So someone last night recommended I change my user name—at work, no less—to “papaya.”

What am I supposed to think of that?

I’ve been reading books like Organic Community and Finding Our Way for work. At the same time, the congregation is moving into a looser knit, team-based ministry model (as opposed to a council and committee structure). I’m learning a lot.

It’s a bit chaotic at times. We’re trying to focus on our assets, personal and congregational, instead of needs and deficits. We’re trying to avoid unnecessary structures that only serve to say “no, you can’t do that,” or “we tried that and it didn’t work.” And get rid of the meetings. We’re experimenting a lot, and some things work out and some don’t, which is all good.

There are four rules I’m giving all my teams. (Actually, three, but the fourth occurred to me yesterday during staff meeting.) I think this is all we need to move forward and make the vision we have for the congregation happen.

1. Whatever works. We don’t need consensus. If it’ll get the job done, and someone wants to do it, they get to do whatever seems best at the time. If it’s easy and doesn’t require meetings, all the better. Unless it causes harm, all is permissible.

2. Whatever’s welcoming. Can new people come into this process? Will they feel they’re contributing to it and not just towing the line? Do they need years of congregational history (the “why” behind “we’ve always done it that way”) or will they feel good about jumping right in?

3. Whatever’s sustainable. Not just environmental sustainability, which is an ideal we’re working our way into, but process sustainability. Does the work depend on one person with unique abilities and hours and hours of free time? Can someone come right in and pick up where they left off? And, as far as financial sustainability, will it break the bank?

4. Whatever puts the congregation’s best foot forward. Will newcomers look at it and think, “That’s a pretty cool place to be”? Will it embody the congregation’s highest values and not put its integrity at risk?

This makes the classic comic strip so much better.

From James Fowler:

Conjunctive faith includes a genuine openness to the truths of traditions and communities other than one’s own. This openness is not to be equated with a relativistic agnosticism (literally, a “not knowing”), however. Rather, it is a disciplined openness to the truths of those who are “other,” based precisely on the experience of a deep and particular commitment to one’s own tradition and the recognition that truth requires a dialectical interplay of such perspectives.

And…

Conjunctive faith combines deep, particular commitments with principled openness to the truths of other traditions. It combines loyalty to one’s own primary communities of value and belief with loyalty to the reality of a community of communities. Persons of conjunctive faith are not likely to be “true believers” in the sense of displaying an undialectical, single-minded, uncritical devotion to a cause or ideology. They will not be protagonists in holy wars. They know that the line between the righteous and the sinner goes through the heart of each of us and our communities, rather than between “us” and “them.”

Here’s an idea. UUs should start doing regular love feasts.

“Love feasts”—also called “agape feasts“—are a simple sharing of food and drink as a celebration of community.^[1] They are an ancient tradition from the Early Church that are sometimes connected to communion, sometimes not.

My own experience of love feasts comes from my college fraternity. I was a member of a houseless Christian service fraternity that celebrated monthly love feasts. They were well attended—and usually interrupted by side splitting laughter.

Here’s how they worked. It was a stripped down version. To celebrate we needed four things.

1. A room
2. A large loaf of bread
3. A cup of water
4. Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and goats^[2]

We’d stand in a circle, and the president would read the passage from Matthew. The water and bread would make their way around the circle. Sometimes we’d each say a word or two about where we were in our lives; other times it would go around in silence.

The key thing was how we received the bread and the water. The person whose turn it was would hold the cup of water. Then the person who had just received would tear off a piece of bread, dip it in the water, and put in their brother’s mouth.

It was very important that it be a large loaf of bread because the pieces we would tear off were usually just a little too big to chew—but big enough to stuff in someone’s mouth.

Love feasts bound us together as a community. Click to continue reading “A ritual to widen, deepen UU identity: Love feasts”

1. Sorry to disappoint if you were expecting something saucier. [↑]
2. The bit about the goats often devolved into speculations about what went on in pledges’ dorm rooms. [↑]

I want to lay out the perspective on congregational membership that I’ve been using in my work as a membership director in a large UU congregation over the last year or so. Maybe this can add to the conversation about the meaning and scope of UU identity and the importance of initiation rituals in a congregational context.

All our prospective members are invited to take a half day workshop that gives them a chance to get to know some other new folks, learn about Unitarian Universalism, and understand the nuts and bolts of how the congregation works.^[1]

As part of this workshop I explain what membership means. I present it as a public, symbolic, and financial commitment to UU values, the values of the congregation, and the individuals who are a part of the congregation. If they want to stand up for those values and do so with the people in our congregation who are also about that, then they should think about joining when the time is right. I present pledging as a monetary commitment to the congregation and its values with few details about the budget (though this often comes up as questions).^[2]

Signing the membership book is a relativel unimportant part of the joining process compared to the main event, a ritual during worship. Click to continue reading “What congregational membership means”

1. I’d say at least 80% of our new members take this class. Most who don’t have been members of UU congregations previously. [↑]
2. 90% of our members pledge and most of the rest contribute financially in other ways. About two-thirds of the congregation are formal members who have signed the book. Of the financially contributing non-members–who we call “friends”—about half pledge. [↑]