Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association Ministry Days

UUMA 25 year presentation

by The Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons

Prepared for UUA.org by: Jone Johnson Lewis, Reporter/Editor

To be assigned by one's peers to assess a quarter century in ministry is to be placed in something of a quandary. Our profession is an ancient art; if we claim that its nature has changed significantly in the 25 years of our practice, we risk abjuring the timelessness of our living tradition; that connection to the prophets of antiquity, the wise women of old, the heroes of faith in every age, to whose lives and work we look for our own inspiration, identity, and credibility. On the other hand, to suggest that nothing significant has changed as the decades have passed calls into question the relevance of our shared vocation; if these fraught years have not confronted us with the new occasions that teach new duties, what in the world – or out of it – might there be that would?

I am indebted to those of my anniversary cohort who responded to my request to share their own thoughts on the lessons and the meaning of 25 years at this endeavor; they have reminded me of both the continuities of our work and the unforeseens that we have encountered in the course of this particular chapter of history. Perhaps the way of wisdom, as so often, is to take a plural perspective, and examine both what has changed, and what has remained the same, about this vineyard in which we have toiled together since 1980.

The most immediately visible change in the ministry of the past 25 years is the one that I represent; women now make up a percentage of our active ministry and ministry in training much more nearly proportional to our numbers in the general population. When I began my career, I was not exactly a pioneer – that generation of women had done the path-breaking work, and I feel profoundly the debt that the women of my era continue to owe to those elder sisters – but I was still something of a novelty, and a risk. Today it is a given that religious leadership in our movement is exercised by both genders, and increasingly without regard to gender.

In this respect, our liberal churches have perhaps ridden the advancing crest of the wave, but it seems to me that they have embraced more than they have challenged the widespread redefinition of ministry that has occurred across mainline denominations in order to accommodate the influx of women. I would contend that rather than granting into the hands of female ministers the moral authority traditionally associated with the social role of male clergy, our culture has instead re-envisioned what it means to be a minister, emphasizing the non-threatening, pastoral tasks of care-giving and relationship maintenance, thus transforming the role into more appropriate "women's work." Without conscious intention, and aided and abetted by contemporary feminism's early distrust of institutional power in all forms, we have participated in the diminishment of the pulpit's public influence, just at the moment when women have come to occupy it in significant and growing percentages. The outcome of these transitions remains unclear to me; it may be yet another 25 years before we begin to know which gains and which losses will prove enduring.

Along with this major seismic shift have come some other, not incidental, reconsiderations of the place of sexuality in defining the minister's role. It has been with great personal and vicarious satisfaction that our generation has seen openly gay and lesbian ministers at last take their rightful place among us as honored colleagues, helping our movement to grow into a fuller witness for the equal dignity and civil rights of all people. Much more painful has been the forging of a new consensus and practice with regard to the boundaries of appropriate sexual behavior for ministers. Those of us who have been around for 25 years can remember the curious combination of bravado and silence that once attended indiscretions on the part of colleagues among their congregations; today we have more confidence in naming such behavior a misuse of power, and calling one another to account. We have also come, I think, to understand more profoundly the connection between spiritual emptiness and sexual impulsiveness; in the end it is not moral rigidity that is our best protection from this failure, but rather a lively and fulfilling practice of the presence of the holy throughout our days.

Another major recognition that has shaped the ministry of this generation has been that children are in themselves religious beings, whose spiritual nurture is a specific vocation. With this realization has also grown the perspective that adults, too – all of us, until we die – are works in progress, so that religious education is a life-long endeavor, and attending to it is a full-scale ministry with its own identity and integrity. We continue to wrestle with the proposition that our commitment to congregational polity does not mean that ministry ends at the church building's threshold. How do we define, honor, integrate, and hold accountable the ministries of those who directly serve a larger community on behalf of our values, and in the name of our congregations and our tradition? These widenings of the understanding of ministry have not been without struggle and even pain, and they continue to challenge us, yet they have also brought us great gifts, and forced us to confront the central questions of professional identity and vocational purpose in profound and urgent ways.

There has also been a significant transition in the most basic tools that we use to perform the work of ministry. I now have twenty five three ring binders; the early ones still contain the handwritten manuscript sermons, full of crossed out paragraphs and arrows indicating later insertions, from which I preached in those days. I'm still just distrustful enough of technology to maintain the sequence of hard copies, but of course these days they are spell-checked printouts of text that accommodated the vagaries of my creative process so intuitively that I no longer even notice it. The mechanics of reproducing either printed copies or tape recordings for those who want them, as well as posting the text of sermons, newsletters, and other church miscellany on the public website, are all but effortless and routine. It seems to me quite probable that the logic of the computer's programming has become a component in the structure of our thinking, in the same way that language and other artifacts of the common culture shape the grids through which we know the world. Whether the impact of these technologies is baleful, benign, or indifferent is not yet clear to me, but it sure is a change from the way I started out. If I were beginning in ministry today, I would be much more intentional about the ways in which I set up my electronic information storage systems; those of us who have lived through this transition have of necessity improvised, while being subjected to the developmental growing pains and early unpredictabilities of a nascent technology.

In the same way, the advent of e-mail has given us both unprecedented convenience, as well as a whole new source of pastoral headaches, and yet another arena in which to forever fall short of other peoples' expectations of us. Time was when etiquette demanded that you cease returning phone calls at some hour of the evening when you might be thought to risk disturbing your interlocutor – alas, no such merciful convention attaches to answering one's e-mail!

Of course, it would be facetious to enumerate the historical and cultural trends that have formed the ministries of this generation without reflecting upon the impact of the events of 9/11/2001. No doubt those stunning attacks, and their personal and political aftermath, continue to affect us all in ways we scarcely recognize, but for myself they have left two significant conscious legacies. One is an intense gratitude for the interfaith community among whose leadership I am privileged to work in the city of Minneapolis . Our already existing relationships enabled us as religious leaders to come together that day and later across denominational lines, with Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and even Muslim clergy, to respond to our city's need for public expression of anguish, and the assurance of mutual support. Never has the significance of the civic role of the collective faith community been so urgently apparent to all of us in that group.

The second enduring impression since that irretrievable day for me is that we live in a far more anxious and dangerous world than the one in which I entered the ministry. I grew up in this Unitarian Universalist tradition, bred into the confident expectation of the ultimate triumph of the enlightenment. That there were both superstition and arrogance to be overcome, I never doubted, but neither did I ever seriously contemplate a universe whose arc did not bend toward liberation, reason, justice, democracy, and an advancing tide of education, freedom and human well-being. As I understood it, part of my task as a minister was to hasten the coming of that day, and to minimize the tragedy and waste of human suffering in the meantime – but the happy end, however long delayed, was thought to be within sight. Lately, I'm not so sure any more. I'm still enough of a product of my upbringing to believe that ignorance and suffering are bad, and that individual freedom and systemic well-being are good, but I'm no longer confident that they are inevitable. Indeed, my work may not be so much to herald the advance of the triumph of reason and good will, as it is a rear-guard action to delay as long as possible the rising flood of renewed violence, superstition, oppression, and ruthless power. It's a far less blithe assignment, I assure you.

What is it, in this cultural landscape of shifting sands, that has held constant? My colleagues are clear that the work of ministry continues to be, as it has ever been, both endlessly demanding, and profoundly rewarding. It is on the one hand a crushing burden of other people's projections and unreasonable expectations, of institutional dynamics not within our control; a path at times lonely and confused, strewn with disappointed hopes and disillusioned ideals, with all too little authority to accomplish what is asked of us, and but scant appreciation even when we do achieve the impossible. These vocational dark nights of the soul are a routine occupational hazard of ministry, and I suppose they always have been. The longing to do more than we actually can, the frustration with our own and others' finitude, the hunger to be loved and esteemed all the time, are nothing new, and most of us experience them at one point or another. And yet, we consistently affirm that the rewards and satisfactions of ministry are greater than we had imagined; we speak of this vocation with passion, commitment, and rejoicing. The privilege of standing with people at the deepest and most precious moments of their humanity; the high purpose of lifting up our witness against the evils of the day, and of serving the nobler aspirations of human endeavor; the sweet disciplines of the life of the mind and spirit; the dearness of those colleagues from who we receive, with whom we share, and to whom we entrust this living tradition; the joyful high play of common worship; the day by day building of covenant communities and effective institutions that literally save lives; these are the gifts that never grow old, and we learn to cherish them more and more as the years hurry by.

One does not arrive at 25 years in the ministry without extraordinary cause for gratitude; to those parishioners who have entrusted their own spiritual care and the well-being of their churches into our hands; to the community of colleagues who have encouraged, instructed, consoled, challenged, and kept faith with us; and to that creative energy which is the source of the strength and wisdom we did not know we had, as well as the endless curiosity and hunger for meaning and love that summons us forever onward. In the words of Dag Hammerskjold, "For all that has been, thanks. To all that shall be, yes."

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