The proposed Mission Statement says:
“The Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Westport is a diverse and welcoming religious community, free of creed and dogma, and open to people of all backgrounds and beliefs.”
“We inspire and support individual spiritual growth. We connect through worship, music, learning, and caring ministries. We act in the service of peace and justice.”
The easy-to remember three word statement is inspire, connect, act.
Today is our annual meeting – a time to take stock, to vote on the new budget for this fiscal year, to elect a new member of the Board of Trustees, to present the Very Fine Award to a member whose contribution to the life of the congregation who has gone ‘above and beyond,’ and to vote on the Mission Statement which has been so carefully crafted by Mary Money and the thirty members who assembled the input from about 300 participants in our two ‘essence-of-us’ weekends.They polished many pages of notes into a succinct and affirmative statement.
We put emphasis on the word ‘affirmative,’ since, quite naturally, we often define ourselves to others by saying that we don’t believe in the Trinity, we don’t believe in Hell, or in a God who chooses favorites…we don’t believe in the Bible in a literal sense, etc.
So the mission statement is in the affirmative, reminding us of the reasons we exist as a religious congregation. It takes into account our basic philosophy and our over-arching goals.
Our Statement of Affirmation reminds us that we are a covenantal congregation; that is to say, we freely come together and enter into a relationship with one another based on mutual respect; we make some promises that are implicit and explicitly we say: ‘This is our great covenant; to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.’
The Statement of Affirmation is, in a way, a mission/vision statement; I introduced it when I arrived 26 years ago so that we could have something we could affirm each week; or whenever a group gathers and wants to be reminded.
One of our 19th century forebears, Universalist minister Hosea Ballou, put it nicely when he said, “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”
It’s natural, too, that we take our religious freedom for granted, the same way a fish takes the water for granted. The only way a fish could discover water is to be taken out of it, which is why we need to safeguard our religious freedom when it is threatened by any attempted imposition of religion by politicians who would fashion laws based on their particular creeds or theological assumptions.
We can trace our religious roots back to our Jewish ancestors, running through the introduction of Christianity and the long series of iterations of it.
To look at the Mission Statement we’ll vote on today, however, let’s take a quick run through our more recent history – the development of Unitarianism in America.
A good place to start is the manger in which our nation was born – the painful and costly separation from Great Britain with the war for freedom, for independence, which is at the heart of our nation as well as the heart of our religious faith.
In those earliest years, when the Declaration of Independence was written and the Constitution was hammered out, the spirit of freedom flowed very naturally from the political aspect into America’s religious life. Clergy were faced with the challenges it brought to old patriarchal and hierarchical underpinnings. The liberals talked with one another during those early years and as the 18th century passed to the 19th the conversation grew into open theological conflict. Then, in 1819 the liberal Christians selected William Ellery Channing as their spokesperson.
Channing delivered a ‘Unitarian declaration of independence,’ outlining the essence of what this group was thinking, Unitarian Christianity. He said the Trinity was a mistake – God is One, not three.
He said that the assertion that Jesus is God is both irrational and non-Biblical. Channing, however, kept Jesus in a special category, but he said that Jesus is one man, one mind – like each of us – sent by God the Father, but that Christian theology had made Jesus into two persons, one human and the other divine.
He said that the Bible is a book written ‘by men, for men, (sic) in the language of men and must be carefully read and painstakingly interpreted in order to grasp its many meanings.’
That was 1819. Six years later, in 1825, the American Unitarian Association was formed.
Thirteen years later, Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a very controversial address to the graduating seminarians at Harvard Divinity School, known as the Divinity School Address. He went one giant step further than Channing, saying things like: “Jesus saw with a divine eye the mystery of the soul and he dwelt in it. In his jubilee of sublime emotion he said ‘I am God, if you would see God see me, or see thee when thou thinkest as I now think.’
In other words, Jesus was entirely human, but he stands out among us because of his deep spiritual insights.
As a consequence of that address Emerson became persona non grata at Harvard, until some years later when the dust settled and he became ‘a rock star,’ then he was elected to the Harvard College Board of Overseers.
Twenty-eight year old Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, sat in the audience that night at Harvard and was bowled over by Emerson’s courageous statement. Three years later Parker delivered an even more controversial sermon: The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.
He said, “Any one, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one province passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox of the next.”
For this sermon he was called a heretic.
He said, “Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, and not the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves…it is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid.”
He called for a new approach to religion in general and Christianity in particular. He said that Christianity had become a religion about Jesus, rather than the religion of Jesus.
He said it’s a lot easier to put Jesus on a theological pedestal than it is to live out his precepts, which Parker summarized as ‘loving your neighbor as your self.’
He denied any kind of divinity to Jesus, he denied the literal truth of the miracles attributed to Jesus, and he questioned much of the Bible, referring to its many myths that were never intended to be taken literally. He said, “It’s legends so beautiful as fictions, (are) so appalling as facts.” Elsewhere, Parker said, ‘As a master the Bible is a tyrant; as a servant I do not have time in one life to discover its many uses.’
The bottom line in Parker’s sermon is that everything we see as essential to the Christian religion is transitory – it changes over time. But what is permanent in Christianity is what is immutably true in the universe; today we might say what is permanent in religion is what’s scientifically true, what can stand the test of reason. Parker was saying that science and religion need to live together openly.
For this powerful, forthright sermon Parker was not only criticized by his fellow Unitarian ministers – denounced by more conservative Christian clergy – but he was accused of heresy by his Unitarian colleagues, he was systematically shunned – his fellow Unitarian clergy would cross the street to make that point, and he was put on trial as a heretic to determine whether he should continue to be allowed membership in the Boston Association of Ministers.
In a different age, in another place, he might have been burned at the stake, as was Michael burned at the stake for his book On the Errors of the Trinity, by John Calvin in Geneva in 1553 But in 1841, in America, Parker only suffered shunning by those who disagreed with him. Ah, progress!
He was asked to resign from the minister’s group, and replied that he considered the principle of free inquiry to be at stake – that theological unity had never before been required, and that he had no intention of resigning. The members realized that there was no way to exclude him without abandoning the principle of free and open inquiry – so the closest the Unitarians ever came to a heresy trial was ended.
In just 24 years, from 1819 to 1843 our Unitarian forebears laid the foundation for the free religious faith we inherited, and we owe them an enormous debt of gratitude comparable to the debt we owe to the so-called Founding Fathers of this nation.
The founding clergy moved us away from doctrinal religious creeds to a covenantal religion, where each person in a Unitarian congregation is not only free to have his or her personal set of beliefs, but that they should be challenged to deepen that belief system and to continue to on a journey toward spiritual growth and maturity.
Which brings us full circle back to our Mission Statement:
“The Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Westport is a diverse and welcoming religious community, free of creed and dogma, and open to people of all backgrounds and beliefs.”
“We inspire and support individual spiritual growth. We connect through worship, music, learning, and caring ministries. We act in the service of peace and justice.”
Those who worked on this summary statement of our Mission acknowledge our independence, on the one hand, and our connection to the wider movement, saying:
We are a free and independent congregation affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association with whom we make a covenant to affirm and promote:
- The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
- Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
- A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
- The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
- The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
- Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
“The living tradition which we share draws from many sources:”
- Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life (my personal favorite);
- Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
- Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
- Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
- Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
- Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
This set of purposes and principles not only summarizes who and what we are, but it challenges each of us to think about what they mean for us individually and as a congregation.
We know, for example, that not every person lives out a life of that inherent dignity and integrity – we can point to lots of examples. But the operative word in this first principle is the word inherent, meaning built in at birth; an essential characteristic…the babe in the manger metaphor; not born carrying original sin, but the potential that each of us can be a blessing.
Each of us has a serious and challenging responsibility to live out that inherent worth and dignity by the way we live our lives – which, of course, summarizes the religion of Jesus, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and every credible religious teacher who has ever lived.
It all comes down to living it out…being a good person.
We exist as a religious community to help our children learn about this life-long task, and to provide what Emerson called ‘supplies to virtue’ for each of us, week after week and year after year.
It helps, then, to have a mission statement that summarizes in a paragraph or so our reason for being, or any organization’s reason for existence. Our proposed mission statement attempts to embody or summarize our shared values, philosophy, goals and ambitions.
Any organization that tries to operate without a mission statement runs the risk of wandering through the world without a moral compass, without the ability to verify that it is on track, working toward its intended course.
I would also point out that in a congregation of free and independent members it is the task of lay people to do the work of articulating an agreed upon Mission Statement. We clergy are called to articulate it in sermons from week to week, and in rites of passage ceremonies like weddings, child dedications, memorial services, counseling and our involvement in the larger interfaith world.
A Mission Statement is a ‘living document.’ It’s not carved in stone – it’s a process meant to engage our minds and enlist our hearts.
Article I of our church’s constitution states the name to be used: the Unitarian Church in Westport. Article II states our purpose, which says, “The purpose of the church is to sustain and further a program of religious worship and education, and the practice and extension of Unitarian Universalist principles and teachings.”
It sounds like a mission statement, and in some ways it is our opening mission statement. We keep evolving.
When I arrived here 26 years ago the only significant change I made is the inclusion of a Statement of Affirmation, which I believed would serve several purposes, all of which would help to give focus as well as an ongoing challenge to our ever-evolving religious community.
We can trace our roots back to Judaism and the covenant made between God and the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; then to the New Covenant, or New Testament, with the theological assertion that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah.
The principle of free inquiry has allowed us room to grow in our religious thinking to the point that we can have a religion without revelation – a free religious faith.
While we are free of creedal statements we are not wandering in the wilderness – we find our spiritual sustenance in music and poetry and in the creation of a community of mutual support where ‘love is the spirit and service is its law.’
We’ll close with a mission-statement kind of poem – it’s about connecting, inspiring and acting. It’s titled Natural History, by E.B. White
The spider, dropping down fr-m twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
Fr-m where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.