See and hear the reportAlso:
See and hear Cynthia Breen's presentation on Our Whole Lives, followed by John Buehrens' closing remarks.
Thanks, Denny! This is my sixth report to the General Assembly. Two more to go. Lest there be any doubt about it, I hope the camera can see the two buttons I was given by my colleague John Gibbons: "No Third Term!" and "No Man is Good Three Times!" Thank you, Wendell Wilkie.
Wow! This is the largest crowd I have addressed in, oh, several months. Back in February I stood before 3,000 Unitarians, all tribal people, gathered for the 99th annual meeting of the Unitarian Union of Northeast India, in the Khasi Hills. Think of that: their 99th annual meeting. For us this is only number 38, my friends. Which may explain why I found in the Khasis some qualities that I think we might learn from. For one thing, they don't seem ever to think individualistically or tell themselves how enlightened they've become. Instead, throughout life, they know that they are always children of the same mystery, sisters and brothers in one human family. The Khasi language acknowledges the sense of spiritual connection in its very way of saying hello. Khublei, they say in greeting. In their tribal tradition, Blei is the name of the divine spirit in all things. Khublei, they say in thanks. God bless you, God be with you. They say it in parting also. Khublei. At the end of their assembly, all 3000 Khasi Unitarians stood and joined in a pledge, a re-covenanting, which said, among other things: "We pledge to remove selfishness, jealousy, foolishness, misgiving, and enmity among ourselves, so that we may build our holy religion of divine unity in the spirit of compassion, love, and trust. . . We pledge to respect other religious groups . . . We pledge to take care of our environment . . . We pledge to respect the conscience . . . of all . . . to support each other . . . and to uphold justice, righteousness, and truth."
One of these days I want to introduce our Khasi sisters and brothers to some of the people on the other side of India who we help support through our Holdeen India Program. Some of them are also tribal people, like the Holdeen partners that recently won the World Anti-Slavery Society's highest award, for freeing more than 15,000 people from bonded labor, not by paying off their enslavers, but by asserting their human rights. Our groups are devoted to the cause of empowering women among the poorest of the poor. Five years ago, when I first visited India, the group called Navsarjan was training dalit women, oppressed women in villages, as human-rights advocates. Since then, despite threats, assassinations, and deaths, they have been so successful in response to atrocities, in securing clean drinking water, sanitation, schools, and other basic services, that the program has spread from 50 to over 2000 villages. Their founder, Martin Macwan, is now a nominee for the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award. He was born the same year as this Association -- still young, yet full of courage, realism, calm, and passion for justice.
I mention those qualities because they are, more than anything else, what I want for our religious movement here in America. We have so much more power and privilege than Martin or our Khasi sisters and brothers. So much more. Over the past six years I have been reminded of that as I have traveled across North America, visiting now nearly 600 of our 1000 congregations. Here are pictures of just some of the places I've been. See if you recognize your own congregation in any of these images.
Many of these are new or expanded church buildings that I have been honored to help dedicate. Trying, not always successfully, to live out the promise I made when I was elected: "Build it, and he will come!" A promise Denny has had to help me fulfill, but which I've lived up to now on a hundred and seven occasions. Many of which you are now seeing whiz by. All of which has led me to reflect on where we are as a movement today. Think about it: these are the outward and visible signs of an inner and spiritual process we have gone through as a relatively young religious movement.
Oh, I know: our spiritual and covenantal roots are deep. They go back centuries on this continent. But as an Association born out of the consolidation of the Unitarian and Universalist traditions, we go back only to 196l. Many of our buildings, I've found, were first raised in the 50s and 60s, during our last great phase of expansion. But in the 1960s we suffered from a kind of childlike naivete as an Association. We were full of social ideals, we were energetic, but we as an Association we both overspent the allowance provided by the member congregations and ran through a good bit of one inheritance, too. So our expansion stopped. Above all, we were naïve about the way social evil, especially racism and other forms of oppression, are not just out there, in the world, but also in here, infecting the most well-intentioned.
During our adolescence, in the 70s, the whole culture seemed to go through a kind of adolescent crisis. 'The Me Decade' caused us membership losses and, at the Association level, we might have vanished had it not been for the intervention of the Veatch Program, helping to stabilize the UUA, to publish the Pentagon Papers, and to begin to build again.
By the 80s we were growing again, but largely through a baby boomlet of new churches, especially in the Sunbelt, through alarm at the rise of a new religious right, and through our willingness to be prophetic again, on issues like sexism and homophobia. The Women and Religion initiative is now more than 20 years old, and has helped us become the only historic denomination with over half of its ordained leaders now women. Our Office of Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Concerns has been with us that long as well, and helped us become more fully inclusive in that way as well. And now? Well, this "householder phase" is no regression. Quite the contrary. All these buildings I've helped dedicate represent a kind of inward and spiritual maturing process. Many were built for more RE space. They represent concern for future generations.
They represent commitment to passing on our enduring values. They also represent deeper generosity of both wallet and spirit. More willingness to act the part of good citizens in interfaith dialogue and cooperation. Less self-marginalization. More willingness to say, "we need not think alike to love alike." Less demanding that other UUs look like us, read the same books, or have the same personal outlook or spiritual discipline. In short, still fairly young, growing, but maturing.
Lately I've been preaching on a theme. On the text in the Sermon on the Mount that bothered me when I was young. The one where Jesus in the King James Version is depicted as saying, "Therefore be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." But the word for "perfect" more accurately means "mature, complete." Clarence Jordan, the Southern pioneer in inter-racial community, has Jesus say this: "You all, you all should be mature then, taking everyone into account," even as the One who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike is to you. [Cottonpatch V.]
Are we mature yet? I don't think so. In fact, I'm always suspicious of people who think they've arrived at maturity, enlightenment. I asked my own daughters, who this year are 24 and 22, what they think maturity is. The one who just graduated from college replied, "Maturity is when you reach a state of ignorance as profound as that of your parents." What her older sister said was this: "Maturity is when you stop doing all the stuff you have to make excuses for -- and stop making excuses for all the stuff you have to do." I think there is much we have yet to do. Not a little involves our young people.
Consider for a moment a little demography. There are now nearly 275 million people just in the United States. Over 60 million are 14 or younger. About 55 million are between 15 and 30. Some 44 million are now in their 30s, 41 million are in their 40s, nearly 30 million in their 50s, 20 million their 60s, 16 million their 70s, and nearly 9 million in their 80s or beyond. All of us grow older physically, but the challenge of maturation in a religious community is to pay attention to all those younger than ourselves.
That's why we should all join in celebrating the 50th anniversary this year of LREDA, the Liberal Religious Educators Association. We haven't yet shown ourselves mature enough to recognize the full importance of their work to our future as a religious movement. But they keep showing us how to set forth what Jack Mendelsohn once called "a mature faith." Mature about things that other religious movements often evade or deal with only by fear or denial. Making us leaders, for example, in an approach to sexuality education that is courageous, realistic, mature, and concerned above all with issues of justice and equity in human relationships.
Today I am proud to announce the publication of a comprehensive program of sexuality education called Our Whole Lives. Here to tell us more about it is my colleague, the UUA's Director of Religious Education, the Rev. Cynthia Breen.
See and hear Cynthia Breen's presentation, followed by John's closing remarks.
Cynthia mentioned that this effort has taken years of planning, a strong sense of our unique mission as well interfaith cooperation, and an investment of nearly a million dollars. Those too are outward and visible signs of our spiritual maturation. We're entering a phase of generativity. And concern for passing on our values to the young is just one dimension. The sheer amount of planning going on in our midst has increased enormously. Earlier this month we gathered over 80 UUA leaders to map the next five years on our Journey Toward Wholeness, toward becoming a truly anti-racist and multi-cultural denomination. Because we have become mature enough to know it can't happen even in one generation. Cynthia and other religious educators have begun the so-called "Essex Conversations," plotting new directions and methods for spiritual growth and learning for folks of all ages. The UUA Exec staff has recently completed a year-long strategic planning process. We have aimed at making maximum use of existing resources to improve services and programs that promote congregational health, growth, and vitality; that strengthen leadership training for laity, ministers, and religious educators; and that increase the visibility and voice of Unitarian Universalism as a force for good in the world. The UUA Presidents' Council has begun consideration of a new capital campaign to provide strategic investment in major new initiatives in those areas, with a goal of at least $30 million. The will, and many of the lead gifts, are there to do it – perhaps more.
Most importantly, the process called "Fulfilling the Promise," led by a Board-appointed strategic planning team, has called upon all member congregations to consider how congregational planning should involve more than just buildings and staffing, but also issues of mission – whom do you seek to serve, and how? – and of covenant – what hopes and promises and agreements are you willing to bring to the endeavor?
Growing up involves not only asking such questions of ourselves, but answering them -- not merely with our lips, but with our lives. To the extent that our congregations, and this Association, are vital, healthy, and growing -- and to a remarkable extent we are -- it is because we are doing this. The principal work of the UUA staff is to help us, in a multitude of ways, to fulfill our potential as a religious people. They are hard-working, smart, devoted, and too often under-appreciated. I ask you now to join me in thanking the entire staff of the Association.
Madame Moderator, this concludes my report. With your permission, however, I would like to claim the privilege of introducing the next speaker. For the last five years he has carried perhaps the longest title on the UUA staff, "Special Assistant to the President for International and Interfaith Relations." In that capacity he has been in effect not only my representative, but our ambassador at large, from Tokyo to Translyvania, from the Khasi Hills to the Cotswolds, from Prague to the Philippines. He has been my mentor and friend for more than 25 years, from the time that I was chosen at the age of 25 to be his successor as minister of our congregation in Knoxville, TN. His first report on his important work building up our international work carried a title he attributed to me: "Here I am Lord: Send him!" Please join me in watching, for a few minutes, a video devoted to the travels and diplomacy of the Rev. Kenneth Torquil MacLean.
Ken has arranged for himself a semi-retirement which involves continuing to travel, between summers in England and winter ministry in Palm Springs, CA. Ken, please tell the Assembly about our international work.
