The Real Reason for General Assembly

Sermon

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been to a UUCSS service on the year’s General Assembly. We have them nearly every summer, and if you’ve been attending this church long enough you’ve probably been to one. You can recognize them this way: a group of elated church members run the service, and they talk about all the opportunities and fun that one can have at our Unitarian Universalist Annual Conference. They say things like:

• There were so many UUs, did you ever know there were so many of us?
• We worshipped with 4000 other UUs from around the world, and what inspiring sermons!
• We went to a dozen workshops – such great ideas for our church!
• I never thought about my spiritual development in quite the way that presenter suggested before, and I’m still thinking about it!
• I went to the exhibit hall and I bought a TON of UU stuff, see my shirt? My necklace, my pin, my bumpersticker, my fair trade coffee?
• I’ve never been to that city before, it was so exciting to visit and see the signs welcoming Unitarian Universalists, and we were even in the local news!
• Boy, I know for sure now that I’m an introvert. I want to do nothing more than go to bed for a day – or, I sure am an extrovert, I don’t ever want this to end!

All these are true and exciting things that really happen at General Assembly. Thousands of UUs really do converge on a city like St. Louis, this year, or Fort Worth like last year, or Portland, Oregon, as we will next year. We kick off with a banner parade, and every congregation that has a representative processes into a great hall holding that banner aloft, hundreds of banners – it’s an overwhelming and emotional thing to see.

We meet lots of new people and get to know each other – it seems like the whole city is filled with UUs, which is sometimes like finding kindred spirits everywhere you go, and every so often is more like when you go to your family reunion and you bump into your embarrassing uncle who never really washe ... and we go to workshops and get great ideas for our churches back at home, and then we go to other workshops and are personally inspired, and we worship together in a huge space, and I can’t use better words than those in our meditation this morning, it really does feel like a UU World, for real.

I got to do all these things this year, plus, as a seminarian, I got to attend “Ministry Days”, a new experience for me. But the most important thing that I did at General Assembly is that I went as a delegate for UUCSS. I represented UUCSS – you all – when it came time to vote on issues important to the Unitarian Universalist Association – the denomination – as a whole. So you may now be asking two questions: Why are we delegates voting? And what are we voting on?

To answer the first question – why are we voting – I need to bring out a possibly scary term, and I need you to stay with me for just a minute. The scary term, my friends, is this: Congregational Polity. You may feel your eyes glazing over but you need to fight that, stay with me, it’s not as bad as you think.

Unitarian Universalists have congregational polity. Polity, meaning the government of our denomination, of Unitarian Universalism.

And congregational, meaning that who is in charge in our denomination, who runs our denomination? Congregations. Congregations are in charge, individual churches like UUCSS and the 1040 other churches in North America.

Congregational polity means that any group decision, any denominational action called a UU action, stems either from independent congregations or from those congregations coming together to vote. That is the purpose, in fact, of General Assembly – besides the workshops, besides the camaraderie, besides the shopping, General Assembly is the voting opportunity for the congregations.

Some of you here, especially, perhaps, if you are familiar with the more hierarchical polity of Catholicism or Methodism, might find our system of governance freeing. And you are right, it is freeing.

Because Unitarian Universalists do not have a governing body, no pope, no council of bishops, that speaks to the nation for us, who decides policy for us, who decides what we should believe or how we should worship. We do that ourselves.

No one has installed a minister in our church for us, and no one has moved our cherished minister to another church because that’s in line with denominational principles, as the Catholics or Methodists do. We choose and call our own ministers and we can keep them as long or as short as we’d like.

We also don’t have to worry about a certain faction of our denomination speaking for the rest of us, because they can’t. The denomination can only say what we, the people, tell it to say. It’s congregational polity.

Some of you here, perhaps raised UU, or maybe this is your first religious home, or you never really thought about it before, are wondering what the big deal is. Who cares? You wonder. And you are right too. Because we have control over our own churches’ actions and behaviors, it is incredibly easy to ignore polity altogether, to live in a religious world where only UUCSS matters and the denomination hardly matters at all. Truth be told, this is where most of us at UUCSS live, because outside of our paid staff we don’t have much contact with our denomination at all as a church. This too is congregational polity – it is a polity that is congregationally focused, not denominationally focused, just like we are here at UUCSS are congregationally focused, not denominationally focused.

Some of you here have noted that I said that thousands of delegates come together to vote and you are inwardly groaning. You may be imagining that such a system is slow. Cumbersome. And that it’s really hard to get anything done. You, too, are absolutely right.

Our denominational commitment to congregational polity means that it takes a long time to make decisions. The upside of having that denominational leader, that pope or council, is that they can decide quickly who we are and what we believe in. We Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, need to get thousands of people together to make those decisions, thousands of people, a large percentage of whom like to disagree just on principle!

Yeah, it’s slow. Democracy is that way. What did Churchill once say, that democracy is the absolutely worst system of government, except for all the other ones? It is never a surprise to me that many of the founding fathers of our nation were Unitarians. That same commitment to hearing the voice of the people that our nation preserves is written into our denominational government. We call it …Congregational polity.

Which brings us back to the second question I mentioned earlier: What do we vote on at General Assembly? I’ve already mentioned that we UUs do not have a governing body, no pope or council, who is authorized to speak for Unitarian Universalists on, for example, social issues. At the same time, however, the Unitarian Universalist Association does an incredible amount of work telling the media and our legislators what we believe and what we’d like to be done. And the way they get this information is from the voting process done at General Assembly.

I’ll give you a short version here of the voting process for social issues…At General Assembly, delegates vote on a social issue to take up for three years of study. At the end of that study period, what is called a Statement of Conscience is presented to General Assembly, the final details are hammered out, and then the Statement is presented to the Assembly again for another vote of approval. So at each General Assembly we delegates vote on both a new issue for in-depth study and also on a completed Statement of Conscience that has come out of those three years of study. It is a long and intensive system, but what emerges at the end of it is a statement that can be used by the denomination to tell the world who Unitarian Universalists are and what we believe.

Some of that great work is done right here in DC, at our Washington Office for Advocacy, which represents UU perspectives to the U.S. Congress and Administration on legislative and public policy matters. Yes, this is our own Unitarian Universalists lobbying group, here in Washington telling our national leaders what Unitarian Universalists believe and what we want from them. We lobby Congress!

The following is from the Washington Office’s website: Because UUs are so diverse, it can be challenging to create a statement that speaks for the UUA. To come up with a UUA position statement on an issue, we rely heavily on the democratic processes of the UUA General Assembly, in which all members of congregations have representation. We review past resolutions …that help us establish historical precedents. We also look to the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism, as well US and international law.

So our UU lobbying group, the Washington Office for Advocacy, decides how to lobby based on past Statements of Conscience from General Assembly as well as our seven Principles. That’s how they decide how to speak for Unitarian Universalism on the national political stage.

I’ll throw in a too brief reminder, as well, too brief because it would take another sermon to do it justice. Liberal religion is not the same as liberal politics. Liberal religion, especially ours, is religion of tolerance and openness towards a diversity of religious thought. Sometimes the actions and the proponents of liberal religion look like political liberals, but it’s important that the distinction between the two not be blurred. This is critically important, and I’m very sorry that I can’t elaborate further here, but please keep it in mind.

The Statement of Conscience brought to us this year from the three year study period was on the Threat of Global Warming. I for one was impressed that we UUs had the foresight to pick a topic three years ago that is so pressing today. We’ve had many enormous natural disasters in the past three years. Scientists are rallying to decry the global changes that they are reporting. Al Gore even has a movie out about it! Religions, liberal and conservatives, are coming together over this issue. Nations who normally disagree on everything agree over the threat of global warming to our planet. What could be better than a strong voice from the liberal religions now? Unitarian Universalism could bring a wonderful addition to the international debate on global warming in a time where such debate seems desperately needed.

There was a problem, however, with the Statement of Conscience on the Threat of Global Warming. The delegates at General Assembly didn’t like it. Not because they disagreed with the idea, however, which happens plenty at GA, don’t get me wrong. The delegates didn’t like this Statement of Conscience because they considered it too weak. In a group of thousands of voters, we began a debate over, as one person put it, “whether global warming is awful, very awful, or awfully awful”!

As you can imagine, it was congregational polity at its worst, thousands of people trying to wordsmith a document in one huge committee meeting gone horribly horribly wrong. And the reason we had to do it that way, as our UUA Moderator, Gini Coulter, pointed out, was because we had failed this initiative at the congregational level. We, here at UUCSS, failed this initiative.

The congregational body who studied this issue sent us and every congregation in the UUA eight mailings over the course of two years asking for input on this topic from our church. Only 10% of congregations responded. We were one of the congregations who did not respond. I know this because UUCSS has been without a denominational affairs committee for more than two years, and without a denominational affairs chair for over a year.

Who was here to receive these mailings? Who asked our congregation what we here at UUCSS wanted to say about the threat of global warming, so we could send it back to the study group?

Have we lost the chance to help push the threat of global warming onto public consciousness?

Have we missed the opportunity to tell the Washington Office to tell our legislators that we want the threat of global warming to be dealt with and eliminated?

Have we missed the opportunity to explain our seventh principle, that we UUs respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part?

Did we lose the chance to tell the world who Unitarian Universalists are and what we believe?

It turns out that we did not lose the chance. The aforementioned nightmare committee of 4000 figured out how to make a number of changes to the document, and the document was voted in by the delegates. You can see the final draft on the UUA website, www.uua.org.

The Statement of Conscience on the Threat of Global Warming is now one of the documents that the Washington Office can use to lobby our politicians on our behalf. But how much better could it have been if we didn’t need to scramble to pass it? How much better could the Statement of Conscience been if the fingerprint of UUCSS had been on it? How much could our congregation contribute, for example, to the study/action issue chosen for this year, which is Peacemaking? Is that something we care about here at UUCSS?

A number of speakers here at our church over the past six months have talked about how important it is that our religious values be heard on the political stage. Having our voice heard at the denominational level is more challenging for us congregational politists, but we can’t let that difficulty stop us.

We must rise to the occasion presented by the need, to remind ourselves to accept the responsibility that our freedom commands, so that we can implement our beliefs and change the world we live in. It is our responsibility to do so, and also our great pleasure. To live one’s values out loud is a holy, holy way to live.

If you want to know how you can help Unitarian Universalism on the political stage, then offer to join the denominational affairs committee here at UUCSS. You can do so by talking to me, or to Alexa Fraser, our Volunteer Placement chair, or with Meredith Massey, our Program Council chair. Their email addresses are in the insert in your order of service. Work with that committee, and the UUA, and the Washington Office for Advocacy.

We can tell the world what Unitarian Universalists believe. We can see our UUCSS values at work in the world. You can make this happen. Please do so.

Amen.