The Future of Church1
Rev. Myke Johnson
March 9, 2014
Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church
Opening:
Pema Chodron has said:
The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things are falling apart? You're either
going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you're going to forsake the old
ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along.
Today we explore the future of church, opening our hearts to that experimental spirit in our time of
worship.
Affirmation: Proverbios Y Cantares – XXIX
Antonio Machado
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
Wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking...2
Reading:
The Best in Art and Life
The best in art and life
comes from a center
something urgent and powerful
an ideal or emotion
that insists
on its being.
Excerpt:
Roger Rosenblatt3
From that insistence
a shape emerges
and creates its structure out of passion
If you begin with a structure,
you have to make up the passion,
and that's very hard to do.
Reading 2:
Everything Has a Deep Dream
I've spent many years learning
how to fix life, only to discover
at the end of the day
that life is not broken.
Rachel Naomi Remen4
1 Copyright 2014 by Rev. Myke Johnson. Permission must be requested to reprint for other than personal use.
2 From Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (trans, Betty Jean Craige, Univ Georgia. Publ by LSU Press, 1978)
3 From Margaret Wheatley, Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005), p.
58. Prose text redone as a poem by Wheatley.
4 From Margaret Wheatley, p. 230, passage from Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessing, p. 247, redone as a
poem by Wheatley.
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There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness
in everyone and everything.
We serve life best
when we water it
and befriend it.
When we listen before we act.
In befriending life,
we do not make things happen
according to our own design.
We uncover something that is already happening
in us and around us and
create conditions that enable it.
Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness
always struggling against odds.
Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment.
Sermon
Last week I spoke about the miracle of church—No one is required to belong to a church—people
choose to belong. No one is required to pay a certain amount of money for church, people choose by
their generosity and pledges to keep it alive, giving what they choose to give. So because of all that,
we might say that it is a miracle that our church exists—without the interest and participation and
generous financial support of everyone here, it wouldn't exist at all.
The other side of this miracle is that many churches are ceasing to exist. The world has changed in
many ways, and one of those ways is that churches are no longer a bedrock institution of our society.
Some researchers have suggested that churches as we know them, won't last up to the end of this
century. Fifty years ago, almost everyone went to church on Sunday. Or they belonged to an
alternative religious faith and went to synagogue on Saturday, or mosque on Friday. But Protestant
Christianity predominated.
One of my colleagues, Rev. Christine Robinson, pointed out that back in those days, Unitarian
Universalism was the church of choice for many people who didn't fit into the mainstream of belief. It
was a church without dogma, and it offered a place in a church-focused world for people who were free
thinkers to have a Sunday institution for themselves. She suggests that our niche in the culture was
“UU's are free to believe whatever we want to, and most of us don't.”5
But the culture has changed. Today, church is no longer an entrenched institution. Sundays are just as
likely to be filled with hockey or shopping as going to church. The idea that people are free to believe
what they want has become the norm. Many more people, especially young people, are completely
unchurched.
Rev. Robinson suggests that we need to reconsider our cultural UU niche for the 21st century.
5 http://www.minnslectures.org/2011Talks/RobinsonTalk.pdf
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She writes:
When people decide that they don’t believe what they were raised to believe, they often
go for years without belonging to any church, because religion is no longer a privileged
part of the social landscape in most parts of the nation. When they decide they want to
go to church again, it is not because they want freedom; they’ve had freedom. Nor are
most of them interested in “community,” generally speaking. For general community
they have Facebook and volleyball leagues and going out for a drink after work,
mothers’ groups, and the like.
No, when they show up at our door, they show up looking for the one thing they can’t
get at the gym, or the Democratic Party headquarters or the mothers’ group. They want a
safe place to explore what happens to them when they start to deepen their lives. They
are looking, in short, for a religious community, not a secular one. And the ones who try
orthodox options and can’t bring themselves, in all integrity, to sign on, or who already
know what they don’t believe; they are the ones who might come to us. It’s these people
who are our natural constituency...or to put it another way; these are the people we are
supposed to be serving...this, our niche in the religious landscape.
If we don’t serve their needs for depth, heart, spirituality, hope, faith, and love outside of
an orthodox setting, who will?
She suggests that our UU niche for our contemporary and future world might be more explicitly
spiritual, expressed perhaps like this: “UU's worship and grow in spirit in religiously diverse
congregations.”
This week I have been thinking about the future of church. I have been looking at what other UU's
have been writing and thinking, and Christine Robinson's thoughts were part of the UU Minns Lecture
Series on Composing Our UU Future, held in Boston in 2011. During that lecture series, several UU
ministers looked at the larger context of our society, and how we might respond to it as UU's.
Christine Robinson went on to talk about some more practical changes in how we worship and
communicate. She suggests that a spoken word sermon without any images may not be the best format
to reach younger people. She writes,
If we want to be hospitable to Gen-Xers and Millennials, we just have to adjust to the
fact that they are image-based learners and that they were not given a classical musical
education. They’ve had TV and the Web and textbooks with pounds of full-color
photographs in them. A page of text without a picture, five minutes of sermon with no
visuals...it’s like a foreign language. Unless they took band, the hymnal is Greek to
them, the hymn styles are arcane, and the organ is meaningless.6
Not that every church has to have visual images along with the sermon—but how will we change to
meet people in their own natural communication medium? I was talking to Rev. Sylvia Stocker this
week—minister of the UU Church in Brunswick. You may remember that the UU Church in
Brunswick was destroyed in a fire a few years ago. They are almost finished building their new
sanctuary, and it will include a screen in the sanctuary that can display images from a computer at the
pulpit.
6 Ibid.
3
I think about how when we want to include images at A2U2, we have to pull down the screen with a
big pole, run wires from behind the pulpit to a projector that we've set up makeshift on a table in the
middle of the chairs. So the process of including images detracts from the smooth flow of worship.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to include images and video in a seamless process with the other parts of
worship?
Rev. Larry Peers borrowed from the Institute of the Future to name some of the changes we are likely
to see in our larger society. They describe a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,
shortened to the acronym VUCA, a world of extreme urgency, unpleasant surprises, and enigmatic
choices. Climate change will certainly be a part of that volatility. They also suggest we will see a more
extreme gap between rich and poor, more polarizing viewpoints, more networking via electronic
media, and more grassroots economic innovation.7
In such a world, what shall UU's become? How do we avoid disappearing? Some UU leaders are
talking about very radical changes. Perhaps congregations won't exist in the future, or small ones will
disappear and only large ones will be viable. They ask, How do we reach beyond the walls of church
to communicate our message to the world? Are we here to create congregations or to change the wider
world?
I think part of what is driving these questions is the increasingly difficult financial picture for churches
and for our denomination. When churches were a more central part of community life, it was common
for people to take for granted that they should contribute financially by tithing—giving ten percent of
their income to their church. People took for granted that they would leave money in their wills for
their church, and took pride in building up the institution. A small town church of one hundred people
could support a building and a minister and be fine. Now, most churches, and indeed all small nonprofits, are having a harder time surviving financially.
So there can sometimes be a layer of crisis attached to these conversations about how do we change for
the future that is coming. The conversation attempts to look at our changing world and ask, how can
we fit into that future world? How can we survive? How can we speak our message to that future
world? What must we change or fix to be relevant to that world?
After reading a lot and thinking about it all, my own instincts started taking me in a slightly different
direction. I realize that who we are as Unitarian Universalists is always a dance with the world at large,
a conversation—but the question that started rising up in my own heart was not so much about how we
adapt to a future that is coming. We are not merely at the mercy of impersonal forces that are bringing
a future into our midst. We are also a part of creating the future.
What I want us to ask is reversed: what is the future we want to see, what do we hope for? How can
we claim the power we have to participate in creating the future? How can we get clear about the kind
of future we want to see? And then, figure out what we can do now to help bring it about?
In my meandering online, I was delighted to discover a site for the “Quaker Institute for the Future.”
The mission of this group is to advance a global future of inclusion, social justice, and ecological
7 http://www.minnslectures.org/2011Talks/PeersTalk2.pdf From Bob Johansen, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to
Compete in the Present (San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2007).
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integrity through participatory research and discernment.8 UU's have many similar values to the
Quakers, and we could take a lesson from this group. They are busy imagining a future that would be
based on their values, and producing research on things like—how do we move past an economy based
on growth, into an economy that is ecologically integrated? We might work on imagining a future like
that too.
What is important to us about church, and what do we want for church in the future? Last week you
spoke of things like connections with other people, and a place in our lives where we go deeper with
our values; you mentioned a place to grow spiritually, a place to pause in the midst of our week to
reflect on how we live our lives. You spoke of a place to find hope. Perhaps we will need that hope
even more in the volatile future that awaits us.
Margaret Wheatley is a person who has worked on imagining futures and worked with congregations
on leadership and change issues. Her central message is that “Whatever the problem, community is the
answer. There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about. We prepare for an
unknown future by creating strong and sustainable relationships, by wisely stewarding the earth’s
resources, and by building resilient communities.”9 She was interviewed by the Congregations
Resources Guide.10 They asked her, “Are there ...cautions you have for faith communities?”
Wheatley answers:
Well, I think the greatest caution is to keep the focus on the quality of our relationships.
I listened to a woman minister who said that for everything she did, she applied one
criterion: "Is what I’m about to do going to weave the web or break the web?" So I think
the greatest thing we have to do is to attend to the quality of our relationships, the level
of trust for one another, and whether by our own actions..., we are doing things to bring
people together, or we are doing things—intentionally or unintentionally—that drive
people apart. Because the greatest need right now is to be together.
[She goes on to say,] I’ve seen this again and again. In very poor communities or in
very dire circumstances, when people can come together, there is joy available. We’re
not going to get through this time together with our current mode of fear. So for me,
that’s the essence of all of our work right now: What can we do to help people come
together? That’s where the spirit flourishes, and that’s where our best attributes come
out. ... We can be human only when we’re together.
As much as we may have virtual networks and online communication, and as important as our
participation in those media may be, we will always need ways to connect with each other at a deep
level, face to face. The primary work of church is to help people come together, deeply, generously, so
that the spirit may flourish in our midst. Perhaps the ways we come together will change.
Do we need our current Sunday format? Not really. Do we need preaching and hymns and candles?
Not really. Last week we experimented with changing some of those forms by including a time in
small groups for the adults in our congregation. Some of you suggested that it might be good to try that
again. Our format probably works fairly well for the people who are here—because otherwise why be
8 http://www.quakerinstitute.org/
9 Margaret Wheatley, Finding Our Way.
10 http://www.congregationalresources.org, website is in transition--interview no longer available online.
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here? But maybe new formats can be created that will resonate with others who would also desire a
chance to connect deeply and grow spiritually.
Do we need buildings? Well, in Brunswick, the UU's discovered after the fire that they could meet in
other people's buildings and still grow in community. Do UU churches need ministers or other staff?
Some very small churches thrive without them. But in the meantime, it does seem to help the fostering
of community to have an identified place to gather, and to have staff people who pay attention to
weaving the web of relationships and asking deep ethical and spiritual questions.
This sermon is not meant to be a stewardship sermon, but perhaps I should also ask the question, will
future UU churches need money? Maybe in some future with local bartering and alternative economics
we might re-imagine that. But for now, money is the medium for creating this gathering place and
funding the people who pay attention to its vitality. With generous giving, we can more fully embody
our vision of who we hope to be. Lack of money can also be a cause for feeling anxiety and scarcity.
In a future in which ordinary people are likely to be more and more stressed financially, church may
need to be a center to talk about economic concerns, and imagine economic alternatives. For every
problem, community is the answer.
Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has said,
...The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we
granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a
terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who
said, "We already did. We have made the world new." The hardest part is to convince
yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day,
rise [up] in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. The very least you can do
in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that
hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.11
We can't create the future alone, but with common values, a listening and experimental spirit, a vision
of communion with the earth, and a deep hope, we can make a new road by walking.
Closing Words
A Parting Blessing
Maureen J. Hilliard
May you be blessed with vision in these shadow times.
May light invade the darkness.
May it be a soft brilliance, as bare as candlelight,
guiding you through twilight 'til dawn.
And when the dawn breaks, may you find yourself upon a threshold.
May you enter and go through, and may you emerge into the dance-a whole and holy new dance of grace.12
11 Barbara Kingsolver, “How to be Hopeful,” Duke University commencement address, 5.18.11
12 In Margaret Wheatley, Finding Our Way, p. 270.
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