By the time you read this, I will be making my final plans to attend General Assembly, which this year will be held in Cleveland. It promises to be a long, grueling affair. This mega-meeting includes the deliberative business meetings of the Unitarian Universalist Association, but I believe more people attend for the ceremony and the workshops. I have two speaking roles this year: I will be the lead minister in the administration of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship-sponsored Communion Service, and (because I am its vice-president) I will speak on a panel sponsored by the Magi Network. Its mission is helping create new Christian churches within the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Many members know personally how awkward being a Christian in a Unitarian Universalist congregation can be, even if the situation has improved, and it has improved more in the last few years than I thought possible. Even so, the prospect of Christian churches threaten and frighten some people, particularly since many do not know that a church like ours exists. I know people who do know that Christian churches within the Unitarian Universalist Association exist who still doubt that they (we?) genuinely belong, and would certainly not want new ones to gather. These feelings sharpen at General Assembly, when the continuous programming and churchly seriousness become confused with daily living, and the boundaries of nerve and propriety unravel.

If I were a betting man, I would wager that the chief issue associated with these feelings is one of exclusion and inclusion. Christianity has been painted as more narrow than Unitarian Universalism (which is another matter) and so a Unitarian Universalist Christian church would be presumed to be more exclusive than a Unitarian Universalist church without any single theological norm. Would a non-Christian be welcome at such a new Christian Unitarian Universalist church? I began to think that some members and inquirers at UNMC might ask the same thing here, and begin to have the same concerns.

First, I want to publicly affirm that there are non-Christians within the church. From a purely statistical standpoint, there must be some members who came for something other than a place "to be Christian" with other people. Some people make music a religious discipline and there will always be a place for them here. Perhaps it is the uplift of the building, or a general sense of neighborliness. Since the bond of the church (in the preamble of the church bylaws) is not itself a test of Christian faith, and since our declaration of faith is not a test of membership (a deliberate act, I am sure) it is likely that some people came to this Christian church as non-Christians, and they (we?) need not hide.

This is because the churches of the "New English" experience have a dual nature; the same is true in the Episcopal church in a vestigial way. Our tradition understands "the congregation" as having the element of "the parish" and "the church." Though we tend to use the terms interchangeably, they have specific technical meanings that reach back to the earliest English settlements in New England. In a nutshell, the parish is the company of people linked to an area who have religious needs. It is the spiritual counterpart of a political precinct. Christian or not (and the early New Englanders had very strict understandings of who was a Christian) there was a place for all in the parish. A town's parishioners, for instance, could rightly expect religious education and moral guidance, and there was a teacher for those purpose. The church was a spiritual entity, made up of Christians. Their proper "demands" are the Lord's Supper, Baptism, pastoral care, and guidance in the faith, and there was a pastor for those purposes. Each deserved access to worship, and its not hard to see that there is quite a bit of overlap between the parish and the church. Indeed, the proper title of the minister of the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, the oldest Protestant church gathered in North America, is "pastor and teacher." Both aspects are honored. Power struggles emerged between the larger and more liberal parishioners and the more conservative churches, leading to the "Unitarian departure" (of the parishes) and letting other denominations emerge, including the Universalists. But the dual nature survived in a muted form. Universalist "societies" were essentially artificial parishes, dedicated not to Christian faith but the care of the institution, and very often "the promotion of pure religion" or the like. In our own church, the church-parish distinction was permanetly blurred when the First Universalist Church of Washington and the Murray Universalist Society (which met in the Church of Our Father, to futher confuse matters) was formally consolidated as the Universalist National Memorial Church, in a building of the same name.

This polity is full of compromise, and thank God for it. It does not fall into the rigid, unworldly polity of the "free churches." Niether does it so easily blend into the secular landscape as to have no moral weight. With the blend comes toleration, and this is the cornerstone of the liberal church. We can rightly and proudly forge the middle path, as a welcome and a refuge, for the differing souls that dwell in our Metropolis.