Evangelize? Here? Now?
In Front of People?

  by Don Skinner, editor, InterConnections, and cochair of the membership committee at Shawnee Mission UU Church, Overland Park, Kans.

  My first reaction to the proposal that the UUA would conduct a media campaign in the Kansas City metro area a year ago was one of mild anxiety edging over into panic. What? You’re asking us to go public with our religion? Actually share it with other people by inviting them to church? But what if they come?
It’s not that we weren’t welcoming. We were. And it’s not that we didn’t want new members. We did. We were situated in the middle of a potential pool of thousands of UUs. They just didn’t know it yet. And that was the problem. The media campaign was going to tell them, with radio and TV spots, billboards, and a newspaper insert.

  And that would, of course, be a good thing. And so it was up to us to get ready for them. To do that we had to stretch a bit. Were we ready for visitors? What would they think of us? What would we say to them?

  And so we got started. We began with a paint brush. And a toilet brush. If we were going to have more visitors we needed to be presentable. We painted the foyer, cleaned the bathrooms, and chased down the cobwebs in the religious education rooms. We reviewed and practiced our welcoming procedures, added greeters, and encouraged our members to speak to visitors. We created new informational packets for first-time visitors. We trained phone answerers. We held a work day and trimmed the hedges. Some of us practiced our elevator statements. We made sure every Sunday service was worthy of visitors.

  And then we waited. First came the billboards. After so many years of not necessarily hiding our light, but not holding it very high either, now we were towering above the city. The billboards were stunning! And what a thrill it was when the first radio ads aired.

  The radio and TV ads and the billboards did indeed bring in visitors. Our first-time visitor numbers went up by more than 25 percent and remained up through the campaign. People told us stories about how they’d been looking for a religion like ours for years, but had pretty much given up. And some of them had heard about Unitarian Universalism before, and the ads inspired them to finally visit.

  I had expected some community opposition to our campaign. We were, after all, going public in our support of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people and sharing a nonliteral perspective about the Bible and a different way of thinking about Jesus. I imagined hateful phone calls. Maybe even Sunday morning pickets. Vandalism even crossed my mind. But we got almost nothing. We got two anonymous antigay phone messages (and pretty mild ones at that) and one letter objecting to our “different trinity” billboard message. That was it. Hey, this is not so bad.

  We held several events aimed at attracting the public. This was new behavior for us. How would it go? People came, they enjoyed the events, we chatted with them. They left. Nothing to it. We learned several lessons from all this. One, we could talk to people about our religion. Two, people would listen. Three, most people in a community, even though they don’t all hold the same beliefs, are tolerant of other beliefs.

  As we welcomed our new visitors we found that they were looking for the same things that we had been seeking years ago in our first UU congregations. And they were grateful that we existed and that they’d finally found us. And we, in turn, were grateful we’d stretched enough to reach out to them. Evangelism? Bring it on.