Sermon: UU
Evangelism/Sharing Our Good News
Let me start with a combination story/article that comes from a UU Minister and someone now serving as a district exec., the Rev. John Morgan:
“A few weeks ago, I happened to use “evangelism” in a sermon. As I was gathering together my notes and heading for the coffee, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that someone was marching toward me, faced flushed, angry eyes looking for a landing spot on my psyche.
“Don’t ever use that word here,” she said.
“What word?” I asked innocently, already knowing from past experiences what she was going to say.
“Evangelism!” She drew back as if the word itself had caught in her throat. I think it had. “Don’t use it again. We have newcomers here today!”
I wanted to ask how the newcomers had learned of this church if not from someone’s evangelism, but I held my tongue. One learns in ministry that certain words trigger certain responses in our churches at certain times in our history. …What a shame and what a loss for us! It’s another case of a good word we have given over to those who heap abuse on it – the born-again televangelists who, in the name of a wandering, poor Son of Man, raise funds to hire fundraisers to raise more funds.
I will not keep quiet. I am an evangelist. …without it, our spiritual movement suffers a great loss of power and (aside, “pay attention now”) – power and passion. I believe that spiritual communities grow by evangelism as fire grows by burning. If you light a match and then don’t give it air, it will burn out. That has happened to a lot of our churches and fellowships that tried to hide our saving gospel and keep it to themselves. As a theological student some years ago, I was asked by the UUA Extension Department to take a look at 315 of our churches and fellowships that had died between 1961 and 1983. (315!) Again and again, in the records of these groups, I found a familiar refrain: inwardness, focusing on internal questions while neglecting a wider mission, with consequent loss of heart and mission. In short, I found no evangelism.” (from “Shout It Out, Folks! We’re Evangelists, Too!” by John Morgan in Salted With Fire, ed. Scott W. Alexander, Skinner House Books. Pps. 15-16)
I have great confidence that those of us gathered here in this room are more than equal to the task of hearing and reframing language that has power. Yes, certain words come with baggage for some of us; old religious wounds are, in many cases, why we are here. But like John Morgan, I believe that we must not cede the conversation, quite literally, to those who hijack its best meanings, or to those who scope is so narrow that the majority of us are left out in the cold.
A beginning question for this topic is simply this: do you think Unitarian Universalism has something valuable to offer people? Something profoundly helpful or healing to offer the world? Another question, to help you with that one: What if EVERYone in the world were a Unitarian Universalist? How might the world be different? Oh, and yes, I hear the cynical among us thinking, “Oh, we’d figure out a way to fight, anyhow.” Yes, every institution made of human beings will suffer from some distress and internal nitpicking and occasional downright nastiness. It’s undeniable, even we UUs are not yet perfect people. But in all seriousness: if everyone in the world genuinely believed in the worth and dignity of every individual? If everyone everywhere believed in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning? If everyone held democratic ideals and a goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all? Not because someone forced it on them – but because the ideas were so profound and persuasive, and because the people who embodied them were willing to share and in their very bodies and through their every act, they made a powerful show of what it was like to live so ethically, so intellectually and spiritually free?
This is what an evangelist believes: that there is a wonderful idea that should be shared, because it is likely to be gift to others; because it has the power to transform people and lives for the better; because it is an idea that can save something worth saving. Do we believe that Unitarian Universalism is such an idea?
If we believe in Unitarian Universalism as a true good in the world, what then? Must we hand out pamphlets on street corners, or go door to door? When I was at the Minister’s retreat recently, I attend a worship service led by one of my former mentors, Jim McKinley, the minister in Hendersonville, NC. Jim told an old UU joke, which goes like this: “What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness and a Unitarian Universalist? Someone who comes and knocks on your door for no apparent reason.” But he encouraged deeper thinking about this, and I realized that a saving element of Unitarian Universalism is that the true UU is someone who will, first of all, show up; and that exactly what makes the joke funny is what makes it significant: she will not have an agenda. She will be there…just to be there. To be with you.
So if we do not take our message door to door or to airport lounges, does this mean we cannot evangelize? Obviously not. Sharing our good news, the good news of our faith, is much more effective if done in two important ways. One I’ve already mentioned: be the message. Live our faith. Be openminded, respectful of others’ inherent worth and dignity, strive for justice, live a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Whether we mean to be or not, we are the message of our faith. Who we are and what we do tells the world what Unitarian Universalists are like.
But of course, we may be living incognito, and here enters the second piece: we must grow comfortable talking about our faith, about our church, about our spiritual community. John Morgan makes an excellent point, one I hadn’t considered until he mentioned it, but one I very much agree with. He points out: “Sometimes, I suspect, the reason we don’t share our faith is that we are a little embarrassed about how little we know of our own history, much less our own values.” I think he’s right. We have a long and remarkable religious history. We have a strong and exciting current movement – one of the only denominations that is currently growing in number, no matter how slightly or slowly. But it is an unfortunate truth that many members of our congregation have a limited knowledge of or interest in either our past or other UUs outside our own doors. And this, of course, is the kind of stumbling block that holds us back – that holds us, as a community, always and forever at just below 250 members…we gain and lose, gain and lose, and never make our way quite past this particular benchmark because we are comfortable.
It’s an unfortunate human characteristic to hold a preference for “insiderness.” Sometimes, without realizing it, we believe odd things. What might be holding us back from sharing what Unitarian Universalism means to us? Is it because now that we have found it, we prefer it to stay just as it is – the same faces, the same size, familiar? Or perhaps we think – hey, we had to figure out about this place on our own – others can, too! Or perhaps we feel unequipped to deal with other people’s ignorance about our church home, because we ourselves have too many fuzzy areas where we are uncertain from where we came or what, exactly, it does mean to be a UU?
We are not a charming, tiny local restaurant that we don’t want tourists to discover and overrun. We are not a strange group of people with odd beliefs, awkward additions to conversation. We are not a pristine wilderness, best cared for by reducing traffic to and from. We are a brilliant burst of hope on a scary landscape, and by God – oh, yes, another scary word this morning, best to pile them all on at the same time and take the heat at once – by God, we should shout from the rooftops! Or at least chat with friends and co-workers, or find ways to comfortably discuss what we have found here with family, with strangers who invite us to their churches, with seatmates on airplanes who bring the subject up.
When we were interviewing for the position of Administrative Assistant recently – and by the way, I hope that many of you have had a chance to welcome our new AA, Desiree Stuart, who is working hard to come up to speed and make our church life a lot easier! – while we were interviewing, we were asked by candidates again and again, “Tell me more about your church. What do you believe?”
When I teach New UU, we talk about preparing elevator speeches, mini “This I Believe” presentations that can be shared in the amount of time it takes for an elevator to descend about six floors. No, I don’t know how they came up with six floors, but there you have it. If you can hit the highlights in that amount of time, you know what you believe. It’s exactly the same for Unitarian Universalism. Let me share this morning a few UU “elevator speeches.” These happen to come from the May/June issue of the UU World in 2004:
Unitarian Universalists
search for the universal, person by person, path by path.
Jill McMullen
North Shore Unitarian Church Deerfield, Illinois
Believing that reason is
part of faith; action, the result of prayer; inquiry, part of tradition;
knowledge of the past, part of the promise of the future: we gather together to
gain strength in diversity and to worship the seen, the unseen, and the
generosity of spirit we help into being. And we laugh. A lot.
Ruth Bragg
First Parish in Bedford Bedford, Massachusetts
It's a blessing each of
us was born. It matters what we do with our lives. What each of us knows about
God is a piece of the truth. We don't have to do it alone.
Laila Ibrahim
First Unitarian Church Oakland, California
Unitarian Universalism
encourages each of us to understand and apply the teachings of the world's
religions to our daily lives, to seek truth, to promote justice, and live in
harmony with the world around.
Bruce Melville Southwest Unitarian Universalist Church Berea, Ohio
All this comes back to a few simple, integral points. First, the way you live your Unitarian Universalist faith matters. So explore it. Understand what you believe. Take some religious exploration classes, talk to other people, agree to do a “This I Believe” speech with the Worship Committee. Sit in silence. Read books that help you grow. Talk to your Minister. We cannot share what we do not ourselves understand. Second, have faith. Dig deep, and see if you agree that Unitarian Universalism really can make a difference in the world. What if our President were a Unitarian Universalist? What if the people sitting on the Supreme Court were Unitarian Universalists? What if your children’s teachers were all Unitarian Universalists? What if the majority of people you ran into on any given day at least knew what Unitarian Universalists believe, what our faith is really like? How is anyone going to know if we refuse to tell them, or talk about it, except safely tucked away into our UU circles?
When I hear again and again newcomers and visitors say, “I was a Unitarian Universalist all my life, but I didn’t know it!” it makes me so sad. A whole life, and they didn’t know a spiritual home was probably just around the corner? How can that possibly be a good thing?
I am for advertising, for speaking up and out. I accept speaking engagements – I have talked about our church at the invitation of other churches, just last week I told the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors all about our church and our Earth Friendly Fridays and our Environmental Concerns Committee and our 50th anniversary when I was with them to deliver the opening invocation. I am a UU evangelist, though I suppose I may not have mentioned that before, pun intended. Something I am aware of, as I speak out and up and for our fabulous faith, is that we here at the UU church don’t have much more room for inviting hungry souls to join us. We are past 80% capacity; it means that we give off the message that we don’t need newcomers and we don’t need our longtime attenders to bother much with coming to church regularly. Today, at our annual meeting, the Board will be leading us through some exciting possibilities for how to begin to address this concern. It all comes back to the basic question: is what we have here worth sharing? Do we want people to know our good news, that is IS, in fact, possible for different people with different beliefs about religion to come together and share a wonderful community and even worship together? What if you had never heard of Unitarian Universalism, or when you arrived at the door of the church, there was no seat available to you? I hope you will take seriously the incredibly wonderful challenge and opportunity and I would say, responsibility we have to become a home for as many people as need our saving message.
I would like to close this morning with these words about our faith from Edward Schempp. According to the UU World magazine, “
“Unitarian Universalism is a fierce belief in the way of freedom and reverence for the sacred dignity of each individual. With Jefferson we “have sworn eternal hostility against every tyranny over the mind.”
Unitarian Universalism is cooperation with a universe that created us. It is a celebration of life. It is being in love with goodness and justice. It is a sense of humor about absolutes.
Unitarian Universalism is faith in people, hope for tomorrow's child, confidence in a continuity that spans all time. It looks not to a perfect heaven, but toward a good earth. It is respectful of the past, but not limited to it. It is trust in growing and conspiracy with change. It is spiritual responsibility for a moral tomorrow.” (March/April 2004)
Words to remember. Words to share. Amen.