medium-sized congregation. It depends on how often and well we open our hearts and extend our hands.
A colleague told me recently of a long-time member of her congregation, the mother of three young children, who has been very vocal in her angry disapproval as she sees the church grow. She likes things the way they are, and she's afraid that growth will mean that her voice or her children's voices will get lost in the crowd. And yet, seeing that new people were in fact arriving every Sunday, this woman began to serve as a greeter, specifically on the lookout for young families with children her own children's ages. In the abstract, she still wishes her church would not grow. She doesn't like change. But in the particular, her face shines as she shakes the hand of a newcomer, a young mother, and leads her up to a classroom. Her circle is growing, and she knows she is richer for it.
Our circle is growing, and we are richer for it. This bridge we are crossing, this bridge we're helping to build for the growth of Unitarian Universalism, will not be smooth walking all the way across. There will be places where we'll have to pause or take a detour or clear something out of our way before we can move on.
In the first Indiana Jones movie there is a moment when Indiana is trapped in an impossible situation -- of course -- and someone asks, "What do we do now?" Harrison Ford snaps back, "How do I know? I'm making it up as I go along!" We're making it up as we go along, and we won't get it right every step of the way. But we'll get it mostly right, if we hold to each other with one hand, and hold to our large vision with the other. May it be so. AMEN.