In 2004, after marriage between persons of the same sex became legal, I wrote a blog post about what a pastor might do when the couple had already vowed themselves to each other in the only spheres available: the social, religious or both.

Husband Jonathan and I are clear that our wedding seven years ago was real, if legally imperfect and that our ceremony a couple of weeks ago was not to replace it, but finish it. To underscore this, we kept the ceremony short, informal and with language echoing back to 2003.

In full, here’s what we did, or rather what the Rev. Victoria Weinstein led us in.

On July 5, 2003, at the Universalist National Memorial Church, you Jonathan Padget and Scott Wells, vowed to each other before God and the congregation, to have and to hold one another from that day
forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death shall you part. You sealed this vow by holding hands, exchanging rings, and with prayer and the breaking of bread.

Today, you come to add to your wedded state marriage under the law of the District of Columbia. Is this your intent?

Each: It is.

[Turning, holding hands.]

I, Jonathan, take you Scott to be my lawfully wedded husband.

I, Scott, take you Jonathan to be my lawfully wedded husband.

Forasmuch as Scott and Jonathan have thus pledged themselves each to the other in the presence of these witnesses, I do now, by virtue of authority vested in me by the District of Columbia pronounce that they
are married.

The Lord bless you with his love as a mantle on your shoulders, a crown on your foreheads, and a seal upon your hearts.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the companionship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

Needed we more?

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As some of you know, on August 21, Jonathan Padget and I legally married at home in the company of some local friends. He and I were married at church in 2003, but now that the District of Columbia marriage law encompasses same-sex couples we wanted to “complete” our marriage. (The liturgy follows.)

The Rev. Victoria Weinstein, perhaps better known to blog readers as PeaceBang and the author of “Beauty Tips for Ministers”, conducted both the 2003 and 2010 services. And here’s the proof: a photo by Avelino Maestas.

Thanks to them and the others present — also to those who wished us well from afar.

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Hi, dear readers! I’m back to blogging after several days of web quietness — more about that later — only to find that something is wrong here. My host? My local connection? Domain redirection? Other causes? Logging in has been a chore this evening.

I’ll be back when I have the problems solved. And it makes me all that more sympathetic to the call of low-bandwidth web design — something to consider, especially if you have have a focus on readers that don’t have a broadband connection.

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Here’s a tool for bloggers and others with websites that refer to members of Congress.

Some of you know I have secular work — with the government transparency organization, the Sunlight Foundation. Sunlight does some pretty amazing things, but I don’t normally speak of it, so as to not present a confusion between my own political views and Sunlight’s nonpartisan stance.

But we’ve got a some tools that I want to share with my readers. One is widgets about members of Congress on your blog. I’ve put a small format “business card” of Eleanor Holmes Norton, the delegate of the District of Columbia, in the side panel of the main page, and (since she doesn’t get a vote) one for the vote John Barrow — my former representative in Georgia — made on the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (as an example) below:

If you want to add widgets to your blog like these or several other varieties, see Politiwidgets.

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There aren’t that many church-focused free- and open-source content management systems. Perhaps I should be happy there are any, but each of them has its quirks.

I found kOOL — even the name is a quirk — at churchtool.org. I found it because I was looking for church-related uses for the typesetting language LaTeX, which kOOL claims to support, and which I think has untapped possibilities to make church-related publications easier to produce and more beautiful.

We shall see. It took me quite a bit of time and some expert help just to get an instance of it installed on my home machine. So as I play with it, I’ll see what it does well and not so well, with a particular eye to complex family systems.  Any features or bugs I should watch out for?  And screenshots you’d like?

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Digging into the Rules of the Unitarian Universalist Association, a church-planter would find Rule 3.3.5.f, which begins:

A congregation should be incorporated when possible under the laws of the state in which it exists. A congregation shall include in its articles of incorporation or other organizing documents a clause providing that the assets of the congregation will be transferred upon dissolution to the Association.

So one the one hand, a congregation should be incorporated, but it might have other organizing documents. Why?

A thought experiment. If you and a group (4? 400? 4,000?) of like-minded religionists agreed to meet and function as a church, and organized it according to religious principles as you understand them, you would have at an unincorporated association. Many religious institutions, in fact, wok this way — though that doesn’t keep them out of trouble. Under the common law, unincorporated associations aren’t legal entities. In broad strokes, they can’t receive gifts (because there’s nobody to receive them), can’t own or transfer real property and legal liability falls upon all the members and officers. (Unincorporated associations have other distinguishing features, so this isn’t an exhaustive list. Do I need you to talk to a lawyer?) Little wonder the UUA advises incorporation, as it creates a legal structure that can hold property and shield its members and officers.  So why not require it?

Some “behold! the mark of the beast!” churches, after all, make a virtue of “not registering with the government” — as if incorporation makes that church subject to Caesar and not God. Good luck with that; let’s see if the municipal water authority buys it. If a church didn’t or doesn’t incorporate, one way of handling the question of property is to put it in trust. Now we have a situation where trustees can float beside the covenanted church, having the cash and the property, perhaps with limited responsibility to the congregation itself. Anecdotally, I’ve heard where this option has fostered long-term dysfunction. (If you comment, no names, please.)  And until recently, churches in Virginia and West Virginia weren’t able to incorporate at all.

I’ve written at length about the parish-church (or society-church) model of church organizing upon which both Unitarians and Universalists have historically organized, but to recap, a parish or society functions as a legal and fiscal entity which incubates and later holds a church. The parish or society holds the building and the money, is governed by elected officers, is usually incorporated, and could easily look to the outside world as a secular charity, save that it “shared” a minister with “its” church. (Unitarians were fond calling the minister, with respect to the parish, “a public teacher.”)  The church is then a spiritual body, governed by the minister (as pastor) and deacons, provides spiritual support and the ordinances (sacraments) and in the Universalists’ case, often bound its members to some recognition to a theological statement. See this example.

But this doesn’t sound much like Unitarian Universalist churches today. Even historically, the practice was lumpy. One way of looking at the eastern Massachusetts “Unitarian Departure” is to see a divorce between the more liberal parishes that went Unitarian and their more conservative internal churches, which then nested in new “second” parishes, making up many of the older UCC churches there now. Universalists, whose great spiritual discipline was debate, so often stopped their organizing at the parish phase that convention leaders would scold them into forming churches, and later, recommended fused parish-churches to simplify the administration. (I’ve noted that the avowedly Christian churches in the UUA tend to have more of the “church” features in their organization, a subject for a lacuna-seeking historian perhaps.)

So incorporation law has a heavy, unspoken presence in our institutional consciousness — one that rewards business and secular charitable models above our own stated views, and forces us to adopt to models we do not choose. It makes you wonder if the “mark of the beast” crowd has a point, if an unintended one.

But there’s a partial remedy, for later.

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Review this map. (Note that the District of Columbia is colored in.) And now think about church growth. The title is a big hint to where I’m heading.

More later.

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Sad news from Doug Drown emailed to me earlier today and  reprinted with permission:

Thought you would like to know that it has been reported on the Maine Conference UCC website that the Gardiner United Church of Christ in Gardiner, Maine (former First Universalist Church) has closed. The property and assets have been turned over to the Conference to help provide funding for its ministry.

This was not a “former” Universalist church; it WAS the Universalist Church, having elected not to join the UUA at the time of the merger and to subsequently cast its lot with the UCC instead. The building is a particularly lovely example of New Brunswick-type “Bishop Medley” Carpenter Gothic, of which there are few examples in Maine. It’s painted yellow, which is also unusual. I’ll try to find a photo.

Thank you, and a photo would be appreciated. There are other unaffiliated Universalist churches formerly associated with the denomination, of course. Some are independent or locally federated, but this situation is unusual. (There was a church in Ohio affiliated with the NACCC but it was small and I’ve not seen it in the directory lately.)

Again, a sad word, worth noting with thanksgiving.

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I’ve been studying the Quakers more than usual lately. Not just the Friends General Conference — the main fellowship for liberal Quakers, including many who aren’t necessarily Christian — but others, including the Holiness pastoral Quakers, and the Conservatives, with whom I would likely be most at home, should I ever go to the Friends. (No plans, though.) They’re a interesting continuum, and I suspect offer many lessons both personally and for the institutions I care about.

A friend — not a Quaker — pointed out QuakerMaps.com as a resource for finding Quakers in North America and Europe, and its a good ministry worthy of emulation. And one with an actual funding model. (Perhaps not by a U.S. Unitarian Universalist, who are almost entirely in a single fellowship in the UUA; thus causing a duplication of effort.)

But before I saw that site, I downloaded a PDF of the world map of Quakers, by the Friends World Committee for Consultation. Take a look.

The thing that touched me was the implied seriousness with with Jesus’ promise that  ”where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20) The lone worship group in Croatia has (or had) two members. Also in Lithuania. The one in Greece has three; Estonia’s lone group has four. Denmark Yearly Meeting, in essence a national body, has 29 souls meeting in three different places. And I wonder how many more tiny groups are hidden in the statistics of relatively larger groups.

Which isn’t a romantic impulse to tininess. Perhaps members of these little groups are frustrated by their small numbers. Or not. And it must be more work per capita to keep small meetings going, though it isn’t like faith is a wholesale business. And while some may be dwindling, legacy groups, I gather that others are much newer.

I could go back and forth like this all day, so suffice it to say that there’s a recognized place in the Friends environment for the smallest gatherings — even those that have no settled space and meet far less frequently than weekly. (“By arrangement” seems to be the mode of choice in some European countries.)

Recognition and respect — that’s worthy of emulation, too.

With this post, I open the category Quakers.

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Funny: after all these years as a Universalist and living in the mid-Atlantic, I’ve never been to Murray Grove, the campground on spot of the New Jersey shore where Universalist pioneer and minister John Murray landed and met the “forerunner” Thomas Potter, thus restoring his faith.

But I would like to go, if only for a little while to walk the grounds and visit Thomas Potter’s grave.  (The little-known and less-occupied Universalist National Cemetery is also there to visit. Not one of the more successful national initiatives.)

And shazam! There’s a blog for it: a good idea for promoting Murray Grove to would-be visitors. A rather targeted, niche blog with only two entries, but the kind of thing that makes me want to go all the more.

“Murray Grove for Ministers“

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A Universalist history note. In places where there was more than one Universalist parish (also called a society), the churches — by which was often also understood as the building — had a distinct name. Confused? It gets worse when you consider some parishes didn’t have churches; that is, that they didn’t have a covenanted and visible body of believers (oops! didn’t get around to that), a building or both. Or, that following General Convention advice about a hundred years back, the parish-church was merged into a single unit. But that’s for another time. Here’s a key to the naming convention.

See the following list from the Universalist Register of 1912, listing the Universalist parishes and churches in that “city of churches” — Brooklyn, New York.

1. Our Father
2. All Souls
3. Church of Reconciliation
4. Church of Good Tidings

So the First Universalist Society — as I bet it was called — of Brooklyn was more likely known in practice as the Church of Our Father. (As indeed, the First (Murray) Universalist Society of Washington, D.C. was known; this is the legal predecessor to the Universalist National Memorial Church, itself an example of the merged parish-church model.) And this explains why Fourth Universalist Society in New York — Manhattan, really — was known historically as the Church of the Divine Paternity.

Back to Brooklyn. Of the four parishes above, only the Second survives, in a federated churches now known as All Souls Bethlehem Church. Whew!

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Rockwell Universalist Church, Winder, Georgia, always stirs up happy memories. It still exists, and is an on and off member of the UUA. (Currently off.) It used to have a website, but the domain lapsed — so no more.

But it does have a historical marker out front. And I posted an interior photo in 2006, itself now more than a decade old.

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Call it an occupational hazard, particularly at a government transparency nonprofit, but I enjoy reading stuff like this notice from the IRS about the automatic deletion of nonprofit status from organizations that haven’t filed with the IRS in the last three years. It used to be that inactive groups could coast without filing for ages, but that changed. Most nonprofit orgs with an IRS determination have to file annually – churches are a main exception — though for small groups that probably means the so-called “postcard” filing. Originally hundreds of thousands of groups — those that hasn’t filed for three years — were slated for deletion, but the IRS has given non-filers one last chance, due October 15.

In many cases, there are really defunct organizations, and should be deleted. But the following have Unitarian or Universalist in their name. Some are relics, others I think active. Do you know anything about their current status? And if they’re active, who needs to be contacted? (If not, we can be grateful for their past service.)

And some detail about this move from Blue Avocado, a nonprofit resource I like.

In FEIN order:

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I’m not a big fan of get-arrested theater posing as civil disobedience. We see quite a bit of it here in Washington, and I can’t help think it says more about those getting arrested than the cause, because it’s a tactic as fresh and timely as a Nehru jacket. It also reeks of entitlement, since the presumption is that those arrested will be processed, offered bail and probably have charges dismissed or reduced to a fine.

Which brings us to the Unitarian Universalist arrest-a-thon today, the day after a federal judge gives SB 1070 a judo chop to the throat. But the show must go on, and Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpiao — admittedly not one of my favorite people — himself has become a focus of the campaign. That’s mission creep from an anti-SB 1070 stand.  (And, how, for example, does this show solidarity for those who are avoiding or do not deserve arrest?)

But say what I will about D.C. arrestees, at least (I’ve heard) they have their lawyers all set up. And at least they’re not asking for a legal defense fund, as the tweely-named UUA Standing on the Side of Love campaign is. (I’m not linking to it.)

If you set yourself up to be arrested, be prepared to pay the cost. That’s pretty basic to real civil disobedience. You might even refuse bail. Real love has costs, and sometimes hurts — and the hurt will find you; you needn’t look for it.

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The British Unitarians and Free Christian bloggers seem to be countering the mid-summer slump that’s withering the bloggers on this side of the Atlantic. And they have an energy that its worthy of emulation: they use blogs, in a loosely-coordinated (or perhaps not so loosely, but that’s how it appears) way, to provide services.  Unofficial outlets and self-rising experts — some ministers, some lay leaders — providing counsel and resources: readers take note.

Depending on who you believe, there are three or four thousand British Unitarians — and for better or worse, many of them seem to think the United States version of Unitarian Universalism is worth emulating. But those small numbers could never provide or justify the service systems we take for granted here. The Communications Commission of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches has a blog that notes these resources; an emerging feed — using Yahoo Pipes — will aggregate the British content.

Not to pick out favorites, but Live Unitarian-ly is an emerging favo(u)rite, if for nothing else, it review of ministry training resources.  Others, related to governance (better here as an inspiration because much of the content is UK-specific) and spiritual community deserve a growing readership. These last two are by “Louise” — others are completely anonymous. Which raises my one plaint: names, photos and bios would be lovely. We, the readers, want to know who you are.

For the rest of us, read, be inspired and find your niche.

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I’m planning some site upgrades this week, so various themes and ideas will blink in and out. Please forgive or ignore.

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I’ve been fascinated by web fonts in private, but news that Google has a Fonts API in a beta release — in short, making liberally-licensed fonts for websites easier to implement — pushes up my interest. And this, despite the Google diet I’ve put myself on. (Once I learn more about web fonts, it’ll be easy to replace their service with one I can host. And besides, it’s not like the Big G is going to get any more personal data about me in the transaction. They have it all already.)

This blog post is for other dabblers. Start here to use Google’s API; it includes a simple real-life example to try.  For pre-dabblers, web fonts can bring a new level of typography to the web, without resorting to pictures of text.  I’ll probably be trying it out on this blog, using Vollkorn, next week.

HT: “Embedding Google Font to Your WP Blog” (Make Tech Easier)

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I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the Christian Universalist Association — why form central, outward-facing organizations when the internal community is so small? —  but my instinct is to be encouraging and wait. And when I heard that the CUA is holding a conference this fall in Ohio, I started thinking about attending.  Call me selfish, but these kind of things are so much better if well-attended, so if you want to meet with real, live Universalist Christians, look at the details and consider coming to Cincinnati on October 23 and 24.

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Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger James Ford (Monkey Mind) posted a video — a very funny video — from The Onion. But let’s be clear: everyone I know had already seen it.

But it’s the summer, it’s hot, I’m tired and it was still funny. So if you missed “Web Site Story” from last August, be sure to watch it, and the same truth applies.

You’ll have to click through — no embedding, alas — and this video has the added benefit of confirming what generation you’re in. (As a member of the new Silent Generation, I don’t expect anyone to care.) Old people, click here. Youth, here. (Other Gen-Xers, here.)

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So I’ve installed two Bible reader software packages: BibleTime and Xiphos (formerly GnomeSword). Both are based on the SWORD Project, where the former is native to the Kubuntu distribution (flavor) of Linux, while Xiphos is native to the mainline Ubuntu distribution I use. (If the difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu doesn’t mean anything to you already, don’t let this be your introduction.)

Now, Xiphos requires a text package to be installed from a remote server in order to be use. Unfortunately, the only one available — even though there are many Bible translations and commentaries available for the software — is the NET (New English Translation) version, but I have misgivings about its doctrinal underpinnings — its roots lie in Dallas Theological Seminary –and its copyright status which makes it dubiously free, even though that a feature it markets on. So I resisted installing it, if even to uninstall it later. And what good would this stricture do a non-English reader? I was caught and a little irritated.

So I installed BibleTime, which as I expected gave me an assortment of choices, including the Bible in Esperanto (London version). This I installed. Lo and behold! it then appeared in Xiphos, allowing me to proceed and add other Bibles. What the hay?

I’m posting this to see if anyone has had this problem, and to see if there’s a solution.

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