Background
It was time! It was twenty-five years ago, at the Stonehouse Club in Little Compton, Rhode Island, that professional religious educators gathered for a group of four three-day meetings to ask the question: "What is our vision for lifespan liberal religious education?"

In the spring of 1998, a coordinating committee comprised of Rev. Makanah Morris, Rev. Patricia Hoertdoerfer, Dr. Rev. Susan Harlow, and Rev. Frances Manly organized to plan a similar process. It was time to bring together the threads of the past in order to provide a vision for the future of Unitarian Universalist religious education. This group represented the UUA Religious Education Department, the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA), and the Sophia Fahs Center at Meadville Lombard Theological School. In the fall of 1998 I replaced Makanah in the core group. The group formulated the following mission statement for this new gathering of religious educators: "To imagine and articulate the core of Unitarian Universalist Religious Education from various perspectives at the dawn of the twenty-first century."

Funding was solicited and granted from the Panel on Theological Education, Funding for Unitarian Universalism, Unitarian Sunday School Society, LREDA, Meadville Lombard, the UUA departments of Religious Education and Congregational, District, and Extension Services. Representative religious leaders were selected from academia, large, mid-size, and small societies, the UUA Religious Education Department, Religious Education field staff, ministry, Directors of Religious Education, theological students, and youth. There were thirty-three participants in all, including a representative from the Journey Toward Wholeness Committee.

Letters requesting input into the process were sent to twenty-two affiliated UU organizations. Participants were invited to one of the two conversations, one of which was held in April 1999, and the other in April 2000. Participants were asked to submit papers in response to three questions:

1. As we enter the twenty-first century, what is the core of our evolving Unitarian Universalist faith?
2. What is your vision for the goals of our lifespan religious education?
3. What are the vital components of Unitarian Universalist curricula?

Hopes and Expectations for the Essex Conversations
The religious education of children, youth, and adults has been a concern of our liberal religious movement from its beginnings in America. Today we know that a unified view of religious education is essential to our Unitarian Universalist faith. We must energize religious education. We must imagine and articulate a religious education that supports our shared Unitarian Universalist values and reflects the diversity of our community. We sought during the Essex Conversations to articulate a renewed sense of educational purpose, a clear expression of liberal religious faith, and a revitalized commitment to UU Religious Education.

Our hope was that Essex Conversations would provide guidance to the Religious Education Department at the UUA and help renew our sense of mission, revitalize our commitment, and clarify our vision of UU religious education. This came at a good time for the department as we prepared to develop a new lifespan curriculum for the twenty-first century.

Our hope is that the papers presented will help your congregation to clarify and imagine your vision for liberal religious education within your spiritual community. Examine the summaries below and talk about them in your RE committees, with your board, your teachers, staff, and colleagues. Look for the Skinner House publication of the Essex Conversation papers in their entirety coming out in winter 2001. Click here for summaries of the papers and audio excerpts of taped conversations.

Paper Summaries

Rev. 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 is critical to their "becoming." It may be time to advocate for making the position of "youth advisor" a professional one.

Dr. Rev. 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 lifelong 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.

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 depths 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, practicing 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.

Rev. 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

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 it 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.

Rev. 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.

Rev. 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 consciousnesses 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.

Rev. 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.

Rev. Jeannellen 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 the 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 its program is in good hands.

Rev. Susan Suchocki
Religious Education for the twenty-first 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 that remind and make us aware of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, our first Principle. Yet these goals are not enough. Religious education should encourage and be structured to allow a breaking down of personal and/or social barriers, and it should acknowledge that lack of experience or education may inhibit 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 twenty-first 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 twenty-first century need 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.

Rev. 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.

Rev. Barry M. Andrews
Faith is comprised of both spirituality and religious identity, which are interdependent and reciprocal. Spirituality is largely personal, made up of values, beliefs, and experiences that relate to our individual experience. Religious identity represents values, beliefs, and rituals that a group holds in common. Both are required for full realization of faith. Unfortunately, our current religious education programming ends up teaching religion, not faith.

A core curriculum in Unitarian Universalist faith development would progressively nurture spirituality and character formation. It is not enough to educate about our religious heritage. We must seek to develop faith, helping individuals of all ages to more fully integrate their spiritual lives with their sense of identity as Unitarian Universalists.

Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
It is time for critical examination to identify the impediments that keep us from greater alignment between what we say we value and our effectiveness in the process of social transformation. We must face the hidden realities that stand in the way of change. We must gain a clear understanding of the ideologies of liberalism and liberation, which sometimes stand in conflict, inhibiting our progress. These efforts must be coupled with a holistic religious education program, education for critical consciousness and the practice of freedom, rooted in the doctrine of love.

Supporting this work is a multi-dimensional endeavor, requiring educational, ethical, justice, and pastoral works, springing from a new theology of church, of ministry, and of culture.

Pat Ellenwood
Four strategic programs are proposed to secure a more dynamic, central place for religious education and to insure steady, long-term growth.

We must encourage covenantal relationships to help create intentional communities in which preaching, religious education, and pastoral care are all regarded fully as ministry. We need to develop a coherent curriculum plan with a well-articulated scope and sequence, providing us with a common experience of Unitarian Universalism. Our congregations must become intergenerational faith communities in which youth can experience what it means to lead in all aspects of congregational life. LREDA can contribute to this future by building alliances, setting professional standards, and educating congregations around good employment practices.

Rev. Richard S. Gilbert
The curriculum for praxis education, helping people transform their beliefs and values into effective and meaningful action in the world, is the totality of experiences, planned and unplanned, from which we can learn, expanding our Unitarian Universalist horizon beyond the confines of a religious institution.

Education for justice begins with one's own existential situation and goes on to establish linkage to the problems of the world. Education for empathy is based on learning about the personal problems of others, seeking to balance objectivity and subjectivity. Education for engagement provides transforming hands-on experience. Education for empowerment provides space for the creation of programs of peace and justice designed to do no less than change the world.

Logan Harris
Many elements come together to create a vital youth group: good advisors, being active within the congregation, working for social action, sharing strong emotional bonds based in a sense of trust, developing spirituality through creative worship, empowerment of youth leadership through strong district and continental connections, and just plain having fun. Youth need somewhere to feel safe, somewhere to laugh and love and learn. We all share the power to change things, and to discover things. We all need our unique, individual power to be recognized and nourished. A youth group can be both a haven of safety and protection, and a place for growth to occur. But youth and adults must work together to create such a possibility. Neither of them can do it alone.

Jacqui James
If Unitarian Universalism is to be the vital faith needed in these changing years, we need to address several issues: ministry to and with families, justice-making, increased support for religious education and religious educators, growing Unitarian Universalists, and functioning effectively in a more diverse culture.

We must find ways to assure that the time that families spend in church is more fulfilling. We must provide lifelong skills, tools, and attitudes to identify and dismantle oppressions and build bridges between people. We must view our religious educators as professionals and religious education as a central task of the congregation. We must link the generations by encouraging the full participation of children and youth in the living tradition of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

Judith A. Frediani
We need to claim our unique responsibilities as a liberal religious community. We must offer lifespan religious growth and learning in an intergenerational community, resisting our tendencies to compartmentalize people by age. Education for social action must not only inspire but also equip us to change the world, ensuring that social justice is inseparable from meaning-making in our faith. Our understanding of "curriculum" must expand beyond the books, boxes, and classrooms to fully realize the transformative power available to us as liberal religious communities.

We need to expand our concept of "RE," and we need to change our relationship with our religious educators. Those engaged in religious education need to be at all the tables, be included in educational opportunities, and be welcomed in partnership with parish ministers.

Jen Harrison
If our churches are to grow and thrive, retain our youth, develop theologically competent UUs, and work toward a more just world, we need to intentionally develop infrastructures that support relationship, spiritual questing, hope, and healing. Our youth groups at their best model this welcoming atmosphere and safe space for conversation about what is meaningful and valuable.

There is much to be learned from the model of our youth groups and their intentionality in building community. We can also learn from other denominations about how to use small groups to grow large and successful churches. These models can be adapted for a shared, lay-led ministry approach to our religious education programs that will supplement the content driven curriculum-based programs for children and adults.

Elizabeth Motander Jones
As our communities and faith evolve, religious education must expand its vision from traditional classroom experiences to viewing all aspects of the community’s life as opportunities for education.

We are losing the skills needed to build and maintain strong communities. By looking at the elements that create and maintain strong extended families, we can learn how to apply those to our communities. We grow by sharing our personal and communal stories, reaching out to the wider community, expressing our commitment, showing our appreciation, communicating in positive ways, spending time together, paying attention to our spiritual wellness, and learning to cope with stress and crisis. In this way we can work to build the strong bonds that form our core as a Unitarian Universalist community.

Rev. Makanah Elizabeth Morriss A lifespan thematic religious education curriculum based on Unitarian Universalism’s six sources can help our people experience a sense of universal connection and their sense of spirit and call them to committed and loving action that will help change the world.

Such a curriculum should encompass early elementary grades through adulthood and be easily adaptable by local teachers and congregations. Support must be provided through a curriculum development resource book and workshops, and development of parent and home resources, including computer resources. Youth programming also needs to include a six sources component. Weaving its energy through all the curricula, program and resources needs to be the commitment to our shared "Journey towards Wholeness."

Rev. Meg Riley
If our religious education programs could create congregations where the religious impulse itself is to savor pluralism and encourage creative tension, our congregations could offer something vital and unique to our communities and to our world.

A concern is that our children experience curricula in a vacuum of intergenerational community or focus. Vital components of Religious Education programs are suggested to address this concern: the embodied practice of religion, affinity groups based on religious identity, attention to civility and positive interaction, spending real time together in community, education for stewardship, respect for those who are sources of passionate energy, and opportunities for close relationships across affinities, self-identities, and ages.

Rev. Roberta Nelson
We must change limited cultural attitudes about religious education and teaching in church. We must make a conscious effort to affirm the central importance of religious education within our congregations and the Association. Commitment to intentional selection of teachers, adequate teacher training and a network of support systems is required.

The teacher who listens and hears, who affirms and challenges, who questions and encourages questioning is the heart of our programs. We can overcome resistance to teaching with a vision that engages and supports teachers in their own spiritual search. We must make manifest the miracle that we know happens when teacher-guides engage with young people, with co-leaders and with themselves. They become co-creators of a pilgrimage that goes ever deeper and feeds souls.

Rev. Rebecca Parker
The core of our evolving Unitarian Universalist faith is humanistic concern that every being have a chance at life. The goal of liberal religious education is the unfolding and liberation of life, in cooperation with revolutionary grace present in the heart of life. The vital components of such an education are practices of critical reception and creative engagement in the world.

Our educational programs must address our current dehumanization. We can accomplish this by trusting the abiding presence of revolutionary grace. Our task is to cooperate with this grace as it emerges, disrupts our small worlds, and wakes our souls to the larger world in which we meet our neighbors, encounter the divine energies afoot, and find, in our engagement there, our deepest selves and the restoration of our souls.

Rev. Tracey Robinson-Harris
At the core of our evolving Unitarian Universalist faith is our commitment to justice and to transforming structures of oppression and marginalization including those within our own community of faith. Religious education is clearly central to the health, growth and vitality of our faith. And we also know that religious education occupies a place on the institutional margins. Neither the implicit strategy of developing quality programs nor the explicit one of focusing on "professionalizing" or "ministerializing" the role of the religious educator have proven sufficient to address the paradoxical position of religious education in our congregations.

We need to define new strategies for transforming congregations so that educating is at the heart of all aspects of institutional life.

Kathy M. Silver
Parents are the primary religious educators for their children, yet we have not given our adults the inspiration and information that they need to fulfill this essential role.

Being a liberal religious person does not automatically make you a Unitarian Universalist. This requires basic knowledge of our history and theology, Principles, system of congregational polity, and a desire to learn more. We need to help people convert to Unitarian Universalism. Failing this, people will simply attend their local church as consumers of religious education for their children. Conversion requires education, conviction, and commitment. It is our responsibility to provide avenues for lifespan religious education in which all members, adults and children alike, can easily participate, working together to become Unitarian Universalists.

Rev. Gary Smith
A primary task for Unitarian Universalist religious education is the identification of a corpus of material we would like our children to know, to own in their beings, by the time they have come of age in our programs. We are charged with passing this history on to the next generation.

Unitarian Universalist religious education in the next century must also be about right relationships. In our congregations, we are offering one of the last places of intergenerational contact in our culture. When we create the kind of community in which our children feel loved and welcomed and safe, this is the imprint we leave for that later year, after the inevitable rebellion, when our children's return is possible, with their own children. This is what it means to respect children and take them seriously. This is the future of Unitarian Universalism religious education.

Laura Wilkerson Spencer
Our seven Principles offer guidelines for what our churches and religious education programs need to become, for how to see ourselves and relate to others. We must address issues of diversity, becoming very intentional about creating diverse congregations and using curriculums that take an inclusive approach to diversity. Our religious education programs should focus on creating a cross-generational community that nurtures individual spiritual growth and development. To seriously address these issues will require religious educators to become involved in all areas of church leadership. Churches must hire well-qualified educators and support them in their professional growth and education. Ministers and religious educators must work collaboratively and create genuine collegial relationships.

Rev. Greg Stewart
The educational ministry of the denomination has been the focus of its easiest and most significant innovation. Way Cool Sunday School took Sunday school out of the church’s basement and into the city’s streets, eliminated age divisions, used curricula as resources rather than recipes, and combined social action with religious education. Underlying the rotational components of worship, classroom, outreach and the arts was the common content of our Unitarian Universalist principles and purposes.

When Sunday school was taken out of the traditional "box," congregations experienced growth in terms of diversity in all its facets, programmatic growth with all its headaches and opportunities, and most importantly, spiritual growth.

Rev. John W. Tolley
A respect for the ways in which art addresses mystery and the expression of new church members for more emphasis on the spirituality inherent in our faith communities have led our leadership to understand "art" as a powerful tool toward effective religious education and expression.

What is suggested is nothing less than a counter cultural revolution. Our educational goals must first free themselves of the expectations of society and focus on the individual needs, dreams, and constructs of each of us. When we participate in our chosen art form and gain the skills to release that power in those we teach, we create a faith community whose process is understood as its worth, and whose reflection makes the whole educational endeavor effectual, rewarding and transformative.