Essex I Summaries
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Essex I Summaries |
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Each participant at Essex Conversations presented his or her paper verbally to the rest of the group. We taped most of the presentations and here you can listen to clips of them. Each clip is no more than 5 minutes long. To listen, you will need RealPlayer G2, which you can download for free.
Susan Davison Archer
Our commitment to religious education needs to focus on new paradigms in three areas: the intergenerational community and our ministry to families, living in partnership with the world, and the special needs of adolescents.
We must envision structures for religious education that differ from the old Sunday morning models that separate families and ages. We need to continue to lift up the relationship between inner growth and outer action and to acknowledge the role of basic developmental growth with the ability to participate in a commitment to the common good. We know that the presence of worthy adults in the lives of adolescents are critical to their "becoming." It may be time to advocate for making the position of "youth advisor" a professional one.
Spreading the “Good News,” Responding to the Challenges
M. Susan Harlow
Today, the church school is perhaps the sole context in which children can actively pursue religious meaning and experience. We need to pay attention to how people, young and old, are “formed in faith,” and can be engaged in a life-long process of religious growth and learning in community, rooted in Unitarian Universalist purposes and principles.
Five challenges are identified: taking religious education out of the Sunday school “box” to explore ways in which the whole religious community is both teacher and learner; restoring “life” as a prime operative value; providing opportunities for the development of deep and authentic relationships; understanding worship as the central educating component of religious community; and engaging us in the struggle to transform injustices in the world.
Learning Types and Their Needs in Unitarian Universalist Religious Education
Daniel Harper
A new typology of learners combines developmental psychology (primarily determined by age), and "depth of faith" (not necessarily determined by age). Eight or more types of learners span across an age range from young children to adults and across the depth of faith from "new" through "long-range” to "deep." There are at least five educational tasks faced by these learning types, including learning our tradition and heritage, how to practice religion, discerning religious identity, theological reflection, and refining religious practice.
By referring to this typology and these five educational tasks, religious educators can begin to open up their conversations with parish ministers, theologians, scholars, and others, with the final goal of helping learners to grow religiously and to deepen their faith.
Inheriting the Past and Creating the Future
Pat Hoertdoerfer
The image of a spiral of dynamic, interacting, interconnecting relationships serves as a model of education for religion as relationship. This education needs to address anew the biases embedded in human relations in our congregations and culture, the pluralism of the sources of our Unitarian Universalist faith, and the interdependence of spirituality and ethics in our reverence for life and for the earth. The goal is to help children, youth and adults develop life-enhancing relationships with others, our faith, the world, our earth, and the universe.
A lifespan curricula series based on the six sources of our UU faith would be an exciting mutual learning adventure promising engagement of professionals and laity, youth and adults, families and congregations
The Children's Fire is the Community Fire
Ginger Luke
The goals of religious education are to create and maintain a human environment and atmosphere where people of all ages can find and create a just community, grow and develop skills and the confidence to live their lives wholly, find and give comfort and solace, and celebrate life. It takes all these components, grounded in our principles, to make up religious education.
Learning who we are and discovering how to be in the twenty-first century require us to recognize many characteristics influencing the substantive ways we address religious education: people are too busy, more information exists than is possible to absorb and our people are in need of community. If we want really want to facilitate the creation of a new vision of religious education, our institutions need to model how to address these characteristics of the times.
Frances Manly
Our greatest challenge in religious education is to create a context in which we can experience, as a felt reality, the fullness of our humanity as radically relational individuals. One of the most valuable tools available to us in this work is our Unitarian Universalist Principles, if we read them in such a way as to reveal, emphasize, and explore the "principle behind the Principles."
The deep structure of the Principles reflects the reality that as human beings we are always in dynamic tension between individualism and interdependence, between autonomy and relationship. Each Principle reflects a unique balance point in that tension. The meaning of human existence is to be found somehow in the fact that we are at once separate individuals of worth and dignity and interdependent parts of an indivisible whole.
John Marsh
We need to teach people how to express themselves in religious language. This requires introducing people to a vocabulary of words, stories, poetry, music movement, and other forms of expression. We should invite people to imbue their calendars with festival days and to practice daily spiritual disciplines.
While it is important to honor different styles of learning and original styles of thought, it is also important to honor rote learning and the accumulated wisdom of widespread traditions. As ever greater amounts of information are thrust into people's consciousness our job will be less and less to provide people with new information and more and more to help people to sort through information and discern wheat from chaff. A grounding in enduring stories will be helpful.
Envisioning Religious Education for the 21st Century
Tom Owen-Towle
The mission of Unitarian Universalist religious education is to create and sustain an intergenerational community of truthfulness and service, holiness and love. This imperative should undergird and guide our social action, liturgy, and stewardship as well.
Unitarian Universalist religious education is neither book nor guru centered. It is not adult or even child centered. It is congregation centered, wherein all ages cooperatively engage in what Starr Williams called "a cycle of nurturing." Hence, our educational perspective must be grounded in sound ecclesiology and focus on all members being religious, remembering, recreative, responsible, respectful, renewable and reverent pilgrims.
On the Practical Side
Jeanellen Ryan
Religious education, in its broadest sense, is a central act of our religious life together. Our times call for it to become “at the core” for Unitarian Universalists of all ages. Our materials should aim toward the small society, toward creative use of limited time available to families, toward revision of traditional curricula and toward greater involvement of adults in anti-racism and human sexuality educational programming.
Leadership is a critical element. Association-wide, we have never fully embraced the notion of verifiable professional religious education leadership, and the price we pay for marginalization is high. Every UU congregation should have access to a qualified religious education professional, not necessarily every Sunday, but enough to feel their program is in good hands.
Rev. Susan Suchocki
Religious Education for the 21st Century should promote a commitment to anti-oppression, antiracism, and multiculturalism and prepare learners through education, personal awareness exercises, analysis and organizational skill development.
Religious education should help us have encounters, experiences or exchanges which reminds and make us aware of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, our first principle. Yet it is not enough by itself. Religious education should encourage and be structured to allow a breaking down of personal and/or social barriers, and should acknowledge that lack of experience or education may be inhibiting us from fully grasping the final defining principle of Unitarian Universalism: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Rev. Elizabeth Strong
A belief in the inherent dignity and worth of every human being is at the core of our evolving Unitarian Universalist faith. This understanding of human nature must remain vital and central to our programs of religious education in the 21st Century. Unitarian Universalists have always been at the front of seekers for more insight into the truth as we know it. Encouragement of our children's ability to search must remain within the center of our religious education efforts.
From this core of our faith we can ground our visions, goals and content of religious education for all ages. Our curricula for the 21st century needs to link us to this past and remember us into new life as a powerful legacy to the principles of freedom, reason and tolerance from our Unitarian Universalist tradition.
Tom Yondorf
Unitarian Universalism, like other religions, has failed to solve the problem of how to discipline humanity so that we live without massively destroying other values such as non-human life, the environment and diverse ecosystems.
One symptom of the weakness of Unitarian Universalism in particular is our inability to retain our children as members of our denomination when they graduate from our religious education programs. Our programs should be outcome based in design. The test for what it means to be a graduate of our classes and programs should be behavior and knowledge, a portfolio of excellence in human living. Desirable outcomes are listed in six areas, including one that calls on our "graduates" to proselytize persuasively on behalf of Unitarian Universalism.
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