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The First 40 Years of the UUA
President's Office, UUA |
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The First 40 Years of the UUA
President's Office, UUA |
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Rev. William Schulz
Warren Ross, author of The Premise and The Promise moderated this panel featuring three of the four past presidents of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
I think Warren has done a very good job of pulling together a great deal of important information concerning events, controversies and accomplishments that have taken place during the past 40 years. Much of the information has been scattered in various reports, studies, and personal recollections. By collecting all of this information and making it available in a very readable book (it also contains a good bibliography that the reader can refer to for more detail.) Warren has provided a real service for our current understanding of our movement as well as for future historians. (MFC experience) I would hope this book would become required reading for all new AND old ministers.
Rev. O. Eugene Pickett
Rev. Picket said:
Putting Bob West's administration in perspective is an important aspect of this book. That period of our history has received far too little attention. Bob was President during one of the most difficult periods in the life of the Association. He had to overcome tremendous obstacles to keep the Association solvent while keeping it operating--and, considering the circumstances, it operated at a surprising degree of effectiveness. He stabilized the finances of the Association and instituted personnel policies and procedures that brought order and fairness to the headquarters operation. He established a good working relationship with the Veatch Program, which helped the Association come through its financial crisis. He initiated court action to release WA money from the Holdeen Trust, and during his administration the Pentagon Papers and the ground- breaking About Your Sexuality curriculum were published. This important part of our history is covered in detail and in a very thoughtful and even-handed manner.
It is high time that the accomplishments of the West administration be recognized and appreciated. Warren points out that a theme running throughout our history from the time of Channing is our ambivalence about institutions. As a religious movement we have traditionally been suspicious of a strong centralized Association. We have been fearful that strength would mean power, rigidity, control. Yet most of us realize that the values and ideals of liberal religion can be effective and influential only if they have a vital and solid institutional base.
I have long been convinced that our Association can be both strong and flexible--an institution of which we can be critical while remaining committed to it. Still, maintaining a strong institution for a movement highly suspicious of institutions has been a challenge throughout our history and may well have contributed to our limited growth. Closely related to this has been the issue of a strong or weak president—whether to adopt the Universalist model, in which the president is the religious and ceremonial leader and the Board appoints a chief executive, or the Unitarian model, in which the president combines these roles and duties. This issue has resurfaced several times in the past 40 years. This issue has always been decided in favor of a strong president model.
Part of this discussion has been the relationship between the role of the Board of Trustees and the Association; and the relationship between the moderator and the president. In the AUA, the Board frequently was hand-picked by the president. With the merger, the Board became a much more democratic institution elected body and more independent. A good many years and many retreats, as I recall, were spent working out the relationship between Board and administration. Some Boards wanted to be more involved with program development and administrative matters. I felt that the Board's duties were primarily to make policy, to review program plans and budgets; to evaluate the effectiveness of the organization and the administration; to represent the interests of their constituents to the association; and to represent the association to their constituents. The administration was primarily responsible for the development implementation of programs and services.
The difference of opinion on this matter did at times develop into adversarial relations between Board and administration. There probably will always be some tension in this relationship, but this is good as long as it can remain constructive and creative. And there has been a similar disagreement about the relationship between the moderator and the president. As Warren points out, the first moderator, Marshall Deamock, resigned after three years. He wanted to be much more involved in the administration and have an office at "25" [Beacon Street].
After his resignation, Joe Fisher was elected as moderator. He served as chair of the Board; moderated General Assembly meetings; was an advisor to the president; and during some very difficult years, proved to be a very effective mediator of various dissident groups within the Association. But it was always clear that he was primarily concerned with the Board and policy-making and that the administration—the president—was primarily involved with program development and service.
Following Joe Fisher, Sandy Caron was the moderator during my administration. Sandy fitted more into the Marshall Deamock mode, who felt that she wanted to have more involvement in administrative matters and in program development. While I don't think this affected the overall leadership of the association, the personal relationship between the two of us deteriorated, and that was a very unfortunate part of my administration as far as I was concerned. With Natalie Gilbronson and Bill [Schulz], there developed a more collegial relationship between the two, again, with Natalie being primarily with the Board and policy-making -- and in her case, being involved with international relationships with our groups abroad.
Denny [Davidoff] and John's [Buehrens] relationship as you have seen and heard, worked out as what they call a shared leadership model. The role of president and moderator are complex and somewhat ambiguous and so the process of defining and redefining will probably continue from administration to administration.
Another interesting aspect of this forty year history that I found in reading Warren's book was about the prominent and influential persons, especially in the Boston area that were active in the Unitarian or Universalist movement and we take considerable pride in--so called famous Unitarians or famous Universalists. But this prominence has never translated into financial support for the Association. Both movements, financially speaking, were hand to mouth operations. In 1979, our endowment was only $9 million. In 1985, the end of my term, we had $40 million dollars. 20 million of that came from the Veatch Fund for our general operating purposes and $9 million for theological education. Some came from a modest capital fund drive that we conducted during those years. But neither the Universalist Church of American or the American Unitarian Association were very wealthy operations from the beginning. So I have been impressed by the giving increase; our endowments have grown during Bill and John's administration.
He outlines many of the significant events and controversies of these past forty years. The Black Empowerment Movement; the Women's Movement; the Principles and Purposes; the theological trends. I know he is going to get into some trouble in trying to deal with these movements, because they were so controversial. But he has provided an outline. He has also provided some good resource material that we can go into further depth on any one of these issues. I think it is a wonderful service that he has provided by pulling all of this material together and has given us a very readable history of the past forty years. So I hope that you will get a copy before you leave and read it and share it with your minister and it would be a good book for any new member joining a congregation.
Rev. Schulz spoke about the role of politics in the development of religious leadership. "Is it more religious to sit in a pub and think of the church or to sit in the church and think of a pub?," he asked. Rev. Schulz spoke about why healthy and skillful politicians are important even in a religious context.Warren Ross is a courageous man. He agreed to write a history of contemporary times despite the fact that many of the principals were still around to tell him everything he got wrong. Someone once said that "the further away you are from any period, the better you can write about it because you aren't subject to interruption by people who were there."Rev. John Buehrens
As far as I can tell, however, Warren has written a remarkably accurate version of the story. I found only two outright errors in the sections pertaining to me—not that I immediately scanned the book for references to "William Schulz," you understand—and those are that Warren has me graduating from Antioch College rather than Oberlin and has the fall of Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu occuring in 1987 rather than 1989. Antioch and Oberlin are in the same state and neither has won a football game in close to a decade but, inasmuch as I am a candidate for the Oberlin Board of Trustees at the moment, I don't want anyone to think I didn't graduate from there. But these are minor matters and the author is to be congratulated heartily on his prodigious research. I am particularly grateful to him for recognizing that, though the struggle for social justice was always a hallmark of the leadership I tried to provide, I also did my best to take seriously the elements of a renewed sense of spirituality that emerged among us in the 1980s.
But Warren is not just a courageous man; he also proves himself in the book to be a gentleman. He has managed to capture the first forty years of the Association while not badly skewering anyone along the way. This is a major feat, both because the UUA has boasted its fair share of jerks (and, believe me, I am well aware that there are those who would put me at the top of the list) and because it is hard to write a history that is both evenhanded and interesting. But Warren has had the good sense to make sure that, on those rare occasions when he does cast a mildly critical eye at someone, he will bring that person no pain because his targets are inevitably long and comfortably dead. I appreciate Warren's having supplied me with still one more reason to be glad I have not yet died.
Warren has done us an immense service. It has frequently been observed that "history repeats itself and historians repeat each other" and my guess is that future historians will be repeating Warren Ross for decades to come.
But John has asked us not just to comment on Warren's book but to speak to a theme in the Association's history and I want therefore to talk a bit about the role of politics in the development of religious leadership.
One of the things that interests me about The Premise and the Promise is that, for all the time, money, energy and drama that have gone into our contested elections for UUA President over the years, those elections are given relatively short shrift in the book. I don't doubt that this is a wise editorial judgment but I trust it doesn't reflect a conviction that politics are unimportant or, worse yet, somehow unseemly. I myself am more than happy to speak a word of praise for both politics and politicians, be they of the public variety or the denominational. And today is perhaps not an inappropriate day on which to do that.
When, as a sixteen-year-old, I was first contemplating a life in the ministry, I thought the church as pure an institution as any I could imagine. I used to sit alone in the darkness of a church sanctuary and think to myself that here at last I had found an institution that was unsullied by pettiness, relentless in its prophecy, protective of the weak and untainted by the whiff of politics. It took about five years to spoil my naivete but I quickly came to realize that the answer to the question, "Is it more religious to sit in a pub and think of the church or to sit in a church and think of the pub?"—the answer is not self-evident. The church is, after all, a human institution.
But if that is so, why do we Unitarian Universalists so frequently disdain church politics? Why do we consistently complain about the length and cost of contests for UUA office? Why are we uncomfortable with the notion that how we make our institutional decisions has as much to do with power as it does with merit?
Because, I suspect, we are uncomfortable with how politics is often practiced in our country and hence regret its insidious intrusion into our church. We are therefore often in denial about the extent to which the institutional lives of our Association and its congregations are directed by political considerations.
But I want to argue that politics is one of the best things about this country and this denomination. Politics refers after all to the ways in which we order our lives and we really have only two fundamental choices about how to do that: we can either follow the lead of the movie mogul Sam Goldwyn who once said, "If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you" and opt for dictators, in the case of our nation, or popes and bishops in the case of our church. Or we can choose the messiness of politics and figure out how to govern ourselves. It's true that democracy results in a lot of deals and trade-offs and compromises and that righteous people often get fed up with it. But it helps to remember that fascists also have no use for politics or compromise because they are too busy settling disputes by means of death and torture.
Now I know of course that some politicians are phonies and others are crooks. I'm not defending the crooks by any means—there are limits even to my own infatuation—but I have come to admire the blarney. In the hands of a champion, inauthenticity is a work of art. Ted Kennedy did me the honor few weeks ago of hosting a party for my new book from Beacon Press and in his introduction of me he declared with great fanfare, "I have read every one of Bill's books and each one impresses me more." Now the problem is that I have only written two other books, both long before I came to know the Senator, and neither of them has ever so much as crossed his line of vision. So, after his remarks, I thought I'd kid him a bit. "By the way, Ted," I said, "which of my other books did you like best?" "Oh," he said, without skipping a beat, "That one with the clever title." It reminded me of how creative Dana Greeley always was whenever he met someone whose name he could not remember, which happened, I suspect, literally hundreds of times a day. With his left hand on your shoulder and his right hand in your palm, Dana would cry out, "Great to see you. You're, uh… You're uh…" at which point you would utter your name, "Bill Schulz," to which Dana would roar back, "Of course you are! Don't be silly."
So I believe in politics and I admire good politicians, whether they be public ones or denominational, because healthy politics and skillful politicians are what keep us free, united and stable. Healthy politics provides a way for everybody to have a say in decision-making and skillful politicians make everybody feel special and invested in the future of the institution.
I think our contests for UUA President have almost always been good for the Association, painful as they sometimes seem in the heat of the moment. They expose thousands of people who would not otherwise give it a thought to the notion that we are all part of a grander vision, a greater movement, a wider faith than that contained in our own congregations alone. They invest hundreds of people in the success of our leaders and hence make for a more dynamic and coherent organization. They excite people about the future and thereby help with our fundraising. And they give our candidates the practice they need in persuasion to make effective leaders once they are in office. I never forgot for one moment when I was President that I had not been selected by a small group but elected by a large constituency and you better believe that made a difference in how I did my job. This does not mean of course that our election process cannot be reformed or refined and Bill Sinkford is correct when he says that choosing a President ought to be about religious discernment but in our tradition there is really only one group of people who have the authority to do that discerning and that is all of us, the corpus, the whole body of Unitarian Universalists, not a select group of us and that means that if we care about democratic discernment, we are stuck with competitive elections. The only alternative to power displayed is power hidden.
Well, let me conclude with a few more personal remarks. The fact is that I am a far better Executive Director of Amnesty International than I was President of the UUA—more patient, more focused, more generous of heart. One of my few regrets is that I could not be who I am today when I served the Association I so love. The fact is also, however, that being Executive Director of Amnesty International, demanding as it is, is an easier job than being President of the UUA—the stakes may be higher at Amnesty but the critics are far less personal. Which is why I want to express my respect and appreciation for all those who have served as UUA President over the years. We certainly didn't always agree with one another—Warren notes Bob West's unhappiness with Dana and Dana was surely hurt by Bob; Warren makes no bones about the fact that John and I disagreed about how to serve international liberal religion—but those differences do not obscure a fundamental sympathy.
Which leads me finally to express my profound affection for all those with whom I served at the Association, with special recognition to Gene Pickett (my dear friend and mentor who, by pretending not to be a politician, was the most skilled politician of all six of us who have served as UUA President), Kay Montgomery (who picked the nettles out of me more times than either of us cares to admit and then cleverly reimplanted a few of her own) and, most especially, the Moderator during my years as President, Natalie Gulbrandsen (who has never received the respect and recognition she deserves but who has served the Association with more energy and devotion than all the rest of us combined.)
Thank you, Warren Ross, for making it all live again and thank you, UUA, for giving me a channel for my passion and forgiveness for my foibles.
"When I think of the four decades I think of it in terms of maturation," said Rev. Buehrens. He started with the sixties as a period of "idealism and innocence," moving through the year 2000. He asked, "What should we do now that we are at our strongest point?"
Rev. Buehrens asked us to move towards a process of recruiting ministers to run instead of people running by petition. The dynamics of a congregation make it difficult for the most articulate to take themselves away. We need leaders who can bring together the spirit and manage the affairs.
An audio version of this session will be available in the coming weeks.Reported for the Web by Jessie Washington
General Assembly 2001 · Program Grid
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