The “Compleat” Church:

Linking Religious Education and Social Action

By Rev. Richard S. Gilbert
First Unitarian Church
Rochester, NY

Reprinted from the 1984 Unitarian Universalist National Workshop on Social Justice

There is a cartoon of a bearded man in sack-cloth bearing a sign down the street reading: “The world is not coming to an end; therefore you must suffer along and learn to cope!”

There is wisdom here. Each day does seem the anniversary of something awful. We are especially mindful of that in our nation's capital. At the risk of unfairly demeaning our public servants, I cannot resist sharing the comment of Thomas Reed, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the last century, as he spoke of the members of Congress: “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” (The same might be said of clergy.)

Happily, that is not the whole story. There are many who labor hard and well in the government vineyards for peace and justice. And there is, out in the hustings, that “saving remnant” of which the Bible speaks, a committed cadre who care enough to change the world. We are part of that prophetic minority.

This conference seeks to link two parts of our faith—religious education—that lifespan process of creating our own meanings and values, that cradle-to-grave journey of religious learning and growth—and social responsibility—that outreach of self which embraces the world, the religious spirit in action.

It is a linkage that should not be necessary to make—it seems self-evident; it has been our common assumption at this conference. In fact, we might better speak of two dimensions rather than parts of our religion. Nonetheless, we do well to consider again how learning leads to action—how behavior informs thought—how spirit grows by being tangibilicated—in Sydney Mead's term—the spiritual made material.

My synthesis of these two dimensions of religion grows out of a doctrine of the church. (See diagram on following page.) Imagine, if you will, a circle within a circle. In the center of the circle is worship—the celebration of the value experiences of life. Out of this spiritual center grows what we think and do as individuals and as a community. Our connectedness with the cosmos, with history, with the world, with each other, is confirmed and celebrated here. This is “center-stance in the midst of circumstance” (James Luther Adams).

Gilbert Model for a Doctrine
of the Unitarian Universalist Church

The second circle circumscribes three equal segments: in one is mutual ministry, a caring community in which we nourish one another despite political and social differences, in which we bind up the wounds of our defeats and share our joys, personal and social.

In a second segment is religious education—a learning community of growth, its curriculum the totality of experiences with potential for religious growth. And in the third is the church as a community of moral discourse and action reflecting on our values and living them.

If I have described this circle within a circle aright, you will notice that each section touches every other section (the arrows between them in both directions suggest their interpenetration). They are understood, not as administrative categories, but as dimensions, functions of the church occurring at many programmatic places. This is a doctrine of the “compleat” church—insufficient, inadequate, unless all parts are intact and healthy. This church teaches by what it says and by what it does. It is quadraphonic, not monaural sound.

To illustrate this model, I cite our congregation in Rochester. Since 1978 we have developed a process for integrating the various dimensions of our church program in an intentional way. In the fall we hold an official congregational meeting to establish a social responsibility agenda for the year. On the basis of petitions signed by ten members outlining a plan of action, we select several areas of concern. Task forces are established to educate the congregation and act in the community.

These task forces are given financial support in the budget, access to the pulpit for announcements and “concerns,” newsletter space and my pledge to preach on those issues. They may speak in their own name and may ask for a congregational vote, as they did on the nuclear freeze that passed overwhelmingly. Current task forces include reproductive choice, women's equity, nuclear disarmament and housing.

Ad hoc committees on other topics are approved by the Social Responsibility Steering Committee that monitors the whole process and deals, less comprehensively, with other issues. On this Steering Committee are representatives of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist United Nation's Envoy. Currently there is an ad hoc committee on Central and Latin American Concerns that is exploring that issue in terms of sanctuary. We also help sponsor a food cupboard in our area and make monthly collections of food and money. This year we have launched a Social Investment Fund. This is a budgetary item to which funds can be added during the year. It is designed to invest our modest monetary resources in community programs and projects selected by the congregation at its annual meeting. The process is much like that for selecting task forces. This spring we voted to support a drug education/action program growing out of “The Chemical People” production of “Alice in Blunderland,” a peace-oriented musical; an urban issues conference; and a curriculum project in criminal justice.

We might illustrate the genesis of one task force that shows the integration of religious education and social action. One of our teenagers attended the UU-UN Disarmament Conference a few years ago. He returned eager to share his experience. His enthusiasm was infectious, and from it we launched our Nuclear Disarmament Ad Hoc Committee, later a task force, a group that has been instrumental in developing a whole nuclear disarmament network in our area.

The key concepts are involvement and accountability. We have close to 100 people involved in contrast to times when maintaining a simple social action committee was a struggle. They are involved because there are specific tasks to be done and because they know the congregation supports their efforts.

The social responsibility program is not a special interest group, but an integral part of congregational life. The whole congregation is accountable. The congregation has ultimate responsibility for this program as much as for worship, mutual ministry and religious education. In the “compleat” church they are, ultimately, one.

From this doctrine of the church, I propose five arguments for the indivisibility of religious education and social responsibility. Thomas Aquinas proposed “proofs” for the existence of God; I am somewhat more modest in my claims. I will simply list those arguments and briefly illustrate each.

The argument from personal religious growth: meaning emerges from personal investment in the common life. Social action, far from being in polarity with personal growth, is in fact one vehicle for it. As James Luther Adams says: “The holy thing in life is the participation in those processes that give body and form to universal Justice.”

Last summer I had occasion to participate in the Women's Peace Encampment at the Seneca Army Depot, where neutron bombs are stored. The depot is about ten miles from our cottage on Seneca Lake and is served by a railroad that is contiguous to our property.

One evening I took our older boy, then 16, to the encampment. Ever since attending the UU United Nations Seminar in the spring of 1983, he has been a budding activist. We visited the farm where the women lived, talked with some of them and then set out to find members of our congregation who were to participate in a vigil at the depot entrance.

As we drove by in the gathering dusk, I spotted the vigil and at the same time noticed an enlarging knot of townspeople who had come to stare and heckle at best, to do mischief at worst. The police were there with their flashing lights. There had been incidents, and having gone through many demonstrations in the past, including Selma, I was apprehensive. We did not immediately spot our friends, and so I was prepared to leave, when he asked me, “Why?” and urged me to stop. Heart in throat, I did; we walked past the townspeople, heard their anger and said our words of encouragement to those on vigil.

I learned something about myself that night—my own anxiety, my son's commitment and my own sense that these women were laying their lives on the line for what I, and they, believed in. My son and I came closer together that night. We both clarified our values and what they meant for our behavior. Out of a simple gesture of social action came enhanced life meaning. I knew then that one reason I seek to “change the world” was for the son who made me face up to my convictions.

If the 60's were about activism—the “they” decade—and the 70's were about personal fulfillment—the “me” decade, then I submit the 80's are about linking social action and personal fulfillment in religious meaning—the “we” decade. As St. Exupery puts it, “To be a (human being) ... is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.”

The argument from praxis: we learn by doing, we do by learning. Praxis is a constant process of doing and reflecting. In the Koran we read, “One hour of justice is worth 70 years of prayer.” In the Talmudic tradition we learn that an “Ish Terumot” (a person of many gifts) may destroy the world when he/she responds, “I am occupied with my studies. I have no time.” About such a person says the Lord, “I consider him/her as if he/she had destroyed the world.” Abraham Joshua Heschel knew that well when he commented that in marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., “My feet were praying.”

Education is not living off the capital of yesterday, giving tradition to the young (as if it could be “given”), but is a means of social reconstruction. “We live ourselves into religious thinking more than we think ourselves into religious living.” (Henry Munroe)

My illustration comes from the civil rights movement. I once heard the story of a white university professor who told his fellow members of the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, that he would sit at lunch counters in support of the student sit-ins.

When someone mentioned that a number of people were not in sympathy with the attempts to gain equal service through this method, the professor replied that he himself was not sure what he believed about this. Someone said, “But we understood you to say you would sit.” And he replied, “You are right. That's exactly why I am going down there to support these people. I want to find out what I really believe.” We learn by doing.

The argument from religious tradition: Horace Bushnell, the 19 th -century religious education pioneer, said, “Examples are the only sufficient commentaries.” Heroes and heroines great and small in our human history are the for-instances of religious belief.

You may have read recently of the death of Martin Niemoeller, “The Pastor,” a leader of the Confessing Church that resisted Hitler. Niemoeller spent six years in Dachau for this trouble but lived to tell the tale. He was the one who wrote, “In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

I had the privilege of spending a morning with Martin Niemoeller in Wiesbaden, Germany, while on sabbatical in 1978. He was still vitally concerned with the world. His mind was sharp, his body so lively that, at my departure, he leaped up the steps two at a time, at age 86, to greet his next interviewer.

I have had the good fortune to be with Maggie Kuhn, Daniel Berrigan, James Luther Adams and many others of lesser stature in the course of my activist years. Others I have encountered on the pages of history books, in poems and essays. When argumentation languishes, the eloquent argument of human life transcends all other arguments and lifts the spirit.

Education is in part an encounter with our past—a past that properly understood propels to action. In the words of Elizabeth Strong, our Minister of Religious Education in Rochester, as she builds on Sophia Lyon Fahs: “Today's children and yesterday's heritage are tomorrow's hope.”

The argument from conviction: convictions are religious ideas in operation. Religious ideas yearn to be embodied; it is their nature. When they are not, they wither and die. Social responsibility is the spirit in action. Our own Hosea Ballou put it best: “There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith in doctrinal matters, can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it.”

Poet Heinrich Heine was walking with a friend before the cathedral of Amiens in France. “Tell me,” said his friend, “why can't people build piles like this anymore?” Answered Heine, “My friend, in those days people had convictions. We moderns have opinions. And it takes more than opinions to build a gothic cathedral.”

The argument from wholeness: we learn not as mind or feelings or spirit alone, but as a whole being with thoughts, feelings, convictions, behaviors. Moral learning is not simply cognitive. Paul Tillich once wrote: “There is no vacuum in spiritual life, as there is no vacuum in nature. An ultimate concern must express itself socially. It cannot leave out any sphere of human existence.”

According to Midrashic literature, “(They) who learn without doing something about it, it would have been better if (they) had not been born.” Or to paraphrase familiar words, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make thee act.”

Educator Jonathan Kozol did a study of Cuban education in 1976–77. At the Martyrs of Kent Junior High School, he learned something about holistic education. He asked these children what “history” meant to them. “History,” they said as he summarized their comments, “is what we do today to change the things we spoke about the day before.”

It was, he said, an answer he had not heard in Canada or the U.S. “For most of us, historic matters have to do with other people or take place in earlier times—never where we may be and while we are alive.”

Admitting Cuban children are, like ours, indoctrinated in many ways, he felt a redeeming feature of Cuban education was to give its children “an exhilarating sense of possible participation in the shaping of the world in which they live.” Children who grow up not as objects of historical process but rather as potential subjects of historic change are hard to find in Moscow or New York.

“It is a priceless gift to grow up with the sense that one may sensibly, not psychologically, presume to think that he or she can be part of any process that may change the world.”

It is one thing to interpret the world and quite another to change it. As one wise soul pointed out, “People who have principles but no programs turn out in the end to have no principles.”

I rest my case.