Delivered on Stewardship Sunday, October 7, 2022, Unitarian Church of Lincoln
I miss weekends. For the first year, or thereabouts, of the pandemic, we I recorded my sermons for our online services here at the church, on Thursday afternoon. This meant two important things for my day to day life:
1) I could not procrastinate until Saturday night to write a sermon.
2) I had weekends off.
I started seminary ten years ago. And for that decade, Sunday has generally been a work day. No staying up late on Saturday night, and no quiet family time on Sunday morning. It’s a hard schedule, but it’s not a surprising one when you start working for a church. But for a year there, I recorded my pieces for worship on Thursday, had Friday to do light administrative work, and then had Saturday and Sunday with my family. And we loved it. For most of that year, we’d sleep in a bit on Sunday morning, then eventually get the family down to the living room, usually still in Pjs. And we’d watch the YouTube service, starting with the delightful music youtube cued up every week. Ailish might not remember this now, but we have video of her grooving to Silent Partner’s Space Walk (yes, that song has a name). And then, most Sundays we’d make waffles.
I told that story in my Oral History recording a few weeks ago. Mine is not the only story like this: I’ve heard plenty of members talking about how, as rough as the pandemic was, it is nice to attend church on the couch. It was nice to have those weekends – youtube’s hold music and the smell of waffles are always going to conjure up good memories for me.
Because going to church is inconvenient. There is little tangible reward for doing so, and in 2022, it is not a societal expectation. In the 1950s, when All Souls Church of Lincoln (Unitarian) was thinking about building a church at 6300 A Street, 76% of Americans told a Gallup poll that they belonged to a church. As late as 1999, that number was 70%. It is now 47.
In 2019, 33% of Americans told Pew Research that they attended church weekly [Note: every minister in the country thinks that number is high when self-reported]. In the latest batch of data, published this summer after the pandemic, that number had dropped to 28%. Now, that doesn’t sound like much, 33 to 28, but think of it this way: One in five people who said they attended church weekly before the pandemic are no longer. Some of those people are now going to church once a month. Some have stopped coming all together.
Last week I spent three days in Kansas City, at the annual Leadership Institute hosted by the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. This year the hosts polled all the clergy and lay leaders in attendance, asking them to share where their churches are at now, compared to where they were in 2019. The results were sobering. 75% of churches have decreased in attendance. Those decreases ranged from 10-50%, with the average church down about a third in attendance. The two words clergy, lay staff, and volunteer leaders were most likely to use to describe how they were feeling were exhausted, and hopeful. That last piece was the subject of lots of conversation.
And this is largely what we are seeing at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln. In 2019, we averaged 160 people on Sunday morning. Now, we’re at around 80 in person, with another 35 or so online most weeks – down about 30%, which puts us right at the average. And that combination of hopeful and exhausted? That tracks.
There are Sunday mornings when I roll over, look at Stacie, and say “I really don’t want to go to work this morning. Is it too late to be an accountant?” Church is inconvenient. But then I show up.
I show up, because that’s something I have learned from this church.
We are people
of open minds,
loving hearts,
and helping hands,
who show up
Don’t tell this to the search committee, but I really puzzled over this church’s mission statement when I was interviewing. Show up to do what? I kept asking. To what end? What is the goal of showing up, and shouldn’t that be the mission, and showing up a tool? Showing up tends to be inconvenient, so why is the action and not the goal put at the center?
Part of that is straightforward to answer: to what end? “To transform ourselves and the world,” it’s right there in the vision statement we read every Sunday morning. But the link, I’m increasingly convinced, is that the method is the meaning. The process of showing up is the transformation. We don’t show up in order to transform ourselves and the world. The actions of showing up is itself transformational. We show up in community to be about the work of transformation, and because we need each other – often it is not more complicated than that.
A buddy of mine has been going through a rough patch recently. A combination of professional and personal setbacks all came at once, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I can best help. He finally put out a simple ask: does anyone want to work out with me in the morning? Exercise helps a routine, which helps everything else. Now, I’m not Rev. Sinclair with my friends: I don’t do professional hospital visits or have a discretionary fund.
By I can show up at my friend’s door, five mornings a week at a set time, with a gym bag and music. Transformation is inconvenient. It doesn’t happen in one big mountaintop moment, it comes from months of consistently showing up, morning after morning. And church is a lot like this. Some days we have to show up. Even (especially!) when it is inconvenient.
I’ve spent most of the last month listening to and transcribing the oral histories that you have been recording. There is so much there that I want to share with the congregation – so far 63 members and friends have recorded twelve and a half hours of audio, or about 250 pages of transcript. We’ll talk more about what I’ve heard listening to those next month, but for now, here’s BJ Wheeler and Amy Miller, talking about why it is important to her to show up in this community:
[name omitted]: (27:09)
what is something you learned about yourself during pandemic?
[name omitted]: (27:17)
I think I learned that if I get out of the habit of socializing, it can be hard to start it back up. And so if I went for four or five days without really talking to someone like say in the cold weather, and so when people aren't out while I'm walking the dog or say, I skipped one church service, cuz I don't know, I just don't feel like it, it would get harder and harder to then make myself do the next thing. And so I think what I learned is being in contact with people and being in relationship, you gotta work that muscle and not let it get flabby because I could have just turned very much into a hermit and not, not gone back out into the world.
[name omitted]: (24:14)
BJ, you mentioned the UU Connects. We were actually in the same small group together. So I had an open circle before the pandemic and then I was part of the UU Connects. And so that meant that I had at least twice, sometimes three times a week, there'd be church service by zoom. There'd be my UU Connects group. They'd be my open circle group. And it sometimes right before the meeting, I'd think, oh, well I don't really have anything to say. And you know, I'm not in a hundred percent feeling happy and chipper. Maybe I shouldn't inflict my bad mood on people, but then I'd go. And it was such a good antidote to just being in my own head space. So the small, as well as the larger community activities through zoom, were a lifesaver.
Showing up, even when inconvenient, is good for us. And we need each other in this place. Another member, talking about the experience of seeing folks drift away over the course of the last few years reflected, “…the YouTube services helped me feel connected. Even though I couldn't see the people that were also listening in, they made me feel like this place was still here. Later on, when the coffee hour was less attended and people were finding other ways or moving on, I was afraid that this church was, would kind of wither away, and that my place in the community here would go with it, that this place might not exist.”
Okay, so now it’s time for the hard sell: This place, this community, exists because our members and friends show up continually. They do not want this place to wither away, they push themselves to show up, even when they aren’t 100% happy and chipper. They give of their time, their talents, and funding. Yes, this is the sermon on the amount, we are going to talk about money and giving.
It is so hard to talk about money, or to ask for it. Stacie is running for office this election cycle and I can tell from experience in that world, all of campaigning is hard: the door knocking in summer heat, the endless series of events supporting other candidates, the juggle of parenting, working, and having this all-consuming hobby. But nothing, nothing is as hard as asking people you care about and respect for money. Society does not teach us to have these conversations well. Rather than a straightforward conversation about “this is what these things cost, how will we pay for them,” we often come at the question obliquely, assuming that someone, somewhere, somehow, will hear there’s a need and step up. Maybe they will. But let’s talk out loud about this:
Last year our congregational budget, how much it costs to keep this church operating, was $479,000. $424,000, or 88.5% of that, came from member pledges and donations. 88.5%
· We have ____ pledge units – individuals, or families that pledge together.
· Pledges in this church range from $1 to $15,000.
· Our average pledge is $1400, our median pledge unit gave $900.
· We have some big donors in this church. Fully half our pledge income, over $200,000 last year, came from less than thirty families. The average age of folks in that category is over 70.
We have a big lift this year in the budget. After several years of pandemic where we have worked hard to keep the church budget at the same level, this year we’re starting to see the costs of significant inflation. In addition, this year I’ve asked the board to work to raise our lay staff salaries to the UUA’s midpoint recommendations.
This is where they were five years ago, when I started, but our budget has not kept pace with the increased cost of wages over those years. We put those increases off during the pandemic, focusing on holding steady financially while so much else was uncertain.
At the leadership conference last night, Adam Hamilton encouraged us not to compare ourselves to the churches we were in 2019. The new baseline is now, he argued, not 2019. If we keep telling the story of a 30% drop in attendance, we will drive ourselves a little mad. I’m also just not interested in telling a story of a church in decline. I don’t think that’s who we are in Lincoln. I think we, this church, are the people who show up when it’s inconvenient, and through doing that transform ourselves and the world.
Pledging in inconvenient. It’s counter cultural. You aren’t going to get better service from the church if you increase your pledge this year. The thirty families that contribute half our budget are not treated differently than folks who pledge $1 – that’s not how we do things here. But if you do pledge, if you do give more this year, you’ll be showing up in the aftermath of one of the strangest periods of this churches long history. And in doing that, you’ll be ensuring that this place of transformation will be vital for the next 25 years.
Amen.