The Unitarian Fellowship movement was the most successful liberal church growth program in living memory. It was not perfect, but given how different these fellowships were from what came before, it’s amazing it worked — or was allowed to work — at all.
The Unitarian Fellowships get a bad rap today, which I think odd [...]
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Category Archives: Church mission and identity
Anti-clerical?
Unitarian Universalist Christian church: 15 years past
Ah kids, gather ’round and I’ll tell you about the world pre-Web. We had mailing lists, telephone trees, gopher (I transcribed the first Unitarian document for gopher, and later Project Gutenberg: Channing’s Baltimore Sermon) and before its current use as a vehicle for file downloads — Usenet newsgroups.
These were chat rooms, divided by subject [...]
The original Twitter, Unitarian Universalist version
For all my complaints about the nonsense that percolates among Unitarian Universalists (and church people generally), I have always loved the Wayside Community Pulpit. These posters, printed with thoughtful and pithy quotations, were the perfect complement to the automobile age. They were Twitter (or Identi.ca) before the age of the Internet, much less microblogging. I [...]
The do-less church
After years of more, more, more — not Andrea True Connection’s standard — in church, I’d be happy with a lot less, if done well.
That’s the point of the 37signals.com blogpost called “How Chipotle, Pinkberry, and others win big by doing just a few things well.” In my experience, many churches do many things and [...]
Alabama church with great website
Sometimes I mention in front of web developers and designers how WordPress can function quite well for church websites. Objections follow. Then I describe these churches: small, with no dedicated technical staff and requiring few bells and whistles. Then agreements follow. But some WordPress themes are better than others, and there’s little pretending that such [...]
Silverman on church finances
Yes, it’s a bit rude and tons of people have seen this. But it’s Sarah Silverman and I totally heart her.
And I love where she goes with respect to church wealth. And not just — by implication — the biggest owners.
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“Radical” and “liberal” in tension
I keep going back to British Unitarian minister and blogger Stephen Lingwood’s latest blog post where he — following a threat on yet another blog — distinguishes between liberals, radicals and conservatives. Be sure to read it.
I keep wondering if the collapse of liberal religion has more to do with our sense of comfort in [...]
Happy (and just) May Day!
I wrote about Interfaith Worker Justice before. Good stuff.
Now be sure to note and use these resources for congregation.
And pray for those who labor and employ, for those who make their own work, and those who have not enough work to earn their daily bread.
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My take on the Humanist bus ad campaign
I thought I would chime in on the bus ad campaign by the American Humanist Association. Bill Baar (Pfarrer Streccius) and Steve Caldwell (Liberal Faith Development) have said their piece, but I’ve actually seen one of the ads. Just a few minutes ago, and I’m not impressed.
I’ll admit: I’m hard to impress with respect to [...]
Nagging Carver Model issues
Can you be free to think when you subsume another’s thoughts? When the structures of that thought literally belongs to someone else? When the model excludes all others?
That’s my problem with the Carver Model, which has taken the Unitarian Universalist ecosphere by storm. I choke every time I come to one of its registered trademarks [...]
