THE PURPOSE DRIVEN UNITARIAN

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 16th, 2005


Just out of curiosity, how many of you already knew who Rick Warren was before you came here this morning? He’s been kinda hard to miss lately. His book The Purpose Driven Life has now sold over 23 million copies, and sales show no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year it was front page news when a single mom from Atlanta, Ashley Smith, convinced an escaped murderer [Brian Nichols] to let her go and turn himself in after she read aloud to him a chapter of the book. Just last month Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, published a flattering eight-page feature article in The New Yorker describing Warren’s twenty-five year old, twenty thousand member, 120 acre campus Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. Among Warren’s many other admirers and collaborators are management guru Peter Drucker, retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch, and publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch.

I first became aware of Rick Warren almost two decades ago, back when I was serving my first little church in Midland Texas, and heard him interviewed (along with another megachurch pastor, Bill Hybels of the Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago) on James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family.” (Back in those days, Midland didn’t have a public radio station, so I tended to get my news and information from slightly different sources than I do today). I was fascinated by what I heard, especially since I knew I was about to go to work outside of Portland Oregon as a new congregation organizer myself. So I immediately sent away for a tape of the program (which put me on the Focus on the Family mailing list for about 15 years). But from that interview I learned how, when Rick and his wife Kay first arrived in Southern California in 1979, they spent several months just asking people who were not currently attending church about what they hadn’t liked about their previous experiences, and discovered that many of the people they spoke with felt that most churches were cold, rigid, and unfriendly places, that the sermons were boring and irrelevant to their lives, and that they were way too concerned about asking for money. And so he set out to create a “user friendly” church that would do none of those things: a church which would feature contemporary music, casual dress, practical messages, and where visitors would be treated like guests, and specifically asked NOT to contribute to the offering.

You have to remember that this was a time when the religious landscape was dominated by “televangelists” like Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim & Tammy Faye Baker, who had learned how to combine the extensive reach of new cable and satellite broadcast technology with the targeted appeal of computer-generated direct mail marketing, and who were beginning to flex their political muscles just as sexual and financial scandal were likewise beginning to chip away at the foundations of several of these so-called “broadcast” ministries. In many ways, the megachurch offered a very different kind of experience from that provided by these high-profile religious broadcasters. At the risk of sounding irreverent, a megachurch is more like Wal-Mart than the Home Shopping Network -- there’s always plenty of parking, someone greets you at the door, and you can pretty much count on finding just about anything you want without having to go anywhere else.

A typical megachurch is organized both from the top down and from the bottom up. Sunday mornings are set aside for large, celebratory “seeker” services featuring lots of contemporary music and drama, multimedia presentations, and of course an inspiring yet practical, down-to-earth message by the charismatic and visionary senior pastor. During the week there are also numerous believer-focused “discipleship” services, typically for groups of about one hundred, which are generally led by one of the many associate ministers. And then there are the cell ministries: small affinity groups of 8-10 which meet in people’s homes and are led by trained volunteers. It all actually looks a little like a Roman Legion, where “cohorts” and “centuries” were the building blocks of a much larger, yet tactically flexible, military organization, which gave the Roman Emperors exactly what they needed to conquer most of the known world.

Megachurches also tend to be independent and non-denominational. And unlike more traditional evangelical churches, they have often jettisoned a theology based on hellfire and damnation for something known as the Prosperity Gospel. In it’s simplest terms, the Prosperity Gospel teaches that God wants human beings to be happy, healthy, and financially well-off, and that these are the “fruits” of a “godly” lifestyle. Yet life itself is full of tests and temptations, “trials and tribulations,” which God sends in order to discipline us, much like a parent would discipline a child, so that we might develop “character” in preparation for the life that is to follow. Those of you with PhDs in 19th century Unitarian history will immediately recognize this as a simplified version of the “doctrine of Probation,” which was very controversial indeed here in Puritan New England, when Henry Ware Sr started teaching it to the students of Divinity at Harvard in 1805. But we are only one of the Prosperity Gospel’s many theological ancestors (and not a particularly appreciated one at that). Still, it helps explain why so much of what comes out of the megachurch movement seems friendly and familiar to us, even if it also feels a little foreign and strange.

Certainly this was my experience when I first picked up my copy of The Purpose Driven Life (back when only 15 million had been sold). I was astonished to discover that Warren’s five purposes: Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry, and Evangelism -- were virtually identical to the five “key areas” of Worship, Education, Fellowship, Community Outreach and Pastoral Care -- around which I have come to base my ministry. Then I remembered that about ten years ago I had also read Rick’s earlier book, The Purpose Driven Church (which only sold about a million copies), and realized that I had probably just incorporated some of his ideas into my own without really giving it a second thought. Or maybe we were just reading the same books, or who knows? Maybe he got his ideas from me! But in any event, at least this coincidence wasn’t quite so mysterious after all.

One of the things that has always bothered me about reading books that come out of the evangelical Church Growth Movement like The Purpose Driven Life is that the authors often seem to be speaking literally about realities which I tend to understand metaphorically. But every once in awhile I have to wonder whether I’m really being fair -- just because they don’t nuance and qualify every little statement about God and Faith and Salvation doesn’t mean that their understanding of these very complex and mysterious subjects is any less sophisticated than mine. I’m certain, for example, that someone who didn’t know me very well, who came here to church and heard me praying after the candlesharing, might initially walk away with a very different understanding of what I believe from what I REALLY believe. And at the end of the day, what does it really matter whether you understand something to be literally true, or only metaphorically true? When it comes right down to living your daily life, it’s still true on some level, isn’t it?

At the foundation of the Purpose Driven life is the notion of surrender, of committing yourself wholeheartedly to something larger than yourself. Warren recognizes the problem many American have with this concept. Surrender is for losers; it’s an admission of defeat. Yet until we become capable of giving ourselves fully to something larger than ourselves, we remain incapable of transcending our own limitations, or achieving anything larger than ourselves as well. Through surrender comes liberation, and the freedom to trust, to help (and be helped), to find a greater meaning than the mere satisfaction of our appetites until we die. We lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, and to become a part of something that is larger than ourselves. Surrender doesn’t make us less than we are now. It makes us more, because it connects us in relationship to one another, and to the powerful spirit of life which has created us all.

The five purposes can all be understood as elaborations on this basic insight. If you have a little trouble with the traditional theological language, try thinking of them as Celebration, Community, Study, Service and Affirmation. Celebration is not confined strictly to Sunday morning. According to Warren, worship is anything that “makes God smile.” He even quotes one of my favorite lines from the movie “Chariots of Fire,” when Eric Liddell explains to his sister why he is first going to compete in the Olympic Games before returning to China as a missionary. “I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” He also asserts something that would have been very familiar to 19th century Unitarian Transcendentalists like Theodore Parker, when he notes that “worship is a universal urge, hard-wired by God into the very fiber of our being....” Fellowship -- or the experience of being in Community -- is the recognition that we are all part of the same “family,” or what we sometimes describe as an “interdependent web of all existence.” The experience of Community is one of reciprocity: sometimes we give and sometimes we receive, sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow. We learn to participate as part of a group, a team, where together we learn to acknowlege our dependence on one another, and how to create together something greater than any one of us might have done alone. Likewise, the act of Study is not merely a process of self-improvement, it is also one of self-discovery, as we explore that part of ourselves which the scripture tells us was created “in the image of God,” and discipline ourselves to follow our best instincts, rather than our worst ones. We become disciplined learners in order to become effective teachers, assisting others in their own process of learning.

Service, or Ministry, is the fulfillment of our calling (or, in Latin, our “vocation”) as people of faith. The highest purpose in life for our 19th century Unitarian forebearers was “to be of use.” Our Puritan ancestors believed that every individual had both a general and a particular vocation: some unique and special gift or talent which God had given us which we are to use in order to make the world better, to be of service to others, and to make God smile in the process. When we seek to serve others, we expand our lives in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine or anticipate before starting down that path. Not all ministry is the responsibility of the minister. We each have a vocation to which we have been called, and through which we find fulfillment by becoming the person God intends for us to be. Or to put it another way, how do you know who you really are until you’ve discovered what you can do, and not just for yourself, but for those who need what only you can give them?

The notion of Evangelism, on the other hand, is something that many contemporary Unitarian Universalists are not especially comfortable with. So we call it something else: Community Outreach, Social Responsibility, Public Witness, Testimony, Affirmation....but the basic responsibility is still to profess our faith, to share with others as freely as we have received, rather than keeping it a secret all to ourselves. It’s true that some of us are both professors and professional Unitarian Universalists. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else should keep their mouths shut, while we do all the talking. What kind of UU church would that be? Sharing our “good news,” announcing to the world by both word and deed that we believe something of value which is worthy of wider proclamation -- this is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to feel shy about, even if we do sometimes feel a little sensitive about the insensitive ways that others may have shared their faith with us. But we don’t need to be arrogant, and we don’t need to be defensive, when it comes to sharing with those we care about something that has been very meaningful to us. We just need to be honest, and sincere, and maybe just a little humble and a little proud, about something which potentially has the power to change both our lives and the world for the better.

I’m going to be returning to many of these same themes again and again in the weeks and months to come. But I want to leave you today with one very practical thought which I hope will make all your lives just a little better. In your participation in this church, and really in everything you do in life, I want you to choose one thing that you do just for yourself, whether it’s a class, or perhaps attending some other activity or program that you find meaningful and enjoyable; and I want you to choose one other thing to do just to be of service to someone else, or to the larger community. And try to keep them roughly in balance. And I think if you practice that one simple rule: one hand for the ship, and one hand for yourself (as the old-time sailors would have put it), you’ll find that you get a lot more out of your experience here, or whatever else you chose to participate in, than you might otherwise. So don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves, and let your hair down, and work and play just as hard as you can. Because then you will also feel God’s pleasure flowing through you, as She smiles while watching you run....