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“The
Crisis in UU Leadership” |
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Good morning. I want to thank you very much for inviting me to speak here at your beautiful Fellowship. It has been several years since I have been here and for quite some time, my good friends Rebecca and Fred Schaafsma have been inviting me to come and I am delighted that we were finally able to work it out this summer. I am also delighted to visit at this very exciting and challenging time in your congregation’s history. I know that Rev. Belcher was your first called minister and now after – what is it, 15 years – you are in the search process to call a new minister. I am sure with your Search Committee and the assistance and guidance of your interim minister, Rev. Don, you will be successful. This past week, I took some time to look at your web site, I particularly enjoyed reading your history. I realized that our congregations have much in common. The Brighton congregation began eight years ago because two people in the Brighton area wanted a UU presence in Livingston County, and through their leadership they made it happen and we were chartered with the UUA in 2000. We have grown to 100 members and 50 children in our religious education program. We are still meeting in a rental facility but hope that that will change this year. We are exploring two options for a permanent church home, and the congregation will decide in September. Your congregation has two people also that made it happen for you - MaryAnn Force and Janice Park - without their leadership you might not be here today. The other thing that I enjoyed reading was your Fellowship’s goals. You have set for yourself, six very ambitious goals, starting with providing life span religious education to developing a strong sense of community within the Fellowship. And, just like in the infancy of your Fellowship, new leaders will need to emerge to facilitate the success of your goals and dreams. So it is in all religious communities across the country – not a single one prospers without leadership. And so this morning, I would like to address my personal concerns about leadership within UU churches – or, more to the point, the lack of leadership in UU churches. In order to do that, I want to share with you some information about what is happening in organized religion in the United States in 2005. We may find this information appalling, but we, as a denomination, need to know what the current religious trends are. As a UU minister, serving a congregation in Livingston County, Michigan, I have first hand knowledge of these findings. If any of you read the article two weeks ago in the Sunday Detroit News about Livingston County – you would know that it is 98 percent white and Livingston County residents like it that way – and are not afraid to say so. It is home to former Clan members and the Michigan Militia. located 45 miles from detroit, they are not suburbia but exurbia. And, most significantly, it is the home of thousands of Evangelical Christians. Many of the churches in Livingston County are modeled after the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois – a mega church with more than 21,000 members. a fact about willow creek that I find amazing is that To accommodate all the cars on Sunday morning, Willow Creek’s parking lot was designed by the same architects that designed the parking lot for Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Willow Creek has a $48 million yearly budget and $143 million in net assets. Their senior pastor, Bill Hybels founded Willow Creek in 1975. They employ 427 people and have 10,000 volunteers. As a member of the Brighton Clergy Association, I am the only non-Christian in the group. The mainline Protestant churches and the two Catholic Churches are considered the liberal religious communities in Livingston County. And with the exception of the Catholic Churches, the mainline Protestant churches’ numbers are dwindling – which mirrors what is happening across the country. The evangelicals are coming on strong. They currently hold almost 30% percent of the U.S. population in religious affiliation. Roman Catholics come in second at 22%. In a recent report in Business Week magazine, we discover what is behind their success – and it’s not just that they have Jesus. What they have is CEO’s and Harvard MBA’s mapping out their business plans. I don’t know if any of you have had an opportunity to see the newest face in televangelism – the Rev. Joel Osteen. Now when I see him on television, I think “snake oil salesman” – but apparently I am in the minority. Pastor Joel is one of the new generation of evangelical entrepreneurs transforming their branch of Protestantism into one of the fastest growing and most influential religious groups in America. His runaway success is modeled unabashedly on the business model. He borrows tools ranging from niche marketing to MBA hiring to lift his share of U.S. churchgoers. And he’s not alone. Many of the evangelical pastors focus intently on a huge potential market – the millions of Americans who have drifted away from mainline Protestant denominations or simply never joined a church in the first place. I thought that this group – the unaffiliated, which makes up 16% of the population, was to be our target market for Unitarian Universalism. Unfortunately for UUism, the Evangelicals are doing a more effective job of getting their message out. So successful are some Evangelicals that they’re opening up branches like so many new Home Depots or Subways. This year, the 16.4 million member Southern Baptist Convention plans to open 1,800 new churches using, by the book, niche marketing tactics. They have cowboy churches for people working on ranches, country music churches, even several motorcycle churches aimed at bikers – I’d better not let my husband Charlie know about that one. Branding whizzes that they are, the new church leaders are spreading their ideas through every available outlet. A line of Biblezines packages the New Testament in glossy magazines aimed at different market segments – there’s a hip hop version and one aimed at teen girls. Christian music appeals to millions of youths, some of whom otherwise might never give church a second thought. In Brighton, an Evangelical Church has built an in-door skate board facility to attract kids. They need only attend an orientation program at the church to gain entrance any time they like. California mega-church pastor, Rick Warren’s 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life has become the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time, with more than 23 million copies sold. Evangelicals’ eager to embrace the corporate style growth strategies is giving them a tremendous advantage in the battle for religious market share. In his book entitled: “The Churching of America 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy” Roger Finke writes: “A new Pope has given Catholicism a burst of global publicity, but its nominal membership growth in the US stems largely from the influx of Mexican immigrants. Overall, the Catholic Church’s long term decline in US attendance accelerated after the recent sex abuse scandals, the severe priest shortage and parish churches and school closings. The so-called mainline Protestants no longer dominate as they did in 20th century America.” The large denominations – including the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church – have been shrinking for decades and have lost more than 1 million members in the past 10 years alone. In contrast, Evangelicalism’s theological flexibility gives it the freedom to adapt to contemporary culture. They are unencumbered by any bureaucratic hierarchy – their attitude is – if you have a vision for ministry, you just do it.” Well, with such low barriers to entry, the number of Evangelical mega-churches – defined as those that attract at least 2,000 weekly worshippers – has shot up to 880 from 50 in 1980. It is calculated that a new mega-church emerges in the U.S. an average of every two days. As Unitarian Universalists, I think we have all experienced the triumph of Evangelical Christianity – it has profoundly reshaped many aspects of American politics and society. Historically, much of the U.S. political and business elite has been mainline Protestant. Today, President George W. Bush and more than a dozen members of Congress, are Evangelicals. In the 1960s and 70s prominent Evangelicals like Billy Graham kept a careful separation of pulpit and politics. That began to change in the early 1980s when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority to express Evangelicals’ political views. Today, many Evangelicals hope to expand their clout even further – they plan on taking their views to Corporate America. Some mainline Protestant leaders have spoken out – they remind the Evangelicals that Jesus was not a capitalist; check out what he has to say about how it is to “get into heaven if you’re a rich man.” Nevertheless, controversial leaders like Osteen continue to preach “the prosperity of the gospel.” They endorse material wealth and tell followers that God wants them to be prosperous. When queried about their position on materialism, the Evangelicals will say that they are just satisfying demands not met by traditional churches. They say that their market research shows that non-church goers said that churches were full of hypocrites and were boring. So they have designed churches to counter those preconceptions, with lively multimedia filled services in a setting that’s something between a rock concert and a coffee shop. Well, what do we as Unitarian Universalists make of this most recent phenomena in religious life? We can, of course, ignore it. Actually, I think that is what many of us have been doing anyway. Perhaps we thought it was a passing phase and would eventually go away – and it might, but not in the foreseeable future. Or we could really take a long and hard look at what makes them successful and adapt some of the relevant techniques to our own UU churches. Unfortunately, my experience with liberal religious communities is that in the face of overwhelming evidence of this type – we get defensive. We say things like “well, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.” Or we say “I like small churches because I want to know everybody.” “We’re a family here, we would be uncomfortable if our family got to large.” “We are a democratic unit, no one person is in charge, we are all in charge.” For most of our history, these attitudes have prevailed in UU churches – and consequently, our two largest UU churches in Michigan have around 800 and 600 members respectively. 800 and 600 – numbers like those barely give us bragging rights in religious circles. For years the reasons given for our numbers being smaller than so-called traditional religious communities is that our theology (or lack there of) or our philosophy of life is just not attractive to the average person. We are, after all, a thinking person’s religion. We are, as a religious movement, demographically, white, middle to upper middle class, college educated and highly individualistic. We are free- thinkers and come-outers from traditional religion – largely Christianity and Judaism. So we have come to believe that we have nothing to learn from these charlatans of religion and we hold fast to the belief that we have maintained our religious purity. So intensely do we hold to our individualism that we defy anyone to lead us. And yet, leadership – effective leadership is just what is needed. Contrary to what many UU’s think – leadership is not a bad word. No UU church would be here today, were it not for someone taking on the role of the leader. But why does it have to be such a painful process within UU churches? Why do we continually undermine the very people who are working on our behalf? I have a story to share about my experience with the American Humanist Association. I was president of the AHA in 1990 and prior to that served on the Board for a number of years. It was a fluke that I was elected because there were few women in the AHA and even fewer who ever held office. The AHA has, from its inception in 1940, attracted white males over the age of 65 who are highly individualistic free thinkers. As with all organizations, they were constantly bemoaning the fact that they weren’t growing and attracting younger people. So we hired a consulting firm to do a demographic study of our organization – who were we and who were we attracting. Well, a few months later they came back with their findings – we were an organization of white males over the age of 65 who were highly individualistic free thinkers. What a surprise – but what happened next was the cliché. The 25 or so white males over the age of 65 sitting around the board table said that the study was WRONG. That they didn’t do the survey correctly and their findings were not correct or relevant. The entire study was thrown out – now what is the real tragedy of their behavior is that the study provided them with their target market – there is certainly no shortage of older people in the US – but they refused to accept someone else’s appraisal of who they were. So they shot the messenger and to this very day remain a 5,000 member organization after now 75 years. We UU’s very often make the same mistakes. We do not like to accept someone else’s expertise. We have a difficult time accepting that we don’t know everything – that we can’t do everything on our own. Consequently, we elect people from our congregations to work on our behalf and then give them a hard time when they are presumably doing their job. We say, “now wait a minute, you are making decisions that I don’t personally care for.” We don’t take into consideration that those decisions might be needed for the betterment of the entire congregation not just our own personal needs. Of course, none of this is meant to be mean spirited or divisive. But what it is - is non-productive. Whether we are questioning the leadership at the national level – our UUA president or moderator – or whether we are questioning the leadership of the chair of the Ministerial Search Committee – unless we are prepared to do a better and more effective job – which means we are willing to accept a leadership position – then we need to learn to be good and faithful followers. Being a productive follower is every bit as important to our religious movement as being a good leader. That is what I believe we can learn from the mega-church model. We need to nurture and support our leaders when appropriate, and then learn to be good and faithful followers. I don’t believe we have a crisis in UU leadership – the underlying issue is and perhaps has always been, our willingness to let anyone lead. So may we be wise enough to know what effective leadership can do to allow Unitarian Universalism to be the force in liberal religion that we so desperately need. May we learn to trust one another and always speak the truth to one another in love. So be it. Sources used in the preparation of this paper: businessweek, may 23, 2005 by: William C. Symons |