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WEDDINGS

This morning we're talking about saving the UUA. Some of you don't know what those initials stand for, so I'll tell you. I'm talking about saving Uncle Uncle Albert. Because we might as well tell the truth– I think he is in a bit of a fix. I think he needs our help. And he is family, so we have to figure out what we're going to do.

Some of you only know Uncle Uncle Albert as a sort of a distant uncle who sends postcards and asks for money. Sends us a strange gift on occasion. He has been known to really be there when we need him. Uncle has written our hymnals, published educational materials for adults and children, publishes a magazine, has an office in Boston, and another in Washington.

Uncle has a long and distinguished history, and it's true that most of his big accomplishments were in his younger days. You know way back in the day– when he had a pistol in his drawer and helped sneak out the slaves.

Nowadays, Uncle is pretty busy, too. But we don’t see him much, we don’t really know what he does with all the money we & the other relations send him. Like almost all UU churches our size, we don’t send Uncle the total amount he wants, we usually send a lot less.

And some years we talk about just cutting him off altogether, just for a year or so, but we figure it doesn’t make sense to cut off our nose to spite our face. So we don’t send him the total of what he asks for.

He never complains, though, just a grumble sometimes. We get a note every year on a postcard. Something like: Was $50 per member last year, need $51 per head this year. --In the faith, Uncle, Uncle Albert.

Sometimes Uncle is a little parochial. He mostly just talks about the Boston area. Every once in a while he exclaims at the goings on in Chicago, Atlanta, or Los Angeles, but it is rare.

I sent him a letter last year, telling him we did the first public gay wedding in the Midwest. But he said he couldn’t update his web page until later. Never did it. I guess one thing led to another, and on he goes.

One thing about Uncle Uncle Albert is that sometimes it seems like he doesn’t have a very long attention span. Every year he wants us to talk about a dozen different social justice issues. Every year, the family reunion is held someplace else, the agenda always changes, there's lots of commotion and meetings, but sometimes things get lost.

A couple of months ago, I sent an email to all the members of the UUA Board of Trustees on behalf of our Central Midwest District Board. And wouldn’t you know it? Half the email addresses were wrong, and a few people were no longer even on the board.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think Uncle doesn’t care much about us, except for those postcards asking for money. But Uncle is pretty busy in Boston. He goes to a lot of meetings.

Many, many meetings, with many, many special interest groups, and they talk about heaven a lot, I guess. You know that's what other folks say about us sometimes– that given a choice, a UU would rather go to a discussion about heaven than actually go to heaven.

Lots of meetings. They even have one special meeting every year for just the staff called the BCM, or Big Complex Meeting.

You can see Uncle every year though. He does a lot of talking at the family reunions, but some folks say he doesn’t appear to listen much– I don’t know if it’s his hearing aid or what.

Sometimes I get kind of ticked off at Uncle, Uncle Albert, but he is my uncle, you know, he’s family. He helped me out quite a bit when I was young. Taught me about the birds and the bees. Like we do now with our youth at Eliot.

Uncle aught me about world religions. Showed me how to figure out how to leave the world a better place. No doubt he’s been helpful.

Did you know that this week was the 40^th anniversary of the march down in Selma, Alabama? You may not have heard this before, but 40 years ago, according to Uncle's web page (http://www.uua.org/news/2005/050311_legacy.html, retrieved March 18, 2005)

Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American civil rights worker, died... after an Alabama state trooper shot him in the stomach at a voting rights march.

Jackson's murder inspired the march from Selma to the State Capitol in Montgomery that was brutally turned back by lawmen.

After the attack, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issued a call to clergy of all faiths to come to Selma to support the marchers.

About 500 Unitarian Universalists, including about one fifth of all UU ministers, rushed to Selma.

One of the ministers, James Reeb, was attacked on March 9 while leaving a restaurant with two colleagues less than a day after he arrived. Reeb died of his injuries on March 11.

Viola Liuzzo, a UU lay person from Detroit, was shot to death March 25 by Ku Klux Klansmen after the Selma to Montgomery march was finally completed.

Back in those days, it was pretty dangerous being a UU and living out your faith. Uncle was a brave figure, Uncle sacrificed a lot. That was back in the day.

But now, some say Uncle isn't doing as much. Too many meetings and not enough results. Some say Uncle Uncle Albert is paying too much attention to the wrong things.

More of my colleagues than I care to count– tell me this. They no longer care about Uncle Uncle Albert. They think he is superfluous, that he doesn't amount to much, that he gets in the way of what we're all about, what we're trying to do.

He doesn't listen, they say. He seems to live in his own little world. It's like the transmit button on his walkie-talkie is stuck– lots of talk, but not a lot of hearing. He doesn't seem to know his button is stuck.

More of my older colleagues say they have stopped caring about Uncle because its just too painful. They say his faults have become a little more painful to endure. I’ve been talking to some of the other family members. And some of us– well some of us think it’s almost time for an intervention.

You know what an intervention is? It’s when you get a couple family members together and they approach the person with the problem. Something like– hey, we know you have a problem with your drinking, and we think its time you get help, and we’re here to help you. Some of us in the family think it’s time Uncle Uncle Albert learn to listen, I mean really listen to us.

We don’t want to mess around with his allowance or anything. We feel a little guilty we don't send him our "fair share" but as you know we've had our own deficit to put in order the last few years. We hope to get a lot closer to our fair share in the future.

But some of us are pretty well agreed that Uncle’s got to change. Some of us are tired of hearing people bad-mouth Uncle on occasion, even if we know there’s some truth to what they say. So, we’re thinking its time for an intervention soon.

Now me, I'm not ready to give up on Uncle Uncle Albert. I've known him all my life. He's been family to me. He's done a lot of good.

You and I would not be here together like this if it hadn't been for him. If it hadn't been for Uncle Uncle Albert's grand-dad, William Greenleaf Eliot would never have left Boston to come here and found a Unitarian Church.

No Washington University. No Mary Institute. A much longer time would have passed before St Louis got public schools– Let's just say the influences of Uncle Uncle Albert have been both deep and broad way out here in St Louis.

So if Uncle's got a problem, he needs us. If he needs us– even if he is getting old and cranky and doesn't realize he needs us– well then, by God, it is time for us to do our part. It is time for an intervention.

Because after that, after an intervention has accomplished its purpose, the real healing and growth can begin. After that, maybe more of my colleagues would start caring again. And instead of griping & politics at the family reunion, we could hold hands, and then jump into the future.

What do you think? You want to go talk to Uncle Uncle Albert with me?

Because he's coming here to St Louis. In June 2006 he will be here in downtown St Louis. And there will probably be over 4,000 UUs here.

By now you know my story about Uncle Uncle Albert is an allegory. There really is a UUA, and it's headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. And it has a long and distinguished history.

In the olden days, Unitarians would gather for an annual meeting in May somewhere in Boston. They called it the May Meeting. And people would talk and share stories of success and failure, and it was a family of Boston Unitarians pretty much.

Then it got bigger. More and more power shifted away from the delegates and toward the UUA board of trustees and administration. The governance shifted from direct democracy to a republican form of government.

Plato, in his Republic, entrusts government to a carefully selected few who are presumed to have special insight into what defines the common good.

And then the UUA trustees began to try and run the affairs of the UUA. But that's what the Administration was doing. And nobody– it seemed– was talking to congregations.

But here's a curious thing– the real name of what we belong to isn't the UUA, it's the UUAC. We are actually a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

What's happened is that there is a disconnect between those who run the administrative side of the Association and the members of that Association. In the last 40 years, the numbers have gotten skewed, out of whack.

I was on the phone this week with a professor at my seminary. He has a book called Unitarian Universalism, A Narrative History. His book says that at merger in 1961, when the Unitarians joined the Universalists and we became the UUA, there were 152,000 adults. Forty years later, the 2005 UUA directory says we number 158,076.

In the olden days, they assessed church dues based on budget instead of numbers, so it may not be quite apples to apples, but no matter how you slice it, it doesn't look good. He says if you add church members and church school membership, UUs have lost numbers in the last 3 years.

In 1962, there were 90 staff at headquarters and out "in the field"– about half one place, half in the other (50 and 40 respectively). Now there are 205 staff, with the big increase happening in Boston. (email received from Erika Nonken, UUA Public Information Assistant on March 18, 2005).

In 1962 the UUA budget was 8.6 million. In 2003 dollars that would be $50.6 million, but this year's UUA budget is under $20 million.

So, if these figures are correct, it means that as a denomination, we're roughly the same size we were 40 years ago with double the staff and half the money. Of course, the US population has increased more than 50% in that time.

There is a lot of speculation as to why this state of affairs exists, but only recently has there been much done about it. I think that the reality is we UUs don't pay much attention to the larger denomination, and we all suffer for it. Because we could be helping out. The UUA could be more useful to Eliot Chapel and to other folks in other places who don't believe a church like ours could exist.

There are two main problems. One is that the current way UUA governance works no longer makes a lot of sense. Another is that the UUA board and administration are paying too much attention to the wrong things.

Those of you involved with lay leadership at Eliot know about what I call "get-in-the-way-governance." It used to be some of our own governance got in the way . It used to say in our bylaws, for example, that all RE Committee members had to be approved by the Board of Trustees. While it may have made sense at one time, it lost its usefulness, we all recognized that, and we changed it.

At one time, the Finance Committee prepared the initial draft budget. Then they said, hey– the Lead Minister and Business Administrator ought to do it, since 80% of the budget is building costs and salaries. So, we changed that, too.

Your Eliot trustees and ministers know that we need to hear from you in order to serve you and to serve our future. For example, our Strategic Planning group ran a series of neighborhood meetings in November to get your opinion and ideas for the short and mid-term future of Eliot Chapel.

I've put various order of service inserts with questionnaires in them to get your feedback on a variety of issues. We have periodic town hall meetings to solicit opinion and advice. I have a Lead Minister's Relations Committee that advises me. The membership committee works hard, the Music Committee, lots of committees regularly seek input as to how we're doing. The board has a personnel committee that works with Reverend Bonnie and me.

We maintain a regular regimen of back and forth communications. We want to know if we are doing a satisfactory or even a good job. We want to be able to say– look, this is what you said you wanted, we came up with programs and services & ministries to do those things and you have evaluated us formally and informally on this. This is a good thing. This is how we know we're being effective– or not.

The UUA board and administration has none of this in place. And it shows. They are out of touch. Last year, a survey of UUA staff showed that 91% felt "that to achieve significant numerical growth the culture of the UUA would need to change significantly;' and "46% of respondents felt that the biggest single obstacle to growth was lack of clarity or purpose." The UUA board's response came across as– well, I hope they get better.

I said that if I were at an Eliot board meeting and we had a survey that showed 91% of our membership said significant change was needed, and that half said we had a lack of purpose or clarity, the meeting would have stopped right there!

You can't get 91% of UUs to agree on anything! Not day or night, not black or white, not show tunes or classical. 91%! That must be a world record. If that had happened here at Eliot, I think we would have thrown the agenda out the window and said– hey! What gives? What's going on? We need to hear from our people.

But the UUA board just moved on to the next thing. They are a good group, the UUA board. They are highly educated. They start work early and they stay late. There is no doubt in my mind that they are hard workers and that their heart is in the right place. But it's like they're painting the wrong barn.

So here's what I think has to happen. We need a feedback loop. We need direct democracy. We need the UUA board to justify the dues increases when they come. We need them to evaluate themselves and the administration as to their own effectiveness, by talking to us.

And when they want our help, they ought to give us the tools to help them out. We need them to set milestones and to report on their progress– real progress, not just the numbers of meetings they went to.

All very interesting you say, but what has this got to do with me? Here's the thing. We can accomplish so much more when we work together than we can accomplish alone.

It was Unitarians and Universalists working together, across state lines, across church lines, that have helped bring about some of the most important social change in the history of the United States.

It was Unitarians and Universalists who preached abolition of slavery, while others pointed to biblical passages condoning it. It was Unitarians and Universalists who crusaded for temperance, and against child labor, instead of complaining about possible damage to the economy.

It was Unitarians and Universalists who pressed for women's and black's suffrage, instead of resisting by saying those two groups were not ready for the privilege of voting.

It was religious liberals like my grand-daddy, the Rev. Thamer Waldo Simer who— along with hundreds of liberal clergy— marched in Selma, Alabama 40 years ago with Dr. King while some in other faiths stressed the biblical basis for racial apartheid.

More recently, when a city clerk in New York state had to stop performing gay weddings, it was Unitarian Universalist ministers who took up the challenge and were willing to be arrested and put in jail for the courage of their convictions.

It has been all of us working together– Unitarians and Universalists and now Unitarian Universalists who have tried to live their faith, to put their principles into action, who have sought to mold history rather than be rolled over by it.

This is the potential and the promise– of lots of UU congregations working together. Our history shows we accomplish so much more when we pool our resources, when we work together. So our Uncle Uncle Albert ought to be coming to us and saying– how can I help? Our Uncle ought to get that transmit button on his walkie-talkie fixed.

And you and I have to get ready. Because there are going to be over 4,000 UUs here in St Louis in June 2006. And there will be tall ones & short ones & fat ones & skinny ones & old ones & lots of teenagers & lots of ministers & pagans & Buddhists & Christians– Oh my! All UU! And most of them sing pretty good. And when you go to church with 4,000 other UUs, it will be an experience you won't soon forget, I promise you.

So, don't think about leaving town that weekend. Think about joining in at the family reunion. And think about how a large congregation like Eliot– with all the wonderful resources & wisdom we have here– think about how we can help Uncle Uncle Albert clean up his act.

After all, he is family. Say Amen! Somebody.

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