“The key to congregational leadership is disappointing your people at the rate they can sustain.” It is May 2020, and I am sitting in the guest room of our house in Lincoln, Nebraska, listening on Zoom to Lovett Weems give a lecture to the entering Doctor of Ministry cohort at Wesley Theological Seminary.
Like most congregations, the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, moved fully online in March 2020, as the novel coronavirus sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. In the space of days, everything about how we did church changed. And, in a less-important but still felt effect, all of the professional development I had planned out for 2020 was canceled in the span of weeks. At home and with (I thought) some time on my hands, I called my old seminary to ask what they were doing with their Doctor of Ministry program. “We actually have a cohort starting online in a few weeks, and have had a bunch of people drop out. How fast can you have your application materials in?” (As a quick side note, the Doctor of Ministry is different than a PhD. It is a D.Min. So within weeks of the pandemic shutdown, some of my more conversative clergy colleagues were proved right as the Unitarian minister in Lincoln became a… demon student).
I spent the first three years of the COVID pandemic navigating the day to day challenges of congregational life, then studying how churches change and respond to adaptive challenges. I wanted to challenge myself, academically, but I also wanted to develop as much expertise as I could in what we were dealing with as congregations. In those years, academically and personally, I learned that there were no right answers. Just, sometimes, the right questions to ask.
The literature on church leadership is a series of grim titles: A Failure of Nerve; Leadership on the Line; Didn’t See It Coming; Transforming Conflict: The Blessings of Congregational Turmoil and a personal favorite How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You Are Going. The subtitle of the last is “Leading in a Liminal Season.” Liminal time, when we are not what we once were but are not yet what we are becoming. Susan Beaumont wrote that book in 2019, and it turned out to be timely as most congregations launched into fully online ministry in early 2020. Timely, but the book was not written with the pandemic in mind, but as a response to the moment organized religion finds itself in, in the first decades of the 21st century.
We are in the midst of a moment of profound change for churches. [SLIDE 1] In Gallop survey data from 2000, 70% of adults in the United States reported belonging to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Twenty years later, that number has dropped to 47%.[1] Attendance has decreased over the same time frame: [SLIDE 2] in 2000, 44% of adults reported attending church in the past seven days. In May 2023, that has dropped to 26% attending in person, with another 5% attending church remotely.[2]
[SLIDE 3] In Unitarian Universalism, we’ve seen our membership stay more or less steady in the last twenty years, but our enrollment in Religious Education [SLIDE 4] has dropped about 40% between 2000 and 2020, then again by another 40% in the three years between 2020 and 2023. All told, there are less than a third the number of children in our congregations as there were twenty years ago.
Our numbers here in Lincoln look similar. Here’s our in-person attendance over the last twenty years – [SLIDE 5] the green horizontal line includes livestreaming, the orange line includes everyone who watches over the course of the week. And here’s our RGL enrollment. [SLIDE 6] I’m intentionally putting this one up next to the national RE Enrollment over the same time frame so that you can see the similarity. We are not an outlier.
SLIDE 6
Side note: I don’t think we do ourselves any favors if we do not look at these data with clear eyes. This is not casting blame – Unitarian Universalists, taking the UUA’s numbers, consist of about four hundredths of a percent of the US population. And we all have individual stories. So we are trying to navigate big cultural transitions that are larger than any individual or congregation. [CLOSE SLIDES]
And the story of the last 20 years of Unitarian Universalism is not a story of decline. It is a story of rapid transition in multiple areas and directions. In 2000, I was in the Youth Group at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton New York – participating in OWL, which at that point was a brand new replacement to the About Your Sexuality program. Bill Sinkford was running for UUA president, encouraging the movement to embrace a ‘vocabulary of reverence,’ to not be afraid to talk about God, blessing, prayer in worship.[3]
We have come a long way in twenty years. We’ve worked through the debate about what language we use – I hear Unitarian Universalists regularly talk about their spiritual practices, how they get in touch with the sources of meaning in their lives. OWL is no longer an experimental curriculum, but a storied tradition that has changed lives and grown to encompass a broader understanding of gender and sexuality that it had when it launched. Particularly over the last decade, we’ve struggled with the entrenched, sometimes invisible threads of bias and oppression in the world and our institutions. This year we are voting on new language that will try to articulate the values commonly held among us. We’ve figured out how to do church online, and how to become hybrid organizations, both remote and in person.
COVID accelerated the pace of change, but not the fact of it.
Back to Lovett Weems and the D.Min. program in 2020. One of the things he told our cohort in that first class, over and over, was that change is constant in church systems. How could it be otherwise? Churches work in the span of decades, not months, and people change over that time frame. Who is there changes. The context of the surrounding neighborhood and culture changes. In any church, something is always starting up, and something is always ending. The thing about churches, though, is that the things that end matter to someone. Profoundly.
Let me tell you a story about a harpsichord. When I started here, there was large, hand built harpsichord that lived in the corner of the sanctuary. Now, it was not used. When I knew it, it lived under a handmade cover, looking for all the world like a quilted, oddly shaped piano gathering dust in the corner of the room. The person who played it most often died a decade before I showed up in Lincoln. Because it was hand built, and (well) a harpsichord, it didn’t hold its tone well, and required an expensive specialist to come out to tune it each time it was played. This was not, in other words, a core component of the music program of the Unitarian Church of Lincoln.
But let me tell you, it took four ministers and at least three music directors almost a decade to get rid of this thing that we never used, that sat under a blanket at the front of the sanctuary every Sunday. “But it’s historic. It’s handmade. Maybe a professional harpsichord player will join the congregation and we’ll regret losing it.”
Because the harpsichord was never just a harpsichord. It was the instrument that long time members remembered gathering around, at Christmas Eve, to sing Christmas Carols with people who are long gone. It was built, by hand, in 1966,
by a beloved, deceased congregant, James McCabe to honor another member, Vic Seymour who died. It wasn’t just an instrument that we kept trying to donate, it was, in some way, the memory of beloveds who had built and sustained this congregation and whose names were not known to the young, new members.
All congregational leadership is change work, Lovett Weems told us. And all change work in a congregation is grief work. It’s never just a harpsichord- it is the background of the wedding pictures of a couple who have been a part of the church for forty years.
And. If change work in churches is grief work, it is necessary work. That story ends with the fourth minister and third music director finally finding a home for the harpsichord in the community. And yes, there is a plaque on the wall in the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, with a picture of the Harpsichord and a dedication to the builder. That story also ends with a corner of the sanctuary stocked with art supplies, toys, and kid-sized chairs for people of all ages to be present on Sunday morning during the service.
This is also what Dan Hodgkiss is writing about in the reading this morning. “The stability of a religious institution is necessary for the instability that religious transformation brings. The need to balance both sides of this paradox- the transforming power of religion and the stabilizing power of organization- makes leading congregations a unique challenge.” The power of the harpsichord’s presence (even unusual) was a felt sense of stability and continuity in the sanctuary. And… if we’re honest about those religious attendance numbers nationally, we need to balance that stability with our capacity to serve in new ways. Churches can be vital places of stability in the world, and we who show up to them every week need to think about change.
Change is necessary, because what we do matters. The Unitarian Universalism I know is constantly welcoming, constantly drawing the circle wide. Organized religion is one of the very few places where genuine friendship exists across different families and generations.
So just like the harpsichord was not just a harpsichord, the pile of art supplies and pipe cleaners in the Northeast corner of my congregation’s sanctuary isn’t just a stack of art supplies. It is a symbol that if you are a single parent of a gender non-conforming kid – in Nebraska- this is a place where you will be welcomed and find support and friends.
UU congregations are a place where if you are an older member whose spouse dies unexpectedly, the church is going to show up for you, making space for your loss, telling stories and delivering what my methodist grandma called Jesus Au Gratin – prayers of healing, in the form of five pound casseroles.
A Unitarian church can take a young adult, hurting in body and in spirit, and held them in care with mentors, new friends, music that speaks to their would and practices that deepen their spirit, until that young adult is healed enough to pay it forward to the next person who needs it.
Unitarian Universalist congregations are needed in the world, we don’t get to just look at the decline in religious attendance over the last twenty years and throw up our hands saying ‘oh well, I guess that’s the end.’ I know all of those stories I just told. I see them. I hear about them from colleagues at their churches. That young adult was me, a decade and a half ago. When we come together as UU congregations, we are places that allow people to find themselves and be transformed by love. And to do that, to keep doing that, we have to be willing to change. And to sit in the uncertainty of what change looks like.
Now, do not think for a moment that I’m saying that we can, or should, change what makes Unitarian Universalism unique and life-saving. The right question is not “How do we fundamentally change who we are, so that we survive as a different kind of institutional altogether?” The right question is, in the midst of this liminal season, “How do we become more of who we have always been?”
Another Lovett ism: “A church with a thriving vision is not doing something new. It is becoming more of who it has always been.”
The Unitarian Universalism I know is one that constantly invites in, that asks us to deepen our faith. The Unitarian churches that I know best show up, for each other and the community, constantly. They are clear-eyed about the challenges they face but optimistic about the possibilities. They are places of laughter and places of healing, places working to make the world just a little bit better.
We are in a liminal moment right now as congregations. Susan Beaumont described these moments this way:
During liminal seasons we stand on both sides of a threshold. We have one foot rooted in something that is not yet over, whereas the other foot is planted in a thing not yet defined, something not yet ready to begin. Our old operating structures may no longer work. Our denominational polity, our governing board and committee structures, or staffing arrangements—all were suited for conditions which have evolved. Our strategic identities—who we are, who we serve, and what we feel called to do or become—were shaped by old experiences. We may no longer be served well by these outdated constructs, but we aren’t certain what we need next.[4]
We aren’t certain what we need next. There are so many questions. The numbers for Unitarian Universalism right now, and religion generally, are a little daunting. However we respond and evolve will require change, and change in churches looks and feels like loss. This is why Lovett told us that first day that managing disappointment was the most important skill we could cultivate as leaders. Change is going to happen. The challenge is if it will happen on purpose or not, and how skillful we are at navigating it.
This is the work we are called to do in 2024. The pandemic is over, at least the part that defined us as institutions. Many of our congregations are in liminal, uncertain times, where the right thing to do is not to find the answers, but to discern the right questions. How will we become more of who we have always been? Liminal, uncertain times. But our times.
The Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker once preached an ordination sermon titled “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” In the almost 200 years since he preached it, the core of his theology has become a touchstone for generations of Unitarian Universalists. There is a difference, he preached, between the outward expressions of religion that come and go in each generation- the liturgies, cultures, and theologies that shift and evolve, and the core, the essence of the thing, what he called the permanent, stays the same.
The Transient and Permanent in Christianity could, with a little editing, be an addition to the literature on leading churches through change. Because what Parker preached is essentially the lesson from Lovett Weems: things will change, whether we want them to or not. The transient will fall away. The question then, is how we do that on purpose, letting go of what is transient to hold onto what is underneath and behind it. How do we hold onto the purpose at the heart of what we do – hearing music, communicating with each other – while not being beholden to a particular tool? To put this bluntly from the story this morning: the permanent is music. The transient is the cassette tape, the CD, the spotify account. I don’t know what technology I’m going to use to listen to music in twenty years, but I am sure I will still find transcendence in a Bach concerto.
In liminal times we are called to become more of who we have always been. That means change, yes, and change means loss and grief in congregations. But change and grief are not the only stories. We are lucky, in congregations -blessed, I can say now- that we get to work in decades rather than in months. Lovett was right, that first day in 2020 and in the days that followed, a lot of congregational leadership is figuring out how to disappoint people at the rate they care bear. But we do that not to change for changes sake, but so that in the midst of change all around us, we take hold of what does not change, and become more of who we have always been.
May it ever be so, and amen.
Our closing song is a hymn to some of the things that do not change. Will you please rise in body or spirit and join in singing 163 For the Earth, Forever Turning.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/507692/church-attendance-lower-pre-pandemic.aspx
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/17/nyregion/religion-journal-a-heated-debate-flares-in-unitarian-universalism.html?pagewanted=all
[4] Beaumont, p. 7