The Sunday service is the primary focus of the church, the hub of the community, and the primary experience of church for many members and friends. This is always my biggest area of focus. I love worship! I love the craft of preaching, and the work of weaving together all the threads of a service into one whole that takes a person on a journey.
Preaching is a conversation speaking to the life of the community—the hopes and worries on the community’s mind; its past, its future; the things it doesn’t yet know that it needs to know. Preaching is comfort and preaching is commissioning, it is strategic and prophetic leadership.
At Beverly in the early uncertainty of the capital campaign, I preached stories from the past of how the congregation had done difficult things and thrived when it kept its promises to each other as the most important thing. At a statewide UU revival before the 2020 election, I preached hope and resolve without cheap optimism (link).
My worship is rooted in place: the physical space, the community’s culture and aesthetic, the history and tradition. In the multiracial congregation at First Unitarian, the day after George Floyd’s murder I produced a video message (link) from the staff and preached the wounded reality of white supremacy in America. In 2015 as Black Lives Matters gathered speed, I preached a message that claims my own identity and history and spoke prophetically to the moment and launched the church’s BLM team (link).
As the adjunct professor of preaching at Meadville Lombard Theological School (one of our two UU-identity seminaries) I am grateful each year to bring this orientation into the classroom and teach and learn from my students.
The most succinct mission for church I know is to grow our souls and heal the world. Social justice is a major theme of my preaching. While there are some kinds of power and access that the minister has, the social justice program of a congregation must be owned by the congregation itself or it will not be successful over time. My focus is to cultivate teams within the church doing social justice rather than me being the person doing the work on behalf of the church. At First Unitarian, that has involved supporting a Black Lives Matter team, a Refugee Task force which sponsored a Syrian refugee family (UU World coverage here), and a Criminal Justice team working on cash bail reform and legislative change. At Beverly Unitarian, it has meant supporting Beloved Conversations curriculum inside the congregation and following the lead of community activists in protest.
I speak out directly (for striking teachers, racial justice, and trans rights, for example), and I regularly preach partnership: the most powerful thing any one person can do to make the world a better place is not to go it alone, but to join together with others doing the same work. There is little tangible systemic change we can make on our own—but we can make such change together.
My experience is that the fundamental growth challenge is about belonging. Can the newcomers already walking through our door cross what feels like a wide chasm from outsider to insider? They can share our values and be fed in worship, but if the congregation feels like a club, we will only keep the club members as we dwindle.
Community building—of existing members, of newcomers, and between newer and older members—is one of the most important things a church can do to be healthy, to survive, and to grow. Hospitality demands that we inside the church carry the weight of actively welcoming the newcomer and inviting them into community. The congregation is one of the few places in the world where deep and honest connection can bridge age, race, class, gender, and education.
Newcomers need a friend, a job, and to be fed spiritually. In a medium or large congregation, people’s main relationship with me is through the services. My role is to keep connected with our mission and reflect and embody the best of who we are in a great Sunday service experience. My role is to support the membership committee in doing membership work which is owned by the whole congregation. That means connecting them with the tools, best practices, and training to be effective. I believe growth is essential not for its own sake, but because we have a way of living in community which is life-changing and life-saving. The best way to keep it is to give it away.
I believe a UU religious education program for youth must, over time, encompass:
- an ethical foundation for lifelong decision making and commitment to heal the world;
- a toolkit of spiritual practices including prayer, meditation, deep listening, and the worship service;
- religious literacy with other traditions;
- a UU identity we can experience as personal belonging to the larger story of Unitarian Universalism—a people with a shared past and shared future.
To translate those ends into a relevant, accessible, scalable church programs, I partner closely with religious education professionals and volunteers.
I love storytelling in worship and connecting with kids. An unexpected gift of pandemic has been leading Time for All Ages stories with my dog Pilot (see a few here). In intergenerational worship, it’s an exciting challenge to create engaging playful age-appropriate experiences, like an Earth Day transformation of the sanctuary into the Lorax’s forest (link), or hoisting “stars” high up with helium balloons to talk about being made of starstuff (link).
Parents are the primary religious educators of their children – the church gets those kids just for an hour or two each week! Intentional spiritual growth and development of parents as religious educators is an RE goal and a goal of the church as a whole.
My preaching and worship leadership is the principle channel for care and spiritual guidance. After the 2016 election, I organized an interfaith service of solidarity and hope: I preached to a full house that we were not gathered only for a consolation but for a commissioning into the work that would come, and I invited them into a ritual comingling of their hopes and fears.
In an emergency, I drop everything and go. I once got a Tuesday morning phone call from a couple. We didn’t know each other, they were new to Chicago, but one partner’s mother had been active in a UU church in Texas and urged them to call. Their infant daughter Audrey had died soon after she was born. I talked with them. I listened. I sat with them in the answerless silence of the moment. I led the small service of interment in the church crypt the next day.
I meet with parishioners to provide pastoral care. If the needs are beyond one or two sessions, or if they need clinical expertise, I refer them out to a list I maintain of respected therapists and resources. But my capacity and reach dramatically expands by equipping and supporting others to do one-on-one visiting through lay pastoral care providers. At Beverly during the pandemic, the membership committee organized pods of 6-8 people to check in and connect with each other weekly. They knew that 90% of pastoral care is showing up: being present, listening, attentive, and kind—and for moments of crisis I was there as needed.
The roots of our polity are not wholly isolated independent congregations but interdependent communities in relationship with each other. As a denomination, I believe we are in the process of returning to our historical polity which balances autonomy and connection.
I am active in my UUMA Chapter, a past president of the cluster, and regularly attend our district meetings and retreats. I am a teaching pastor, ministerial formation network advisor, seminary professor, and steered the creation of an endowed internship program at First Unitarian Chicago. When I encounter a problem I can’t solve, or a dilemma I can’t see a way through, I pick up the phone and call colleagues.
During this era of pandemic, I contribute content to cross-congregation Facebook groups (link) and colleagues. I preach and teach regularly on UU history (link) and identity, and our part as members of a larger body, not just as purely autonomous individuals or congregations.