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New Horizons in UU
Ministry...Community Ministry UU Community Ministry Center | ||||||
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New Horizons in UU
Ministry...Community Ministry UU Community Ministry Center | ||||||
Speaker: Rev. Jody Shipley
If there is such a thing as an average UU Minister, the Rev. Kate Seitz Bortner is certainly not it. Rev. Bortner serves as Crime Prevention Coordinator for the City of York (Pennsylvania) Police Department, doing ministry at the crime scene, working on peace-building and more. For her ordination, she was "bagpiped in," with uniformed police as a part of her ceremony.
Bortner was one of about a dozen inspiring community ministers (some ordained, some not) and more than 30 interested others, who turned our for this session run by the Rev. Jody Shipley, founder of the UU Community Ministry Center. One woman works in an interfaith ecumenical groups in Haiti, another does a health outreach street ministry in Chicago, yet another is making a documentary on women affected by the drug conspiracy, and several worked as hospital chaplains.
Shipley began the session by discussing how she came to this work. When she was District Executive for Pacific Central, her office was at Starr King School for the Ministry. Her office had a couple of couches and there was no lounge, so inevitably her space became the common area. Shipley saw waves of people coming in who were interested in non-parish ministry. Some left for the secular world, including one who wanted to do ministry for the homeless in the Bay Area and eventually started what is now a $5,000,000 program. Shipley caught the bug to make community ministry happen and founded the Center.
UU Community Ministry goes back to the nineteenth century. Its founder, the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman, was not only a terrible preacher, he didn't like it. In ministering to the seamen of Boston, he learned that the kind of preaching taught at Harvard didn't serve the working class - a community riddled with alcoholism, poverty and violence. Meanwhile, William Ellery Channing was trying to minister to the poor of Boston. He knew Tuckerman was ready to quit, so asked him to take on this ministry. His ministry grew steadily, with Tuckerman making as many as 3,000 parish calls per year. He was a mentor to poor families, helping the children get an education, finding housing for those in need, and working with widows. Tuckerman's calling has evolved into what is now the Urban Ministry of Boston, and serves as very successful model for this work. Elements of the model include: it has community ministry; it cooperates with parish ministers to empower the work; and lay people participate.
Back to Starr King - graduates went into prisons, hospitals, and so on, but they lost touch with the institution, because it is structured around parish ministry. Then at the 1991 GA, a third track of ministry was added - the three tracks now being parish, educational, and community. However, nobody told congregations. So five years ago, the Council on Community Ministry was formed to help make that connection. Over the next three years, they developed Guidelines for the Affiliation of Community Clergy with UU Congregations (a book available from jshipley@aol.com).
Now the movement is growing, as evidenced by this session. And to quote Rev. Shipley, "There isn't an area in our life that isn't changing because of community ministry."Reported for the Web by Anna Belle Leiserson; photos by Tori Bell
General Assembly 2001 · Program Grid
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