CREED, COVENANT AND DENOMINATION
A Reflection on Contemporary Unitarian Universalist Polity and Spirituality
A Paper Delivered at the Fraters of the Wayside Inn to Answer a Charge to Explore the Question, “What is Wrong with Congregationalism?”
25 January 2010
Frater James Ishmael Ford
Fraters of the Wayside Inn
Senior Minister
First Unitarian Church
Providence, Rhode Island
What’s wrong with congregationalism? The short answer is just about everything.
Of the twin errors of mistaking the forest for the trees or the tree for the forest, congregationalists almost always think the tree is the forest. This bias of the congregationalist keeps the focus local, which can be good, but in practice tends to mean the issues dealt with are parochial. A consequence of this myopia is an inward turning, not in the sense of hard introspection, but rather manifesting as a disinterest in what happens beyond the walls of the congregation. As a consequence higher aspirations, any larger vision tends to take a back seat to pleasing what are too often seen as consumers, stake holders, or only slightly better, constituents. I’m sure this attitude has a place in commerce; but if it becomes all we’re about within a religious enterprise, it dooms it.
There are other problems, as well. Within our tradition people have confused congregationalism with Unitarian Universalism itself. From this collapsed UU congregationalism people have come up at least with two different senses of what this means. For some congregationalism is the summum bonum, while others feel it is a tragic mistake, condemning us to being mere witnesses to the currents of spiritual history.
In fact I have considerable sympathy with the former view, but to get there requires a little, as some like to say, deconstruction. So, I will attempt over the next half hour or so to untangle congregationalism from liberal religion itself, take a look at the phenomenon of congregationalism, again acknowledge its shortcomings, and finally suggest how nonetheless it has a great deal to offer to us within our liberal spiritual enterprise.
Now we need to define some terms. First the project we share as Unitarian Universalists is an association of a tad more than a thousand congregations scattered around the country and a few outside that together maintain an office in Boston and sponsors an annual conference. Almost anyone not a UU would call this a denomination. However, as we know, the word “denomination” is a hot button for some of us.
Those who find that word problematic seem to think the word has something to do with authority, or central control, which they adamantly reject. “We are an Association not a Denomination,” they proclaim with great vigor and more than a little heat. Of course they are right in so far as we are an association of congregations, that is, we follow a congregational polity with a particularly weak center. However “denomination” when used to describe religious organizations, simply refers to a coherent or for us more or less coherent body with some common identifying characteristics. At least that’s what it means in Merriam Webster and other standard dictionaries, and in ordinary English usage.
I believe what this heat around the name reveals is a particularly strong adherence to the principals of congregationalism. Which is one of the three ways religious institutions in the West organize themselves. Actually one can extend these three models to almost all religious institutions. The Episcopal model provides the strongest center, the symbol of the community becoming a single person. A Presbyterian model maintains authority through a relatively smaller body of elders. And Congregationalism makes the congregation the center. Modern English speaking congregationalism dates from the sixteenth century and the theories of the theologian Robert Browne who thought he detected congregationalist principles in the Christian scriptures. And the continental Anabaptists evolved congregationalist structures independently during the Reformation. Those who like to study such things suggest currents of Christian monasticism and other pre-reformation institutions were precursors to this theory of religious organization. That should be enough historical background; this is not a history of the origins of congregationalism.
What is true is that we Unitarian Universalists are congregationalists. No doubt. That is the congregation is the legal center of our organizational structure. Pretty much period. The larger associations to which we as congregations belong, our districts and the Association centered at 25 Beacon Street in Boston, are strictly voluntary and any individual congregation may withdraw at any time, and even during the tenure of a congregation’s membership in the Association its financial support of central organizations remains strictly voluntary. Hence the lovely ribbons worn by representatives of congregations at the General Assembly proclaiming fair share, substantial improvement and the like. It’s as close to coercion as the center can exercise.
For organizations larger than single unaffiliated churches we are definitely at the purer end of the congregationalist spectrum. In addition to our roots, which come out of the English dissenting movement, congregationalist denominations in North America include the various Baptist conventions as well as the community church movement. The mega church phenomena as well as the emergent church movement have congregationalist elements, as well. And are well worth examining, although not here, today.
An example of a purer congregationalism than ours could be the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, the rump that re-organized following the merger of their larger majority into what became the United Church of Christ. The “triple C” has only the most rudimentary of denominational structures, and barely even has a denominational headquarters. Although, and I think interestingly, even with them the right to ordain, which is rhetorically reserved exclusively to the congregation, by their covenant, calls for the assent of several other congregations through an established process for any given church to exercise that right.
The principal departure from a pure congregationalism within our Association is, as it is for the triple C, in how we deal with professional ministry. We move farther than they from a pure congregational control over ordination, or more precisely, over professional ministers. While our rhetoric asserts only the congregation has the right to ordain, we have an extra-congregational system for guiding ministerial formation and training, for authorizing ministers and for disciplining them and on occasion for dismissing them. Through the central offices a system for managing retirement funds as well as providing insurance, while over the years spotty in practice, has been held as a goal, and there these goals themselves conspire to bring the ministry if nothing else under a single unifying institution. And as long as the member congregations continue to support the aspiration of the center that they limit their calls to fellowshipped ministers, this formula will continue.
As limited as this departure from a purer or barer congregationalism as this may be, there are those for whom this is the thin edge of popery, or at least some feared central higher authority. It was once suggested to me that during much of the twentieth century those who cleaved most radically to as bare a congregationalism as possible were our Christians. It allowed them a caveat while still belonging to a denomination that had cut its moorings to the Christian tradition. Yes, we belong to a non-Christian association, but it is merely an association, of which our Christian congregation is a member. It looks to me today as we move into the deep waters of a reclaimed spirituality, as yet not clarified, many of our hard humanists are now saying much the same thing about the sanctity of a primitive congregationalism. So, calls for a bare congregationalism seems likely to be with us for a while longer.
At the same time there are those who find within the institution of congregationalism a form of, if you will, post-Christian spirituality. I have a dear friend who when he was in seminary presented me with the outline of a thesis he hoped later to develop into a book. The core of his thesis was based upon his feeling that congregationalism lay right at the heart of any Unitarian Universalist spirituality. There were all sorts of corollaries to this thesis, including how one could not in any genuine sense be a Unitarian Universalist unless one actually belonged to a UU congregation. He allowed for no, as one recent commentator has put it speaking to this attitude shared by many, “free range Unitarian Universalists.”
My friend expounded on this with considerable enthusiasm. While I thought he had some very interesting ideas and as I’ve already suggested in fact had some thoughts along similar lines, myself, I found the argument that one must embrace a congregational polity in order to be a Unitarian Universalist problematic. After all both English and Irish Unitarians organize along Presbyterian lines and continental Hungarian speaking Unitarians follow a modified Episcopal polity rather weakens the thesis. And as for North American Unitarian Universalism, there are those free range UUs. And within that challenging fact where pollsters can find well over half a million people who identify as UU, while our own internal statistics reveal no more than two hundred thousand or so who actually attend and belong to our churches. This suggests there is something wrong with claiming one must belong to an institution when more than half those who identify with the tradition do not belong to any congregation.
At the moment among the strongest tensions between us seem are those between those of us who advocate as strict a congregationalism as possible and those who see flaws in that congregationalism and wish for something else, more centralized which they perceive as more nimble, more able to act upon opportunities as they present. Those holding this later view see how pure congregationalism tends to an atomism, which is unhealthy for those in the congregations as well as for any aspiration for the movement to grow.
Frankly, I think both these perspectives are largely of limited interest, confined to the ruminations of the clerical class. The actual congregations are going in a somewhat different direction. At least so it seems to me. They are congregationalists, they accept modifications, particularly regarding the nurture of professional ministers. And, and, they are beginning to articulate a desire to grow.
Which, of course, begs any number of questions. Chief among them what are we that we think we should grow? And so another whipping boy for us is the word “movement” itself. As we are quite small and do not seem to be growing there is an easy challenge to that word. Of course it also means direction, and here I will use that word to mean us, we as a generality in motion, with an aspiration for growth hanging somewhere in the background.
But, really, why growth? Now within the circles in which I move I find often the argument for church growth has to do with budget constraints and hopes for doing more and better work. As a working parish minister, I understand those blandishments. But, as it says in the book of Proverbs, “Where there is no vision the people perish.” The truth is as a collective we’ve moved out of the Christian camp. So, as resistant as some of us are to the project, I suggest we need to look hard to see what our vision actually is. Particularly in light of the second half of that sentence in Proverbs, “…he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” If we’re not Christian, and we can say today, if we’re not humanists, what law is it that for us that brings us to joy and happiness? What law is it we hold that heals the human heart and which allows the transformation of human lives?
Are we simply an aggregate of congregations with nothing but history in common? Which is the assertion of some of us at the purer Congregationalist edge. Or, do we represent some evolution of spirituality that has distinctive characteristics, which can be described, engaged and proclaimed? It is my thesis we do represent something dynamic and new. And, further, I suggest this unifying principle can be found within the history of our congregationalist movement.
From very near the beginning our project rejected creedal assertions. We felt the spirit was free and so human beings should be free. And so rather than finding some formula of belief that people needed to adhere to in order to belong to one of our congregations, we instituted covenants. For us a covenant was originally a three-way contract, inspired by the founding myth of Judaism as a covenant between God and a people. For us the covenant became a contract made between people, between you and me, before God. In our times that word God has been examined and pushed challenged, rejected and embraced, but in some form remains critical for a covenant, rather than a bare contract. That word God at its deepest core, for the purposes of coming to a covenant, has been as an articulation of our highest, or if you prefer, our deepest aspirations, informed by intuitions of some larger of which we all are a part.
I suspect as an institutional expression this begins in the middle of the twentieth century more or less with the consolidation of the country’s two most liberal Christian denominations into the Unitarian Universalist Association. Well, already both denominations had largely separated from their Christian origins. But most important for the development of an emergent liberal theology, I believe, was that American Unitarianism was staunchly congregationalist while the Universalist Church of America while having presybeterian elements, was also essentially congregationalist. The resultant Association, of course, was, is our purer congregationalism.
Our congregationalism with its theological focus of covenant has allowed us to explore as individuals within our communities what it means to be human spiritually. While there are other factors involved as well, it is also part of how we were able to move beyond our Christian origins in ways not happening in the British Isles or on the European continent. Now, don’t get me wrong; we owe an enormous debt to the Christian tradition. We owe nearly as much to Judaism. And, at the same time something has emerged that allows for a continuing Christian or Jewish expression, but in general is not either. And I believe it is found within congregational covenant. The first flowering out of this covenant of presence in the face of our deepest intuitions was as humanism, a naturalistic spirituality that embraced the human mind and its possibilities as central to the enterprise. And now after nearly a hundred years another shift has taken place.
The most notable expressions of this has been how feminism and earth-centered perspectives have infused our congregations, and how many people who identify in some manner with Buddhism have come to see themselves, in my case, ourselves, as Unitarian Universalists. A dialogue has taken place, is taking place, where no part of the past has been lost, I believe, but something new and larger has emerged. There has emerged out of this what I identify as a rational mysticism, a grounded way of the heart. Taken together, I call it the new Universalism. And I believe this has all been able to happen because of our congregationalism and congregationalism’s way of covenant.
My hope for our association is that we will come to consciously acknowledge the movement of the heart that has birthed this new universalism, a perspective that indeed can heal the individual heart and which calls us to engagement within the world. This new universalism, nurtured within our congregationalism has been articulated within our call to hold up the preciousness of the individual, while at the same time acknowledging how the individual exists only within a net or web of relationships. All this, I believe, brought together through a free and at the same time responsible engagement with the quest for deepest insight.
Where next, who knows? I suspect an ever-deeper dialogue with Buddhism, as well as the progressive perspectives in Hinduism and Taoism. I think of all religious traditions we’ll probably most closely follow the currents of contemporary psychology as it investigates the shape of the human mind. I suspect this will eventually manifest in a reformulation, as we’re already seeing, of traditional Western religious language. The next steps, again as we’re already beginning to see, will include the rise of conscious spiritual disciplines, either adapted from other traditions such as Insight and Zen or birthed within our own communities such as the Small Group Ministry model.
And with this, I believe, the next step is evangelism, sharing our good news of this new Universalism with a hurt and longing world.
Where this will end up, who knows?
But I feel a great sense of hope.
And this has all evolved directly, I believe, out of our congregational way.
Thank you.
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