The last 10 years seen a lot of change to my attitude which church theology and the Unitarian Universalist Association. I’ve picked up some skills, and let others go. In the larger world, some old friends have gone and new people have risen up.

Thank to you, dear readers, who have made the experience rewarding and I appreciate the many readers in commenters to this blog. I don’t know what the next ten years will bring, but it will certainly be something new.

The Western Conference Unitarians — think of the middle third of the United States a hundred and more years ago — were known for a kind of bibical rationalism and a minimalist style of worship sometimes known as “fiddle and lecture”. And I’ve been looking for some simplified options.

Without directions, it’s hard to know what exactly this kind of worship looked like. Yesterday I found a piece of ephemera: an order of service from Jenkin Lloyd Jones’s All Souls Church in Chicago, from January 27, 1907. That should be a representative sample from one of that movement’s leading lights, maturely developed.

I. Organ Prelude.
II. Voluntary (with “From all that dwell below the skies…”)
III. Poem.
IV. Choral response.
V. “Prayer, ‘Our Father,’ chanted.”
VI. Scripture.VII. Hymn.
VIII. Sermon.
IX. Solo.
X. Offertory.
XI. Hymn.
XII. Benediction.
XIII. Organ Postlude.
XIV. Social Greeting.

I can confirm that the hymns map back to Unity Hymns and Chorales, so the “Choral reponse” was surely one from that book, too.

All Souls Church, Chicago, order of service

What strikes me is how little congregational repsonse there is. Little, perhaps nothing spoken in the pews — only hymns and chanting. Perhaps a small step from the Middle Ages, when the silent congregants would look devotionally upon the sacrament: here, the preaching.

Theological qualms aside, such a service can be sensible, even wholesome and devout in a large congregation — not unknown to “the Unity men.” In small congregations, the effect would surely be stilted, and with an unsteady preacher, deathly.

I’ll keep looking.

Grant us, O Lord, to pass this day in gladness and peace, without stumbling
and without stain; that, reaching the eventide victorious over all temptation, we may praise thee, the eternal God, who art blessed for evermore, and dost govern all things. Amen.

The index identifies it from the Mozarabic Rite — the dominant form of worship in Muslim Spain, as distinguished by the now-dominant Latin Rite — is a darling interest of students of liturgy, preserved in a single chapel among the Catholics, but revived by the Anglicans in Spain. A trial prayerbook in Mexico strongly commended by the United States Episcopalians also revived the Mozarabic rite. It didn’t take.

But this prayer in particular was widely antologized, found in ecumenical hymnals for youth and the armed forces, plus Episcopalian, Lutheran and Congregationalist formulations, from the Progressive Age to the Second World War — the era Hymns of the Spirit (1937) was composed. An Episcopal prayerbook for solders and saliors puts the prayer under a heading that typifies the time: “For victory over temptation.” Likewise one for scouts: “For purity”. (PDF)

So where does this bit of liturgical saltpeter appear in English translation?  Hard to say. I cannot yet find a reference earlier than 1913, and nothing quite like it appears in the studies the Episcopalians made for the Mexican church, this Collect for Grace being the closest (and perhaps the source) in Charles R. Hale’s Mozarabic Collects Translated and Arranged from the Ancient Liturgy of the Spanish Church (1881):

O Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst take upon Thee the weakness of our mortal nature; Grant that we may pass this day in safety, and without sin, resisting all the temptations of the enemy, and that at eventide we may joyfully praise Thee, O King Eternal; Through Thy mercy, O our God, Who art blessed, and dost live, and govern all things, world without end. Amen.

A good place to leave it.

Two cents a day (even in 1896) doesn’t sound like very much, but would that be today? (This resource to the rescue.)

About 56.24 cents a day, or more than $205 a year. Far more than the usual “chalice lighters” ask of $60. Food — and funds — for thought.

This year, I’ve sought out and geocoded all the member churches of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, in Great Britain. I have some observations and a map like I made for the UUA, but there are some lingering choices for how to render the map. So instead, I’ll tell where the centerpoint — er, centrepoint — for UK Unitarians, based on the reported quota numbers. (With the understanding that this probably isn’t an adequate way to measure membership, much less participation.)

The proper location is on a farm south of Barton-under-Needwood, in Staffordshire, just off the A38. Hardly the place for 3,600-plus Unitarians and Free Christians, who’d about double the population. So let’s call it nearby Burton upon Trent, which has about 44,000 residents and at least has a train station on a main line.

To tell you the truth, I was hoping for Ashby-de-la-Zouch (for the name alone).

Copyright and liturgy — literally, “work for the common good” — exist (for some sensitive souls) in tension. The bonds on what comes from God, or what is given to God, ought to be loose, if made at all. Since this attitude predates personal printing — think spirit duplicators in the pre-computer ago — little wonder the limits of liberal licensing extend to redistribution or free (that is, sponsored) distribution (one example) and not adaptation. In the United States, the public domain ascription of the Episcopal Church’s prayerbook is the exception that proves the rule: it has been widely adapted and modified. Unitarian Universalists could take this attitude to heart.

Gladly, I can point to one example that should still be effect and, for some, still useful. From the introduction to the 1937 Services of Religion prepended to Hymns of the Spirit (the red hymnal).

All of the services are intended to encourage a larger participation by the people than is sometimes to be found in what is called “Congregational worship,” but which too often is carried on only by the minister and choir with the people as silent auditors. To ensure full participation by the people the printed services should be in their hands, and they should be instructed to respond audibly in those parts assigned to them, which are printed in bold face type. In churches which lack the printed services or wish to follow a simpler form, it is suggested that the order of service, in a sense of the main sequence of events be printed on cards to be placed in the pews or hinged into the hymn books, the minister drawing upon such of the materials included in this book as he finds suitable for the occasion. Ministers wishing to reprint single services on leaflets for use in their own churches are liberty to do so but the words “Copyright by the Beacon Press” must appear in every such reprint and reprints may not be sold.

An imperfect license, but there are better ones today. Might I suggest, like the Open Siddur Project, a free/libre license using their license decision tree? (It refers to these licenses.)

I’m left wondering if the board is micromanaging, if the higher reaches of the management team is incompetent, or (what I think the real issue is) that the Association is governed by a corporate management style that is unsuitable to our policy, tradition and culture. And perhaps even good sense: if you’re given to self-punishment let me recommend you read the Board packets from the last several years. It’s impossible to think anyone not on the Board would have the time or stamina to be able to follow the process, and its product looks more like generating more process than say, new congregations, building loans, print or online publications, a new hymnal, religion education materials, etc. etc. etc. And need I remind anyone that the President is as much an elected official as the Moderator?

Performance metrics, however well-loved in the nonprofit sector today, can lead staff to “work to the test” and (at their worst) can become a kind of performance art which steer the work of the Association staff away from practical work.

Unlike Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Tom Schade, I think the $100,000 the board reserved for a consultant is a valid point of discussion. (I agree about the high dudgeon, though.) $100,000 is unlikely to go very far in the world of organizational management consulting; and perhaps no do more than a few elections to change the dynamics in the board and administration. Do the remaining staff members, already with constrained budgets, wonder how seriously their work is taken? If I was one of the ten staff members who lost their jobs in the last round of layoffs the idea, that $100,000 worth of consulting would be a bitter bit of news. Congregational leaders, themselves under tight budgets, are asked to make the “fair share” to the Annual Program Fund, and I would wonder if it was being well used.

In short, the UUA acts like the kind of legacy organization or corporation that persons my age and younger than I mock. (TPS reports anyone?) Losing the old headquarters building and the new regional structure — belt-tightening dressed as progress — will lessen long-cultivated emotional warmth to the UUA. This latest performance will convince “the next generation” (younger than me) that the best place to lead, to serve and to share resource may well be some place different than the current structures of the Unitarian Universalist Association. If you don’t like what you see, vote with your feet and support new ways.

Boy in the Bands approved.

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(Unitarian Headquarters, Budapest)

View Larger Map

(First Unitarian, Koloszvár)

And I discovered is how difficult it would be for a newcomer to find many Unitarian churches, based on their web sites. There’s often plenty of information about teas and their seventeenth-century history, too many lack basic directions, maps, visitor expectations, parking or transit information. So I hope my map in addition to being a visual tool for understanding prospect for new church development — see my earlier concern about a lack of a church in Milton Keynes — can also be useful in helping newcomers find a church that already exist. A good website isn’t everything, but why make it harder for vistors than it needs to be?

And because as was suggested in UUWorld article I believe what’s happening with the British Unitarians is a bellwether of what’s to come in the United States. We’re larger, but by no means large and the same thing can happen to us.

The map is quite a labor but I hope to have it up later this week.

I thought about this again because I had been reading about medieval developments in with Christian worship as a way to better understand how and why we worship today. I think people on the liberal end of Christianity like to think that we have little in common with medieval worshippers, ascribing all of our traditions to the seventeenth century or later. The medieval worshiper would understand our attention to color, sound, and movement. They would get our candles and oil-lamps. But they might have a more difficult a time with how little we pray.

Ancient models a Christian prayer had overlapping cycles of the day weekend and year. While the monastics would pray seven or more times a day — every day — others might still pray twice a day. Add in a mass on Sunday and other devotions. Plenty of opportunity to get both the continuous rhythm of the life of Christ and the saints with other, special, topical occasions for prayer. Today’s Protestants are likely to see that whole week of devotion compressed into the Sunday service. The rhythm of our “faith history” — and with it, opportunities to learn through worship — is a rival for time with our special concerns. “Special concern” worship — votive worship — is largely seen in weddings and funerals, ordinations, and the occasional community Thanksgiving service and prayer breakfast. We see it in “candles of joy and concern” which our medieval ancestors would recognize — the original lighters of a votive candle — if perhaps without the public attention! We see it too in the vigils for the dead…

I think we Unitarian Universalists feel the tension between cyclical worship that teaches, and occasional worship that concentrates on particular themes. (Votive worship can address particular doctrines as well as particular people; for this, today, read worship in reference to a particular cause or movement.) We feel the tension, but may not have the language to describe the variety, which makes our worship look ad hoc or random. (Or simply be ad hoc or random.)

So Sunday — or today in your own private prayer or thoughts — consider that “sending prayer” is as core to the faithful life as the best-heard sermon or best-sung praise.

But why Harriman, Tennessee? Why not its larger neighbor, Knoxville? Indeed, why the then-stony soils for evangelism called Tennessee?

I found a clue in a guide for the YPCU 1896 Jersey City, New Jersey meeting. One of the sponsored events was a visit to a new development on Staten Island: Prohibition Park, a wholesome place for non-drinkers to live. Harriman, too, was established in 1898 as prohibition town with a national scope and an eye to honest industry. Universalist grain magnate Ferdinand Schumacher was an investor. So I’d think settlement utopianism was the attraction.

The church is long-gone, but understand that one of its windows survives in the United Methodist church in Winterville, Georgia, near Athens.

On the other hand, the news came within a finger-wagging press release from UUA president Peter Morales, which includes,

We rely on the covenant between our member congregations and the Association to enable us to provide the services and support your congregation needs.

When our congregations, for a variety of reasons, do not fully contribute to the Association, we must work to decrease our expenditures while sustaining a high level of support for congregations and individuals.

And so once again, covenant is trotted out as a tool to scold. (When do you ever hear covenant described as a tool for happiness?)

And scold whom? The very congregations who create the UUA. And so if I’m going to give the UUA’s leadership council the benefit of the doubt, so much more will I give it to the hundreds of congregational decision-makers who have their own tough choices.

Theological language will only go so far. The institution of the UUA provides services for its members, though I’m often left wondering if the services provided are worth the money or trouble. There are other avenues for almost eveything the UUA provides, if you’re willing to look. (Ministerial fellowship might be an exception, but the ministerial “oversupply” blunts the power of the guild.) Emotional appeals will only got you so far, and with tight money and a culture that’s more connected, secular and tolerant, they won’t go very far.

From a churchly point-of-view, this also means that the generation-on-generation loss of homemakers’ time — long undervalued, until it was no longer there — as a steady workforce is particularly stinging. Paid work and other activities have proved deeply rivalous. Treating volunteers as a financial resource (even if you dispute Independent Sector’s numbers) can help frame how a congregation can deploy its resources or decide to put aside struggling church activities, like newsletters, “forum” series, thrift shops, bean suppers, certain kinds of fundraisers or what have you.

After all, this isn’t the first such change. That the current building is the second 25 Beacon Street is well-known. And that nearby 16 Beacon Street, a Unitarian building once used by Universalist General Convention, was long since sold. I’ve written about other Universalist office spaces in Boston before — all gone now. But I regret the loss of their work, not the buildings.

Scouting for other documents this week, I found this 1914 photo at Harvard University Library, of “Boylston St. Looking E. from Arlington St. Birdseye View from Universalist Bldg” not far from the soon-to-be-lost buildings, and presumably quite close to Arlington Street Church. Looking at the photo I noted the Hotel Thorndike, and — not finding anything about the Universalist Building — looked it up, imagining myself a century-ago visitor to Boston. I even found a dining room menu from 1907. But as strange as some of the offerings now seem odd or really quite interesting, that time has past, and we have enough work today to bother with time-consuming historic reconstruction.

Time to greet 24 Farnworth Street, and move on.

Experts say that churches, like other houses of worship, face particular challenges in going green because of unusual architecture and an often slow decision-making culture.
…
One of the biggest barriers to going green may be the way churches are run. With many volunteers involved, meetings can be sporadic and budgeting processes slow, according to Ms. Moorhead. “Churches aren’t running on the same kind of cash-flow model as a business,” she said.

So when I saw the fun and quirky promotional video for the tea-positive, London-based “church for atheists” The Sunday Assembly, what lept out was the goal to help others extend their work “as soon as possible…” (1:08) I almost fell out of my chair. God bless ‘em (or something like that.)

It’s Lent: the time when Christian churches put the focus on slowing down and reflecting. But I wonder when the speed-up-and-finish-the-job season will come; I have to think glacial behavior scares off good, patience-tested people.

The idea of a remote congregation isn’t new. Postal missions and radio churches (breadcast sermons) have a long history, both for Unitarians and Universalists and others.

Metro DC holds testimony to the potiental power of broadcasting worship. All but two Unitarian Universalist congregations in the area are children or grandchildren of All Souls (Unitarian) and the proximate cause of the expansion was the satellite services, driven by A. Powell Davies’s preaching. But the days of white-flight suburbanism and culturally reinforced worship attendance are over and we can’t lean on that model reflectively.

So, I think, the first thing to consider is what kind of participation is desired of, of even possible by, the person watching or listening.

There are (at least) two complementary ways to look at broadcast worship. One, implicitly knows that the broadcast experience is second-best, but simulates the experience of in-real-life worship, with the an opportunity to participate at some important part, say by watching the elevation and fraction of the host at a televised mass, or to pray for one’s own beloved dead at the Kaddish. “These experiences fill an obligation” is another way to look at it.

The other participation mode is to be a consumer of the aesthetics and information, and I’m plainly worried that as a function of our free-church mode of worship this is where the mainline of Unitarian Universalism is. It gets its value from being “the best show in town” or by being a rare conduit for some spiritual understanding. I think I can be forgiven by pointing out how unlikely the “best show” production values are, and that the more likely appeal is for those far from a Unitarian Universalist congregation. (Special spiritual understanding is possible, but let’s put that to one side for the moment.) That necessarily limits the appeal of webcast worship to the already convinced, but spatially inconvenienced.

(I’d better post this or I’ll never do it. But I do have some opinions of “how” based on what I’ve found online.)

The first is bittersweet. New congregation development has ground as low as it ever has. Leave it to this “situational congregation” (I don’t get a sense that it’s intended to last past the deployment of US troops) to dredge up a much reviled mode of organization: the 10-member fellowship. (The branch church is another active model, but for another time.)

The second is more sensitive. The relative boom in Unitarian Universalist military chaplains doesn’t surprise me: military personnel and their families — and I grew up in a military family — need pastoral care; settlements are few; and there are surely affirming challenges and perks that the chaplaincy has that parish or other ministries don’t have. But it seems to me that Unitarian Univeraslists have followed the cultural rising tide with respect to the military, and with hardly a peep of introspection. More fodder to consider if Unitarian Universalism closely follows culture rather than speaking to it.

I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist almost all of that time, and so she has seemed a part of the landscape. A verity. I appreciate her work (mostly, to be honset, through the experience of the others) and worry about the institution after her.