For the last four years, this congregation has been in transition. In 2007, there were big plans to enlarge the building and the membership, but a flood washed away all those dreams and designs, and ultimately, the minister. In 2009, an interim came who aided in the transition, shepherding change while you engaged the extended process of searching for a new minister. Thousands of dollars and two years filled with consecutive busyness and long periods of waiting, and here we are. Stage one, two and three of transition are over. So the question before us is “What now”?

I preached two sermons here last spring. In the first, I said that at our core, we are a covenanted community, seeking to find the ways of love. Quoting Rev. Alice Blair Wesley, I said “A covenanted free church is a body of individuals who have freely made a profoundly simple promise, a covenant: We pledge to walk together in the spirit of mutual love. The spirit of love is alone worthy of our ultimate, our religious loyalty. So, we shall meet often to take counsel concerning the ways of love, and we will yield religious authority solely to our own understanding of what these ways are, as best we can figure them out or learn or remember them, together.” The next week, I took this statement a little further and asked us to consider not only finding the ways of love, but acting out of them, to extend our the arms beyond these walls because we are not only in covenant with each other, but with a bruised and hurting world. We have a promise to heal, to serve, to stand in solidarity, to stand on the side of love. We are bound, I said, each to all.

And now, I’m taking one more step and I think it’s this next step that will bring us to the starting point. Having established our bond to each other and our responsibility to our community, I want to talk about our mission in the world. Why are we here? And I don’t mean each of us individually, but as a congregation, even as a religious movement. What is our purpose?

Last spring, I was talking about ministry, about my future ministry here and about our shared ministry together. Ministry is what we do with and for each other. Today, I want us to start thinking about mission. Mission is where we’re going, it’s what we are here to do. Mission tells us why we exist. Ministry is what we do to fulfill our mission. Our pledge to walk together in the spirit of mutual love is our ministry to each other. Our acts of charity and our work for justice is our ministry to the community. It is our mission that inspires our ministry.

This is a very healthy and interesting congregation. Folks here genuinely care about each other. We have a pastoral care team of mental health professionals willing to use their expertise to tend to members in need; we have a job support group for folks out of work, also led by a professional in the field. We have affinity groups and small group ministries; every week we light candles for those in our community who are hurting and last week we organized and worked together to memorialize a man who hasn’t been a member here in 20 years.

This congregation also knows how to have fun, how to enjoy each other as evidenced by last week’s pot luck and the upcoming Haunted Auction. We are also justice-minded and come out in large numbers for things like our monthly Midnight Runs and you’ve charged me with an intentional ministry of presence, asking me to find the balance between inspiring your personal spiritual growth and connecting to the larger community.

But, there has to be more to us than our personal relationships and a few social action projects, especially when we consider how much work and money go into keeping this place up and running! Our budget is something like $215,000 a year and I couldn’t even venture to guess the number of volunteer hours dedicated annually. What we have here is wonderful. Just lovely. Good, fun, charitable people who care about each other.

It’s a really good start.

But we haven’t quite reached our full potential. This isn’t unique to us; UU congregations around the nation are in similar positions. We’re fabulous. But we’re also a little lost, a little directionless.

This congregation was founded more than 150 years ago by people who had a message for the world. Unitarians were free, liberal thinkers who used reason to filter theology, who believed that revelation was in process and that all humans are saved.

They founded churches to gather like-minded thinkers and create a movement to change the world, which, frankly, they did. Both Unitarians and Universalists, before and after the 1961 merger united for the abolition of slavery and the full inclusion of people of color into a white dominated culture and the installation of rights for women, in the home, the statehouse and the boardroom and the institutionalization of the compassionate treatment of animals. They fought together for humane treatment for the mentally ill and those wounded in war; and most recently, we are again united in our fight for the right of all people to marry regardless of sexual orientation.

Unitarians and Universalists have, for hundreds of years, stood on the side of love. And yet, over the course of the last 50 years, we seem to have lost our focus. We’re in something of an identity crisis which has manifested in an allegiance to individualism and diversity in the absence of unified theology. We have declared ourselves so open to ongoing revelation and the individual search for truth, that we have forgotten that we are a single body.

During the ministerial start-up yesterday, about 25 or 30 of us started a conversation about mission. It was suggested at some point that a UU congregation has more in common with the League of Women Voters than with conservative Christian churches. I vigorously disagree.

Humans created religious institutions nearly as soon as we could think clearly and, as an institution, religion has survived for millennia. We live in great mystery. When people first became religious, far more was unknown, but even in our post- enlightenment, scientifically revealed world, there is still great mystery to human existence and we created religious institutions to understand and respond to that mystery in community. Religious institutions provide the container for people to wonder and make meaning, together.

I think one of the reasons for the current Unitarian Universalist identity crisis is the energy we’ve dedicated to dismantling conservative American Christianity as our nemesis in the world of religious institutions. Rather than creating a strong identity of our own, we’ve defined ourselves over against THEM. They say church, so we say society or fellowship; they use terms like god, sin, salvation, grace and we all but ban them from our halls. We’ve lost our way. We’ve gotten distracted. I’ll preach a sermon one of these days reclaiming some of this language, but in the meantime, I’d love to see us commit to being US rather than not being THEM. Another thing that prevents us from recognizing the mission we already have is our individualism. Too often we place the value of the individual search for truth over the collective need for vision or unity. We value our diversity more than our theology. We hold our 4th Principle which declares our affirmation of the individual search for truth and meaning before us like shields, protecting us from the need for a unified vision. This search for truth becomes the war-cry that allows us to each become knights on separate quests, looking for our own, personally monogramed, holy grails. So often when I hear people herald this Principle I wonder...how much truth do we think is out there? And, how easily will we find it if we are looking alone?

Robert Latham, in his keynote address to the Ohio/Meadville District last year, said “Reflecting this individualism, we have done the same thing with the ministry of our congregations... The end result has been a reduction of the purpose of ministry to that of fulfilling the whims of individuals and the congregations they comprise. That is, we have been satisfied with seeing our mission as providing a self selecting smorgasbord of need fulfillments for individuals rather than engaging any sense of noble purpose that might address the profound needs of the whole of culture.”i

UUs tend to uphold the values of tolerance and diversity and make room for every person to pursue whatever path is appealing to them, rather than take the risk of declaring a common goal. In the absence of such a clearly defined and articulated goal, we have created substitutes. We declare community for being our raison d’etre, and commit ourselves to caring for each other, which is wonderful, but ultimately not entirely fulfilling or attractive or, frankly, worth the exhaustion too many of you feel trying to hold this place up. We could do that without all this infrastructure. We also declare social action as the heart of our communities, but, for most congregations, this one included, there are generally just a handful of people involved with social action and often our Social Action Committees are staffed by individuals with pet projects rather than having a clear, unified goal, seeking to significantly affect change in our communities.

But, as I’ve said, I think we’re more than just a strong community of 137 people and a few social action projects. As a religious institution, we are needed to transform the world. Sound too big? I don’t think it is. Frankly, religious institutions have been doing it for thousands of years, forming and transforming culture in their own image, for better or worse. And, liberal religions have been part of that legacy, as I went over earlier.

When I talk about cultural transformation, I’m not talking about changing laws. As I said, secular missions change structure, religious missions change hearts. I believe it is our mission to change hearts, to open them to the ways of love.

Doug Zelinski is a Consultant for the Mass Bay and Clara Barton Districts. He gave a workshop about congregational missions at GA this year that I didn’t attend, but some of his notes are online. Doug has put forward his bold, honest insight about what religious institutions – including ours – are charged with doing. He suggests that the purpose of the religious institution is to shape the world in our image of love.

That’s our mission. To shape the world in our image of love. Actually, it’s a mission we’ve had for a long time. Of course, it’s not just ours. This is what religious institutions have been doing all over the globe, from the beginning of human history. Bigger than being a strong healthy community of people who care for and about each other, bigger than a few social action projects or even a clearly defined, well organized social action plan, this is about who we are in the world. It’s about changing hearts.

There are many successes of our free, liberal faith, moments in American history that we herald, and yet, for some, the idea that we will continue to shape culture in our image of love is worrisome. I would like to suggest, though, that if we don’t move away from the individualism that says everyone can do whatever they want and go in any direction that feels right for them, we are going to end up nowhere. If we are not agreed on where we are going, we won’t ever arrive. Without clarity of purpose, there is no purpose at all.

Many religious institutions are shrinking, as are we. But, there are a few that are vibrant and alive and growing rapidly. One of the primary things growing religious movements share is clarity of mission. They know who they are and why they exist. They then create leaders who are committed to that mission and they build an organization that can support that mission.

At about 8:00 on a Sunday morning in August, Graham and I were heading for a favorite tag sale in Connecticut when we found ourselves, believe it or not, in traffic. As we inched our way up route 7, wondering what could possibly be happening at this hour, we found that we were being held up by the hundreds of people trying to get into the parking lot of a mega church. This was the early service. There were to be 3 more that morning, and there were two the night before. Thousands of people were there, together, and their leaders were busy at work shaping the world in their image of love.

What would society look like if it was shaped in our image of love? While I don’t know much about that particular mega church, I’m guessing that my vision of a love-centered world is different from theirs. Let’s face it, I believe my image is more...loving.

What if our Principles served as a guide for American culture? Of course, our Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson who declared Unitarianism to be his ideal for this budding nation, and, of course, our Congregationalist/Unitarian heritage defined life in the colonies even earlier, so in some ways, our values are already woven in to American culture. But, what if we could change hearts? What would our criminal justice system look like if everyone covenanted to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person? What would our immigration system look like if we promoted justice, equity and compassion in all our relationships? How would our impact on Earth change if we all lived with a profound respect for the interdependent web of all existence? What if all the boards of education understood that truth has not been set in stone, but continues to unfold. Would our approach to civil rights be different if we agreed to encourage and support each person’s spiritual growth? How might the national budget change if peace and liberty were our agreed upon, common goals? What if we lived in a world in which everyone was seeking the ways of love?

Once we accept our shared mission, once we recognize that we are a religious community fulfilling the same role as every religious community does and has, once we understand that we have accepted the charge to shape the world in our image of love, we can really talk about ministry. We can understand then why we gather in small groups to listen to each other carefully and make soup when someone is sick or visit each other in the hospital. We can understand what these four years of transition were for, why so many of you poured yourselves out to keep First Unitarian alive during a devastating flood and the loss of a minister and all the meetings and patience and money required so you can find a new minister. We can understand why we collect old clothes or make sandwiches for the homeless or change our habits that we might live more gently on Earth. In this context we know why we sink so many of our personal resources of time and money into this congregation, why many of us will dedicate portions of our estates after we die to the good work of this community and why we gather on Sunday mornings seeking inspiration and rejuvenation. We do it because we know the world needs our message of peace and hope.

We do it because we do have a mission and know what life on this planet could be. We do it to transform society and we do it to change hearts and shape our world in our image of love.

i Both Latham’s keynote and Zellinski’s workshop at General Assembly (2011) were instrumental in the creation of this sermon. Please see their work for further study and thought.  

Rev. Peggy Clarke