Ministry is about bringing a sense of the sacred and the transcendent to everyone.
It is about creating moments where we can experience awe.
It is about creating resilience.
It is about troubling the waters and being Love’s hands in the world.
Singing during worship in College Station. Photo by John Faber.
Worship and Preaching:
Worship and preaching are the reasons why I am a minister. The best worship creates an experience where people get a chance to rest and recharge or to be challenged and affirmed. Someone once described Unitarian Universalist worship as the huddle before going out into the often chaotic world, and I agree with that. It is about creating moments where we can experience awe and perhaps transformation. The best preaching furthers this purpose. My sermons explore challenging concepts, expand our horizons, and provide comfort. I love writing, and I love crafting worship experiences for a community to enjoy and encounter together. Worship also speaks to parts of the worship attender's own life that they might be struggling with, and gives some tools to continue in that struggle. I try to balance the pastoral with the prophetic, the heart with the head. I like creating rituals as well that move us to experience worship with all of our senses.
Checking in with a member after a worship service.
Pastoral Care:
There’s a song I learned in seminary written by the Rev. Burns Stanfield. The lyrics were simple: “Walking, walking with you, walking with you is my prayer.” Pastoral Care is about traveling with people during joyful and sad moments in their life, and going where they could not go alone. But it’s also about a long term relationship, especially in the context of a ministry in a congregation. Pastoral Care in our congregations means randomly checking in with members of the communities that I serve. One of the best things that we can do as well is to teaching contemplative practices which serve to ground people and give them a sense of resilience.
Prophetic Witness and Interfaith Engagement:
The work of social justice, prophetic witness, and interfaith engagement begins with something simple - knowing that people in our community are hurting, and suffering. It begins when oure heart breaks and we seek to rebuild this broken and beautiful world. The work truly happens when we development relationships with those who struggle in oppression and we work to trouble the waters and be Love’s hands in the world. We must realize that we are all in this together—our liberation is bound up together (Paraphrased from the words from a group of Aboriginal activists in Queensland in 1970s). We must focus on reaching across denominational and community lines to work to build the Beloved Community and to love the Hell out of this world (as the Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford, a UU minister in Texas says). We must also work to center the voices of those who are most affected and those whose voices often go unheard, to tell stories that are not often told, and to trouble the waters.
Members of the UUCL Board and me.
Congregational Leadership
Two of the best approaches that I have seen to leadership development can best be described as “Roots and Wings.” If the congregation is located in an area where people tend to put down roots and stay, that might be called a “roots” congregation. In these cases leadership development looks like creating future leaders in the congregation. It is about giving leaders not only the tools, the labels, and the language to best serve their congregation, but also tools that might be useful in the rest of their lives. If a congregation is located in an area that has a constant turnover, such as a college town, that congregation may be more of a “wings” congregation. In that case, the congregation may need to reevaluate what leadership development looks like. In this sense we need to give emerging leaders manageable leadership opportunities, and to provide excellent leadership development classes. In this way, we are growing the future leaders of the congregations they eventually settle in and in the wider Unitarian Universalist movement. It is part of my ministerial role to help the congregation understand if it is a roots or a wings congregation. It is also part of my role to identify future leaders and consider the support I can give them, and to empower the rest of the congregation to support them. It is also important to thank people who are stepping out of long held leadership roles.
Leading the time for all ages at First Parish in Lexington.
Religious Education
After worship and preaching, the thing our congregations are best known for is religious education. The best religious education offerings revolve around 4 Rs—Resistance (learn about prophetic witness and strategies for creating a more just world), Resilience (learn about spiritual practices), Reflection (learn how to make meaning of life experiences), and Religion (learn about our religious heritage, explore our own personal religious journeys and the religions of the world).
It is important to teach our children and youth what it means to be Unitarian Universalist and to get them involved with the practices of congregational life.