THE STATE OF THE CHURCH (2004)

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday May 16, 2004


Early in my career as a Parish Minister, I got into the habit of preaching once a year, on the date of the Annual Meeting, on the subject of “The State of the Church.” The logic of this seemed obvious at the time, and hasn’t really changed that much. To my mind the only thing more tedious and deadly dull than listening to a traditional annual report is writing and presenting one. But making this subject the topic of a sermon, moving the issue of “the state of the church” from the nuts and bolts context of a business meeting to the inspirational forum of public worship, effectively shifts the focus from one of dry reporting to a dynamic exploration of questions of meaning and value. Rather than looking backwards, it becomes an invitation to look to the future, to examine the purpose and effectiveness of our religious society in the light of a shared and articulate vision of our mission and future goals. Or at least that’s the theory. It could also turn out to be just another one of those tedious and deadly dull sermons that every preacher seems to preach once in awhile, no matter how hard they try to avoid it....

But having said all that, let me just begin by saying that from where I stand, the state of the church looks good. It could be better, of course -- it can always be better -- but it could certainly be a lot worse as well. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of positive energy in the congregation this year, lots of optimism and enthusiasm, lots of good feelings. And of course, for all I know, it’s always like this around here; because, after all , I am still a relative newcomer to Carlisle and the First Religious Society, so there is certainly plenty left for me to learn about this place, and all of you. I was talking with a colleague about this the other day, and she told me that it really wasn’t until after the start of her third year, when she knew that she was really a “settled” minister, and not just serving as another interim. And the literature suggests that it’s typically not until the sixth or seventh year of a ministry that clergy truly “come into their own” as the “leader” of a congregation -- a phenomenon which seems to coincide with the moment that the number of people who have joined the church since the minister’s arrival begins to approach the number of people who have been there all along.

For my own part, I already feel very much at home here. But I’m also kind of hoping that the novelty NEVER really wears off -- that amidst our growing sense of comfort and mutual familiarity there will always be something new to learn, something different to try, some undiscovered territory to explore. And the thing that makes this possible is often simply the recognition that nothing in life is ever truly “settled” once and for all, and while at times this can feel unsettling, it’s also what makes life interesting, what keeps us lively and on our toes. Of course, this insight can sometimes be taken to the opposite extreme as well. There also always seem to be some people who like to shake things up simply for the thrill of the adrenaline rush, because they crave excitement of change for its own sake. But between these two extremes there’s a pretty broad path that we can follow, which allows us to be both creative and innovative while still enjoying the things we have always enjoyed, without getting stuck in a rut.

There’s one other thing I’ve noticed about my experience settling in here, which is that in ever other congregation I’ve served, without exception, I’ve been brought in to serve as a troubleshooter -- there was some specific problem or set of problems that needed to be fixed (or at least addressed), and it was my job to see to it that it happened. This wasn’t really the career I’d planned for myself; things just sort of worked out that way. But one of the big attractions of this congregation was that I liked the things that you were doing here, and simply wanted to be a part of it all -- maybe help you learn to do things a little better, or even just bring my own talents to the party, in the expectation that my contributions would add to the overall quality of the experience. So I’ve been trying to break my old habit of always looking around for problems to be fixed, and to learn instead how to look for new opportunities to be embraced, along with ways that I might best fit in and contribute to what you are already doing well together.

At our leadership retreat last fall, facilitated by our District Executive Lynn Thomas, we tried as a group to identify priorities for my first year of ministry here in Carlisle. And obviously, near the very top of the list was what we are doing right now: our Sunday morning worship service. Any time you add a new member to a team, any kind of team, regardless of how skilled or talented they may be, it takes a little time for the team to really “gel” again-- for the various teammates to get to know one another’s skills and abilities and how they all fit together in a supportive, synerystic and harmonious way. Preaching is obviously a very important part of what I do as a minister: it is certainly the most visible part of my job, and also probably the most time consuming...and although a lot of this work, the writing and the reading, I have to do alone that still doesn’t mean that I can do it all myself or that it happens in a vacuum.

A sermon is just one part of a larger experience of public worship which has a structure and a dynamic all its own. My job as a preacher is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” -- to take what I have learned through my education and experience, about our shared Unitarian Universalist faith, and to examine what is happening in the world in the light of what I know, in such a way that others might find it enlightening as well, not just spiritually or intellectually or in the abstract, but in the place where people actually live their lives. And the context of this activity is a time that we set aside each week to gather together apart from the distractions of the rest of the world, and to reconnect to one another as a religious community, to center ourselves and explore our lives more deeply, share our joys and our sorrows, sing out loudly in celebration of the things that we hold sacred, and then to return to the world inspired and encouraged to put our values and our principles into practice in our daily lives.

This worship, this “liturgy,” literally is “the work of the people” -- something that we do together. And all my ideas -- every one -- ultimately originate from listening carefully to you. If it’s on your mind, eventually I want to get around to talking about it from the pulpit -- not because I want to tell you what to believe, but because “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and our tradition of the Free Pulpit is grounded in presenting to thinking people thoughtful opinions slightly different from their own.

This brings me to what has been a second priority for this first year, which is simply trying to get to know all of you as well as I can. Obviously, this remains an on-going process, complicated by the fact that I don’t always see all of you as often as I would like. My head-counters tell me that the average attendance has been good this past year, although it has dropped off a little here in the spring; I fully expect that next September it will be a little lighter than it was last September (now that the novelty of seeing the new minister has worn off), and that basically by a year from now we will have a pretty good idea of what the new baseline is. And then we will begin to grow the church from there.

Growth in average attendance is the product of two things: an increase in the absolute number of people who attend church, and an increase in the number (or frequency) of times that each individual attends. Population times Frequency: how many, how often. And it is the single most important statistical indicator of the health and vitality of a congregation: more important than formal membership, more important even than the budget. All good things in church begin by people showing up, not just on Sunday morning, but at the various other activities of the church as well. And churches grow when people invite their friends. It’s really just that simple. One of the unanticipated benefits of the activities we have organized this past year to help me meet people is that they seem to have helped many of you to get to know one another a little better as well. I fully expect that we will try to continue to organize these kinds of events far into the foreseeable future.

There are a lot of other things I would like to talk about here this morning, such as our recent pledge campaign, and the efforts we have made together to build upon the work this congregation did with Michael Durrell during Diane’s interim ministry, as well as some of the plans to begin to create a more systematic program of Adult Religious Education here at FRS, together with the development of what are sometimes called “Chalice Circles” -- small, lay-led “covenant group” ministries of six to ten souls who meet together on a regular basis simply to share with one another, in an open yet structured way, their insights and experiences as spiritual seekers. But time is short, and I don’t want to leave here this morning without saying a few words, at least, about the Welcoming Congregation Program.

I have to admit that becoming a Welcoming Congregation wasn’t really something that was very high on my priority list when I was called here. It was (if I can borrow some language from Richard Clarke) something I thought was important, but not very urgent...and I knew that it had been somewhat controversial here, and thus needlessly divisive, and so I was perfectly willing to let it simmer on the back burner for awhile until there was some compelling reason to bring it up again. But we don’t always get to decide the timing of these things for ourselves; sometimes someone else decides to turn up the heat, so that things start to boil over and demand our attention.

Tonight at midnight same-sex couples will at long last have the right to become legally married here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while many (though not all) religious conservatives tend to view this development as either the work of the devil or the product of a sinister conspiracy of activist judges and secular humanists, I suspect that the response of most religious liberals (including Unitarian Universalists) ranges somewhere between benign ambivalence and outright joy. But regardless of how people may feel personally, the principle of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” is now once more, for better or worse, front and center on the battlefield of the Culture Wars, in the midst of what is perhaps the most acrimonious and polarized political campaign of our generation.

There are a lot of misconceptions, right here in this church, about what it means to become a Welcoming Congregation, and while it would obviously be impossible to clear them all up right this second, the most egregious goes something like this: becoming a Welcoming Congregation means taking a vote to change the by-laws to declare that you are a “Gay Church” -- then you fly a Rainbow Flag above the front door, and suddenly anyone who ISN’T Gay is no longer welcome here. I know it sounds silly, but don’t laugh...because I’ve heard it described in almost just so many words on more than one occasion right here in this building, sometimes even by people who were basically in favor of the program.

What the Welcoming Congregation is REALLY all about, is essentiallly a systematic and on-going comprehensive process of Adult Religious Education designed to help churches learn how better to create the kind of safe space where ANYONE can come, along with their families and their loved ones, and talk openly about mundane things like where they went on their summer vacation, and NOT have to worry about about being shunned or ridiculed, or beaten up, or fired from their jobs, or thrown out of their homes, simply because God made them a certain way, and they are tired of always trying to hide who they are from their neighbors and fellow creatures.

The Welcoming Congregation Program is about building mutual respect and trust, along with a tolerance for diversity which is grounded in a better understanding of the value of pluralism, and of the wide range of human experiences that make up the human race. And the reason that it focuses so specifically on the LBGT community is that so much of the so-called “traditional religious values” crowd is so overtly hostile toward them. Thus we are called by our faith tradition to answer that hostility with hospitality, just like it says in the Bible....just like Lot took the two strangers into his home, in order to prevent the male citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah from abusing them, and thereby entertained angels unawares.

I think that it is only natural for human beings, or any kind of animal really, to be suspicious (and maybe even a little fearful) of the unfamiliar. This cautiousness concerning things that we don’t really understand is probably hard-wired into our brains -- a kind of “safety mechanism” which typically errs on the side of caution by keeping us out of harm’s way even when we’re not really sure what the harm might potentially be, or even whether there is any real danger at all. Homophobia is basically just another form of Xenophobia: a fear of the foreign, a fear of strangers. Like all prejudices, it is generally rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, and tends to disappear rapidly in the presence of improved knowledge and increased familiarity. But we all come to this issue at different places on the learning curve, each of us with our own backgrounds and experiences. And as we learn together about one another from one another, our shared experiences eventually drive out the stereotypes and the misconceptions, and replace them with healthy relationships that affirm our similarities as well as our differences, always within a larger context of mutual respect and understanding.

And this is why I’m so confident that once we begin this process in earnest, it’s all going to go a lot more smoothly than you might suspect. Because after a year here, I feel like I am starting to get to know you -- and I know that you are all basically good, decent people: intelligent, curious, open-minded...who care about one another and the world around you, and who want nothing more than to do the right thing. You’re Unitarian Universalists, for crissakes! -- you really do possess the one true faith, but you don’t want to say anything about it because you don’t want those other folks to feel badly about theirs. But let’s not let that keep us from practicing what we preach. Because practice is what keeps a faith like ours alive. And it is through our good example that we begin to change the world, one good deed at at time.