Goals for Unitarians

January 7, 1968
Plainfield

Goals for Unitarians

Once there was a belief that Unitarians believed in salvation by character. Now there are those who have a hunch that Unitarians believe in salvation by survey.

The report on the Committee on Goals of the Unitarian Universalist Association comprised two sections; the first part consisting of three specific recommendations. The second was a series of 70 tables indicating the results of a survey about:

a) Personal beliefs and attitudes concerning such traditional religious ideas as God, prayer, worship, immortality, evil, Jesus.

b) Social beliefs and attitudes revolving around such questions as domestic social issues, the Vietnam War, the draft, civil disobedience, the standards for sexual and marriage morality.

c) What Unitarians and Universalists believe their churches should be and do, teach, and preach.

d) Then a series of tables attempted to identify Unitarians and Universalists by profession, origin, religious background, age, income, etc.

I don’t know how many persons have read the Goals Report or are at all familiar either with the survey materials or the recommendations made by the committee. In several previous sermons, I have tried to relate the comments to the material printed in the Goals Report. Drawing lightly or heavily on the report, I have tried to define what religion is; who the Unitarians and Universalists are, the future trends of Unitarian and Universalist belief, and a month ago, my view on what the Church should be.

Unitarians should feel the importance of self-study. Our Adult Programs committee held a number of discussions from which a summary report will come. In our discussions, as I understand the reports, most of the interest, comment, and criticism centered about this local society, its program, its personnel. The Goals of our Continental movement, the U.U.A., were touched on only here and there. There seemed a minimum interest only in our larger movement. This is understandable. Strong and continuing enthusiasm for the Unitarian Universalist organizational structure beyond the local Church is pre-empted by the programs, problems, and necessities of the local Society, not to speak of unlike degrees of involvement on the part of members. Furthermore, there are those who wonder if we have not spent more than a sufficient amount of time contemplating our own navels – self-study, self-analysis, sometime self-punishment. “Let’s get on, we can’t turn back the clock or change what was to what was not,” is the assertion of some. There is something to be said for such impatience, with going round and round on the same issues.

Nevertheless, there is a wider Unitarian Universalist movement than the boundaries of our own membership lists. The recommendation made by the Goals Committee were offered with the intent that they should be discussed by member societies in the 50 states and Canada. At the Annual Meeting of the U.U.A., scheduled for late May 68, a considerable block of time has been allotted for discussion of this report. The U.U.A. has asked for reactions from societies before February 1, and I hope there will be at least some discussion here in order for comments to be an influence.

I would like to comment on the three recommendations; then try to stimulate you to think of goals you believe worthy of your convictions as an individual Unitarian Universalist; and goals worthy of the Unitarian Society of which you are a member.

The recommendations of the Goals Committee were not based on the tables shown in .... The recommendations were formulated by the Committee quite separately from the interpretation of the survey result tables. These recommendations of the Goals Committee concerned the schools for the training of our ministries, communication, and a suggestion for continuing, creative development of our ways of religion.

1) Believing that a primary concern is a learned, dynamic ministry, the Goals Committee recommended that the denomination support a single, professional graduate school, located in a major metropolitan center and affiliated with a major university.

The reasons for this recommendation cluster around the reality that, based on present and expected financial resources of the U.U.A., we can support only one school. Other possible advantages would be the gathering in one place a community of scholars and a community of students who by their combined presence would provide a center for diversity, creativity, scholarly arts of our movement.

Disadvantages include the fear that one school would produce only one type of minister, thus inhibiting the creative interchange which has characterized the different emphases that, up to a short time ago, five schools were producing.

There are other flaws in the recommendations. Our remaining graduate schools, Meadville and Starr King are independent corporate entities and will not necessarily dissolve because of denominational attitude or budgeting. The halting of U.U.A. financial support will not necessarily be a death blow to either school. Both Starr King and Meadville have each accumulated a cluster of supporting loyalties, not only from alumni and in all parts of the Continent, but also from Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships in their respective areas, the Pacific Coast and the Middle West. A separate finance campaign on the part of either or both might well succeed, and in its success cause a reduction of support given to the Unitarian Universalist Association.

One thing more, there is no law like unto the laws of the Medes and the Persians to ensure that the professionals of our ministries – parish, education, executive – must be trained in our denominational theological school. Already a substantial percentage of our ministers received their graduate training in theological schools of other denominations.

More than that – why any theological school as such? The Stevens-Gesner Committee is considering a program where a person training for our ministry would seek a graduate degree in some specialized social science such as social psychology, political science, sociology. In the process he would range widely in the many areas of human relationships, the arts, the sciences, thus confronting many disciplines and expressions which are inevitably relevant to a modern ministry with impact. Frankly experimental, this program deserves encouragement and attention. You will hear more of this, I believe.

2) A second recommendation by the Goals Committee is the establishment across the Continent of Metropolitan Centers where the ideas and methods of liberal religion could be tested and developed, then applied to the concerns of the time. Ministers and laypeople would come to these Metropolitan Centers to study, work, and celebrate together. The Metropolitan Centers would bring together the resources and the talent to do on an area basis what individual churches would find it impossible to do for themselves. Staffed by experts and scholars, the Metrocenters would program seminars, workshops, demonstrations in a wide variety of subjects: preaching and worship, art and drama, ethics and theology, social-action, fund-raising, leadership learning, church administration, adult and child education. They would be places of learning and research.

I have two objections, at least, to this recommendation. First, the financing of such centers is not feasible in the near future. There are too many more pressing priorities.

Second, the nucleus and potential for such Metrocenters already exists in the District organization. Here in New Jersey, we have witnessed in recent months the increasing relevance of the Area Council and mounting interest in what the 18 churches and fellowships comprising the N.J. Area Council can and could do together. The Area Council and the District can function as a Metrocenter and to some extent already is so functioning.

Resources are being shared (Bordin Orrin Fleck David Frost Roger Hall) – while the money is neither available nor within sight for what the Committee calls “experts and scholars.” Furthermore, this emphasis on Areas and Districts would be a flow of ideas and influence from the grass-roots, that is the local churches and fellowships, rather than from the top down. Involvement and interest will surely be greater when the local societies are the creative source. More and more we need to discover that the experts do not always live out of town.

Of course every society should be a Metrocenter. This is what our worship committees have been doing and doing well for several years. Not from the top down, but right here in this Society can we expand and enlarge such efforts so that we can (quicken) the “vitality of the religious life ... improving programs, increasing worship and sources of support, and presenting liberal religion to the whole metropolitan community in a fresh, dramatic, and appealing way.”

3) The third recommendation of the Goals Committee is to improve communication in the broadest sense of the term. The Committee suggests three possible ways in which there might be movement:

a) a serious first-class journal of liberal religious thought and opinion.

b) Publications program should include the development and production of worship materials that are uniquely appropriate for Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships, families and individuals, including a constantly growing body of ceremonies.

c) Much more exploration with the arts which not only speak to us but can speak for us. Life can be celebrated in paint, in sculpture, in dance, in film, in poetry, drama or music ....

I for one question both the need and feasibility of a first-class journal of religious thought. A serious journal always has a limited appeal – requiring a fairly high price, a substantial subsidy, or both. Financing for such purpose seems low in our priority list at this time. Then, too, we have several journals, all of which have limited reading audiences (“Register Leader”, Respond”, “Readout Zygon”, Journal of the Liberal Ministry”). No one would say all are “first-class” but most who see them would believe that each deserves a wider audience than it now possesses.

Then too, the possibility of more paper communication emphasizes the reality that much more of the constant printed paper blizzard which seems never-ending would probably result in fewer persons reading less, rather than more persons reading more.

More important is the recognition that the arts represent ways of potential communication which we have not used in any significant degree. We still rely too heavily on the spoken word and the printed word to communicate the sense of what is vital and timely. Let me hint about conversations I’ve had with Roger Hall which may lead to some attempts to experiment and communicate using kinesthetics, aesthetics, and ethics to communicate the art of worship.

This should be made clear: the communications made – one theological school, Metrocenters for development of religious ideas, practices, programs, services, etc., communication through journals and the arts, are not goals in themselves for an individual or the Unitarian Universalist as he is a member of the society. These recommendations are methods – and while the method may be the measure, as Angus MacLean wrote (long before Marshall McLuhan became the most famous and least understood authority on communications).

This is not a philosophic discussion of ends and means. Are the means justified by the ends? Briefly, both the methods and the goals must measure us to the difficult requirements of fellowship, freedom,and human dignity.

In the days of the advances of the Norsemen in the stormy Atlantic, when a Viking force led by Einer Thorgeirsson landed in Iceland about 1000, the sea-farers set in the ground an axe, an Eagle, and a Cross. These pagan-Christians placed the land they were claiming under the protection of three gods – Thor, symbolized by the axe, Odin represented by the Eagle, and Christ symbolized by the cross (MYTH AND RELIGION OF THE NORTH, p. 84).

We are not likely to have as goals a trinity of gods, whether axe, eagle, and cross, or father, son, and holy ghost, but we do have the power to fix our eyes on goals toward which the journey proceeds.

We would be wrong in accepting the answers of antiquity. But into the ancient goals of truth, beauty, and goodness, we can both develop our individuality and develop as fellows together in a religious society in a setting for cooperative, serious deliberations and joyous friendship.

Truth is not the truth discovered once and for all by the saints and seers of old. Truth is a flowing stream, not a pool locked in by authority based on age. If we match the demands of our age, we will recognize that truth is more than logical propositions in linear, printed lines on left-to-right pages. We will seek to understand the truths that intertwine with our body motions, voluntary and involuntary; the truths that tug at our feelings seeking expression and interpretation, truths that come not alone from the individual in his inmost solitariness but emerge as a consequence of that unique and enduring self-wrestling with the world of trials and triumphs; the world of exciting times and boring routines; the world of creative achievement and frustrating delays.

Beauty is not alone a Grecian urn or Michaelangelo’s David or Andrew Wyeth’s “Christmas World”. Beauty is modern man and woman seeking to identify the aesthetic values of a city street today; the aesthetic values of a new design; the response with brush, note, chisel, draftboard drama to the ebb and flow of the human spirit today. Beauty is helping us understand our confusions, brutalities and hopes today, because we are human spirits who need more than official, printed pronouncements in order to live well. There was a time when people designated “religious” aspired after the beauty of holiness. This is not enough for us, because in a world of rush-in, brush-off and freak-out, we have greater need to feel the holiness of beauty. We, too, need the beautiful as distinguished from the practical.

Goodness is not alone a set of thou shalts and thou shalt nots spelled out in ancient commandments or puritanical codes. Not that the past should be ignored in the evaluation of what we ought to be and do. Santayana was right when he wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But our age is one of such hazards that unless the behavior characteristic of social groups changes markedly, then catastrophes unequaled ever in history will occur.

Goodness is not a catechism to the learned in Sunday School. Goodness is not listening to a sermon, whether it is dull or interesting, mediocre or superior. If goodness is to be important and redemptive to the fellowship of the human family, to the freedom of the human family, to the dignity of every member of the human family, then there must be much wider recognition that people are “made” good and grow through social participation. They grow and perform good acts or regress and perform evil acts through the human process of human relations with others in selling, buying, voting, building and changing institutions, deciding to what degree they will try to make the ounces of their weight count in issues that to them are vital, timely, and undecided.

Whatever sophisticated definitions can be given to goodness or a code of ethics, there is no effectiveness to goodness unless there is strength in the winds of change that may influence the better legislation or the improvement of attitudes that cause people to suffer and die in war, that cause people to be deprived of goods, identity, and hope in the stifled cities or the poverty-stricken rural areas. The Science Editor of a newspaper wrote not long ago that to judge from weather-satellite pictures, there is no life on earth. These satellites are in orbit sufficiently high that the pictures provide no detail which would enable scientists to come to conclusions that there was life on this earth if they did not know it was there. At that orbit, a satellite from another world might not take pictures which would demonstrate that there was life on this earth.

The goals for the Unitarian Universalist movement in the world and this Society in this area might be part of the effort to put enough truth for today, enough beauty for today, enough goodness for today together to the end that a few years from now a close-in camera will still be able to photograph life on this earth. More than that, that a visitor from space may find a better and happier life on planet Earth for many more persons than now is the case.