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Fulfilling the Promise Final
Report Fulfilling the Promise Committee |
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Fulfilling the Promise Final
Report Fulfilling the Promise Committee |
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Four years ago, in 1996, the UUA Board appointed a committee to create and recommend to the Board a process involving all member congregations in planning the future of the Association. The Fulfilling the Promise Committee, as it came to be known, has just completed its fourth and final year, and this was their final report to the Association.
Introduction
Following the Mountain Quartet, the Rev. Clark Olsen introduced the report. Olsen explained that the original committee included five at-large UUs, two members of the UUA Board of Trustees, the UUA President, Moderator and Financial Advisor. Over time the committee expanded to include a representative from the UUMA and a representative from YRUU.
At the first meeting they clarified their charge and named the Committee "Fulfilling the Promise" to reflect its vision for the association. Its charge was to call the member congregations of the UUA into a participatory process of ongoing renewal. The goal was eventually to make the needs and aspirations explicit, with a covenant of shared goals, resource commitments and supportive structures.
Mission and Fundamental Questions
The next step was to call congregations to articulate a common mission for the association. UUs needed to reflect on such fundamental questions as: who am I? why am I here? And how will I relate to the larger world? They wanted to extend their reach to individual UUs and to congregations. To these ends, they decided to send a survey to all UUs and to hold meetings in a variety of locations.
Survey
Using the UU World, the survey was sent to every UU household. Some 8,000 responded from virtually every congregation, giving the committee important insights about UUism. While they don't claim it was a scientific sample, the resulting report to the Rochester GA gave a strong sense that the results resonated with feelings of a much larger UU constituency.
The results showed:Based on the survey, the Committee felt there is both remarkable coherence and energy available in UU communities. Individuals are searching for more significant meaning and to change the world. We want a deeper connection to the larger community. And they found a commitment and profound gratitude in many UUs for our heritage and our promise.
- There's a remarkable coherence in our people. The weight of answers to any given question was remarkably similar across many demographic categories. This coherence seemed far stronger than previous assumptions about our diversity and factionalism might suggest. There was something that held us together.
- Theologically we are indeed pluralistic. In fact, everyone in the association is a minority.
- We want our congregations more involved in social justice.
- We want Unitarian Universalism to be better known in the world.
- We have a deep longing for congregational life to be about more than individuals strengthening themselves as individuals.
Congregational Missions and Covenants
The Rev. Bill Sinkford, the next speaker, said that having started questioning individuals, they knew that as a committee they needed to probe more deeply by involving individual congregations. Specifically, congregations would need to examine and understand their missions and covenants.
Sinkford defined "vision" as the image of where we want to be, while "mission" is what we are called to do to move towards our vision and "covenant" is a series of promise about how we will do this.
Between 250 and 300 congregations answered this specific call in a variety of ways. Some worked intentionally, and some did it as part of another activity such as calling a minister, a capital campaign or safe congregations work.
Lateral Relationships
Sinkford said that they wanted to go beyond typical congregational borders, so they asked about relations among and between congregations – looking for what they termed "lateral relationships." And they found congregations were beginning to relate to each other in new ways. They found many examples, such as in nearby Cincinnati, where on a recent weekend all UU congregations, along with others, worshipped together and participated in a racial reconciliation.
They began to believe that we have understood congregational polity in too limited a way. It has meant isolation for too long. Instead we need to foster relationship between and among ourselves. This will be the cutting edge for us for years to come.
How the Committee Worked Together
Denny Davidoff, the next speaker, asked the assembly how many had taken a rope course? With not many raising their hands, she went to explain that a ropes course is "a series of outdoor, carefully controlled physical exercises that challenge fear and build trust because a person has to rely on the help of others to, for example, walk a high wire from the branches of one tall tree to another tall tree guided by the ropes in the hands of colleagues way down below attached to her harness."
It was Clark Olsen who suggested an experience with a ropes course. He said the committee would work better together, trust each other more, loosen up, break out of the box and so on, if they could carry out a ropes course instead of just talking around a table. So at the second meeting, that is exactly what they did. Davidoff claims she has always been a klutz and is still a klutz, but she now loves and trusts the Fulfilling the Promise Committee, plus she trusts the work they have done.
This past October the committee met in the Seattle area, after testing their Congregational Assessment Tool. This was where they wrote the first draft of Our Common Call. They "talked and wrote and talked and wrote and talked and wrote." The work itself was so inspiring that Davidoff eventually wanted everyone in the UUA to experience the conversation. It was her hope they could videotape their next meeting.
To quote Davidoff, "People who have done a ropes course together don't give up easily." And so they found the money for a film crew, plus a volunteer producer (Marika Olsen), and project hosts at The Mountain. Then, as it happened, Davidoff herself couldn't attend the meeting due to her husband's illness. But the committee took her "precious idea and nurtured and loved it into being and [she] knew [she] could trust them to do that."
Davidoff urged the assembly in watching this video to "look and listen with care." She was reminded of a poem by William Butler Yeats:Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,Among Ourselves: Fulfilling the Promise Committee in Conversation
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Recommendations for Congregations, Districts and the UUA Board
The next speaker, Kay Aler-Maida (Convener) said she hoped the video gave some indication of how much the committee loved doing this work. She said it was a gift to be part of this group, and thanked the individuals and congregations who participated in Fulfilling the Promise. She also thanked Gladys Townsend, whose generous bequest helped in part to fund the work.
She said it has been a rich journey of both discovery and rediscovery. Now that they have reached the conclusion of this phase, the committee is bringing three recommendations:Our Common Call
- For Congregations: "Individual congregations should review their mission and covenant statement approximately every 5 years, and with this review they should undertake a process of self-assessment." Aler-Maida said that the strength of the association depends on the strength of the congregations. She explained that such review processes can occur both naturally and intentionally. She also explained that this work "should not be undertaken in isolation but done in relationship with another congregation or congregations, whether that congregation is Unitarian Universalist or another denomination." She said that tools to do this work can be found on the UUA's website (see http://www.uua.org/promise/main.html) and field executives can help.
- For Districts: "Districts support congregational self-assessment and the development of lateral relationships among congregations with the help of regional staff teams." With this work each congregation gains strength and vitality and a sense of something larger.
- For the UUA Board. "The UUA Board appoint a strategic planning committee whose function is to scan the Association's environment identifying key elements needed to fulfill our common call." The Committee has worked to position the association for more traditional types of strategic planning. They have learned that planning and transformation goes on in a multi-layered way. Alder-Maida shared "a secret" with the assembly: "We can't do top-down planning in this group." The role of the future strategic planning committee "would not be to create specific plans for the Association but to keep a finger on the pulse of the Association – to actively survey the entire Association's environment (board, staff, committees, districts, associate and affiliate organizations) and identify for the Board initiatives and gaps as the Association seeks to answer our Common Call.
Carolyn Owen-Towle led the committee in reading aloud Our Common Call:
We are grateful for a 400-year-old, living tradition, which enriches and ennobles our faith. Valuing this past, learning from its triumphs and shortcomings, and confident of a dawning future, we unite to deepen our understanding and expand our vision of the good life as a people and as congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association. We come together to bear witness to a spirituality of wholeness and mutuality.
We have inherited a tradition of religious freedom that continues to affirm a radical respect for dignity and moral agency of each person. Our forebears challenged a world of dogma, superstition, and widespread ignorance with this faith which remains rooted in freedom of inquiry and expression, tolerance for the multidimensional character of truth, and the fullest exercise of reason in religious life. Our vision has inspired people and changed social customs more than we may know. Yet at this moment in history we must go further than our forebears imagined. Out of a sense of religious calling common among us, we offer the world our declaration of interdependence and challenge ourselves to deepen our religious practice.An Outside Perspective
- We affirm the value of religious community.
- We affirm the inherent value of persons within community.
- We link our hearts and minds for mutual edification and the continuing discernment of life's truths.
- We pledge to support each other in humility and with forgiveness, to deepen our religious practice.
- We come together so that we may strive to heal brokenness in ourselves, among people within and beyond our congregations, and in the larger environment of our planet.
- We will offer love to the loveless, hope to the forlorn, and speak truth to power.
- We will move beyond tolerance into constructive engagement with others from all walks of life and forms of faith expression.
- We will seek justice for all, work to transform institutions that oppress and dehumanize, and commit ourselves to be makers of peace.
- With others we will seek a spiritual foundation to support a pluralistic, democratic, and sustainable community on this each, our home.
- As Unitarian Universalist, we join hand and hearts to answer this call, that we may fulfill our promise.
Following another beautiful song from the Mountain Quartet, the Rev. John Buehrens took the podium to introduce the next speaker. He described our association as a community acknowledging our common call in a multiplicity of forms, and saying our land may be the most religiously diverse in the world. He said that no one knows more about this growing religious pluralism than a scholar who is attending GA, Diana Eck. She is a professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of the recently released book, A New Religious America : How a Christian Country Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation.
Dr. Eck began her remarks by saying it was a privilege to be here, and particularly moving to see a strategic plan evolve into a calling. She described GA as a religious assembly taking up some of the most important issues of our times, a family gathering of a sort, a "religious fair" or "America's block party."
She said the important thing is that religious diversity is on our UU agenda. She believes we have articulated and worked to achieve diversity in a coherent way. She termed us a "laboratory and proving ground," working on how to unite around issues that typically cause fracture. This kind of calling and covenant has taken a lot of energy, but alas, she said, "your work is just beginning."
Forty years ago religious America was a very different place. The 1965 New Immigration Act has transformed not just the general face of America, but also its religious face. She gave example after example of these changes, citing in particular our host city of Cleveland with its twelve Islamic mosques, four or more Buddhist temples, two Hindu temples, a Sikh temple and a Jain temple.
This is a new religious America, and it places Unitarian Universalism "right on the money" according to Eck. We have many new neighbors in the U.S., and they need to be reached out to with a neighborly hand. She said the work is not just on diversity within, but also outside ourselves. It's a new challenge for us to take our neighborhood seriously and a new challenge religiously. There is a sense of spiritual and social common purpose. We also have new allies in social and political concerns.
According to Eck, we UUs have learned how to be bridge builders, and in the U.S. we need bridge building. The covenants UUs have articulated contribute to the common covenants of communities. We are a resource for the United States, and she hopes we will bring our experience into the civic square.
Conclusion
The Rev. Kenneth Hurto concluded the committee's report with the following words: "From time to time throughout our history, Universalists and Unitarians, and Unitarian Universalist have sought to give voice to shared convictions. Ever mindful not to forge a creedal orthodoxy, these expressions have been variously called 'affirmations, 'testaments', sometimes 'covenants', or 'things common believed among us.' The Fulfilling the Promise team has listened carefully to your voices these past four years. From your speaking, we have attempted to discern an expression that captures for this moment an understanding of commitments commonly held. We have named it: The Common Call of Our Faith As We Enter the 21st Century."
This very informative and beautifully structured session ended with the Mountain Quartet singing accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation of delightful candid photos of this very GA.Reported for the Web by Anna Belle Leiserson
General Assembly 2001 · Program Grid
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