Here’s the outline of the workshop on Multigenerational Communities of Faith I presented at last weekend’s Prairie Star District Annual Conference and Meeting in Kansas City. Twenty-two or so folks from around the district joined me on Saturday afternoon. We began with this quote from Mary Pipher: “Thirteen-year-olds need other people who aren’t 13 years old, and 80-year-olds need people who aren’t 80.”

 

I said that I believed that this was true on an intuitive level, but that I didn’t have any empirical evidence for it. So the workshop would refer to bits and pieces of information that I hoped added up to a case for encouraging multigenerational communities of faith.

 

First, we looked at what those words meant. I referred to Barry Andrews’s essay in the Essex Conversations (see last week's post) for the definition of faith that I found most useful. Then I passed out the Vision Statement from the UUA’s Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group (see Looking to the future...) as an example of what faith development might mean for children, youth, and adults in our congregations. Then I shared some quick thoughts about James Fowler’s stages of faith (see Fowler Stages of Faith) to give us a sense of how we might plan our multigenerational programs to address the various faith development needs of those who come to our communities.

 

I then moved on to the word community. I shared this passage from Diana Garland’s essay “Community: The Goal of Family Ministry”:

 

We hardly think about or recognize community until it is changed, or we leave. Upon return after a long absence, the sights, smells, and greetings from familiar people may flood us with emotion. All these point to the familiar niche that community is. It consists of people, organizations, and physical environment that keep us from depending solely on the persons within our family to meet all our personal, social, physical, and spiritual needs, and who communicate, "This is your place; you belong here."

The African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" became a political slogan pointing to the importance of community for children, but it does not quite go far enough. All persons, both children and adults, need community. Because children are dependent on others for their survival, their vulnerability in the absence of community is more apparent. As James Garbarino has pointed out, children are like the canaries miners used to take with them into mine shafts. Canaries are particularly sensitive to poisonous gasses, and if they succumbed, the miners knew the environment was dangerous (Garbarino, 1995). Like canaries in mine shafts without adequate fresh air, children "succumb" without adequate communities of nurture and support. Adults, too, however, need to live in community. Some seem to need community more than others, but even self-sufficient adults seek the company of others and need a community when they become ill, injured, or threatened.

 

Next, I talked about the kind of community we want to see in our congregations, namely, the Beloved Community, and I mentioned Tom Owen-Towle’s forthcoming book Growing a Beloved Community: Twelve Hallmarks of a Healthy Congregation as an example of such a community (see also my April 13, 2004 post), as well as the Covenant of Beloved Community from All Souls UU Church in Colorado Springs.

 

Finally, I offered my definition of multigenerational (see my post from April 6, 2004), as well as James Gambone’s work on Intergenerational Dialogue and the five living generations as a way to begin intentionally engaging ourselves in developing truly multigenerational communities of faith.

 

I closed the workshop with these questions:

Suppose a family came into your congregation comprised of the following members: two parents, an older teen from one of the parent’s first marriage, an adopted adolescent, a toddler, and a grandparent who had recently lost his or her life partner. What programs do you already have in your congregation to attend to this family’s need for community? What programs do you have in your congregation to address the individual faith development needs of the members in this family? What programs could you add to what your congregation currently offers to attend to this family’s need for community? What programs could you add to what your congregation currently offers to address the individual faith development needs of the members in this family?

 

We shared a lot of ideas near the end of the workshop, ranging from Wednesday night programs for all ages to multigenerational social justice activities. I’ll be presenting this workshop again at the UUA’s General Assembly this June in Long Beach, California.

I've been posting my thoughts on what it means for a congregation to be a multigenerational community of faith. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the word multigenerational, and last week I shared Tom Owen-Towle's thoughts on the Beloved Community. This week I'd like to offer an explanation of faith, one that I hope allows room for the wide variety of opinions and belief systems one finds among the members of a typical Unitarian Universalist congregation. It's from Barry Andrew's essay "Educating for Faith," published in The Essex Conversations (http://home.earthlink.net/~psdlund/id3.html). Barry uses the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith to make distinctions between faith and belief, and faith and religion:

 

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, author of Faith and Belief, prefers to view faith as something apart from either belief or religion. Belief is the holding of certain ideas. One does not have faith in a concept, he insists; one has faith in the reality about which the propositions are fashioned. Nor is faith religion. For Smith, religion represents a cumulative tradition, including scriptures, myths, symbols, ethical teachings, creeds, rituals, and so forth. Faith, as he understands it, is deeper and more personal than religion. While it may be engendered by a religious tradition, “it is a quality of the person and not the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendental dimension.”

 

I like this passage because it puts faith squarely in the realm of the personal, yet it admits that religious traditions can engender faith in individuals (and in families, I would add). Multigenerational communities of faith are, as far as I'm concerned, the best place for an individual to learn what it means to be a person of faith because it gives one both a religious tradition to help in fashioning one's faith and an environment (the Beloved Community) to test that faith. The opportunity to relate with people of all ages and stages of faith development is what multigenerational communities of faith offer us.

 

I'll be presenting my workshop on Multigenerational Communities of Faith the coming weekend at the Prairie Star District's Annual Confernce and Meeting in Kansas City. Next week's post will have a summary of that workshop.

In last week's entry, I wrote a little about what I believe the word "multigenerational" means. This week, I'd like to offer some thoughts on "community," specifically the "beloved community." Unitarian Universalist minister Tom Owen-Towle has a new book coming out on the Twelve Hallmarks of a Beloved Community (I'll put it on my recommendation page once I receive my copy). Rev. Owen-Towle has been preaching on the beloved community for quite some time. Here are ten hallmarks of a beloved community that he presented to a group of ministers in November 2001. (You can read the entire essay in the UUMA's Selected Essays 2002: http://www.uuma.org/Documents/PDF/Essays2002.pdf.)

I. Beloved Community Means Holding to the Difficult

As Unitarian sister May Sarton put it, “Now take the chisel and make for the bone! Difficult love, you are the sculptor here. The image you must wrest, great and severe.” Authentic religion, you see, has nothing to do with light and comfy promises. Rather it adheres to what I call “hard blessings.” Especially in these times of societal terror and angst, we must eschew any politician or guru or TV infomercial or, for that matter, our own liberal religious platitudes that might unwittingly proffer sweetness and pabulum.

In Robert Bly’s book Iron John, the lead figure arrives in town and immediately asks, “Hey, is there anything dangerous to do around here?” Note he doesn’t say: Is there something foolish or deadly to do around here, but is there something dangerous, and if dangerous is too big a leap for you, then is there something demanding or difficult to do around our UU premises? For as Rilke reminds us, “Love means holding to the difficult.”

Hence, responsible stewards (“keepers of the hall”) of the Beloved Community would be prudent yet adventurous in service of the prize.

II. Beloved Community Produces Where It’s Planted

I like what Alice Walker says: “I imagine that when Martin (referring to King) said to agitate nonviolently, he meant to start at home.” That’s right—among the chosen folks with whom we awake every morning or work every day. As Unitarian Universalist process theologian Bernard Loomer used to say, “We are called to tend and mend that portion of the cosmic web where we’re planted.” It is so tempting to spread compassion in a surrounding province while shirking our responsibility to be change-agents within our own households or congregational life.

I’ve come to believe we cannot have a religious locus in our lives without having a territorial one. We cannot discover who we really are without surrendering fully to where we are. We simply cannot live grounded lives without being rooted in a specific place. Every one of us has sufficient tilling ground—sacred ground, battleground, growing ground—right where we’re planted.

III. Beloved Community Requires Vigilance

Colleague Gordon McKeemon reminds us that the derivation of the word community, although related to communion and communication, comes literally from the Latin munio, meaning “to arm.” Therefore, with the prefix com-, meaning “together”, community actually happens wherever there is shared growth and security, a context of mutual assistance and vigilance.

Hence, authentic UU beloved community is comprised of compassionate arms— arms that engage in firm, fair, friendly wrestling matches rather than blood baths or back-stabbing; arms that huddle together in times of sorrow and swing open in rejoicing; arms that reach outward in justice-building and peacemaking and not merely inward in narcissistic embrace.

In a genuine beloved community, arms are watchful to guard against any behavior that would undermine the shared covenant. Church members band together to defend one another against arrogance and shallowness, outside agitators, or internal saboteurs.

So when we weave our local beloved UU communities, may we envision our tapestry in terms of intertwining hearts and heads, souls, and arms.

IV. Beloved Community Honors the Law of Respectfulness

As Catherine Attla puts it, “There’s a really big law that we have to obey. That law is respect. We have to treat everything with respect. The earth, the animals, the plants, the sky. Everything.”

Respect means literally, “to look at something or someone again and again.” Respect is the only virtue sizable enough to hold “the wholly other, caringly in our sight, realizing that our mission remains to forge a discipleship of equals, within and beyond the walls of our chosen faith.” Imagine what pervasive respect might mean if manifested in the policies and programs, liturgies and encounters, of our local congregation?

V. Beloved Community Declares the Meeting Open

A beloved community is responsive to the stranger, the newcomer, the outsider who arrives bringing either attractive or odd gifts. “Hospitality to strangers is greater than reverence for the name of God,” recounts the Hebrew proverb, and the Christian scripture confirms the same sentiment when it declares, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”

African American poet June Jordan cuts to the quick when she asserts, “My hope is that our lives will declare this meeting open.” However, our Unitarian Universalist circles possess an average track record with otherness. While tolerating differences of theology, class, orientation, and race in theory, in practice we gravitate in practice toward homogeneity of lifestyle, social behavior, and rituals. For example, UU humanists, mystics, Christians, and pagans often join in frustrating dances in our tribes, clumsily stepping upon one another’s toes or bumping into one another.

Additionally, if we aren’t careful, our passion for inclusion can grow thoughtless, plunging us headlong into the pit of Jonathan Swift’s “anythingarianism” where we stand equally for everything, without limits or boundaries, thus standing for nothing.

The Beloved Community doggedly inquires: How whole is our singular family of faith; who is being left out; what voice is not being heard; who needs to be consoled or goaded? Our peculiar way of doing religion spells spaciousness, size, thickness, width. Theodore Parker talked about ministry as essentially a matter of entering a “wide place.”

Others echo this sentiment. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke penned, “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, but I give myself to it.” And novelist Barbara Kingsolver writes, “If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider notions will be fatal.” And then there is our old Universalist hymn that resounds, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy,” emboldening us to embrace those who live on the outskirts of human favor.

Consequently, the Beloved Community would not have us ask people what they believe or what might be their political preference or sexual orientation, but rather inquire of their singular story and how goes it with their spirit, deep-down, really. And as our loving grasp expands, a marvel occurs: the universal supply of love is replenished; we are personally refueled, our chosen community is enhanced, and the deities begin to dance. Active love is a form of transcendence. “It leaves stretch marks,” as poet Marge Piercy puts it.

In beloved community we are summoned to greet one another in Hindu fashion: Instead of saying hello or goodbye we would say namaste: “I honor the light that is within you,” or, “the divine in me greets and embraces the divine in you.” In effect, namaste reminds each of us that our neighbor is always our teacher, knowing well that our stinging critics are also our rabbis.

VI. Beloved Community Undergirds its Members

The Rissho Kosei Kai movement, liberal Buddhists from Japan, would encourage us to follow their example where every member of the congregation is an active participant in a small affinity group. These intentional support circles, called hozas, exist solely to thicken the overall “interdependent web” of our local parishes—soothing us when we’re down and goading us when we’re sluggish.

In the Church Aspiration we voice every Sunday in my liberal religious outpost, we make two interwoven promises: we affirm “service is our prayer” as well as vow to “help one another in fellowship.” You see, social justice and interpersonal caregiving are as Siamese twins—when you tear them asunder, both wither and die. Inreach and outreach are married in mature parish life.

Our caregiving mission also creates a beloved community that reflects backward even as it marches forward. Durable religious community travels back and forth in time, honoring and upholding those faith-comrades who have sauntered before us and bequeathing those yet to be born with the gift of tomorrow.

The congregation celebrates communally the entrance of babies into its midst, pledging its troth out loud. Coming-of-agers are heard and embraced along with their families in full worship celebration. The dead are paid personalized homage, noting that the biblical phrase for dying means “to be gathered to one’s people.” There are rites-of-passage to welcome newcomers and tributes of farewell for those moving away.

A robust parish finds meaningful ways to lift and caress the members of its circle. Continually.

VII. Beloved Community Members Fight Fairly for Impact not Injury

Growth is expansive and disruptive. It spells change that in turn causes anxiety that precipitates conflict. Conflict is not only inevitable in a beloved community, but also desirable. Hence, discomfort becomes a spiritual discipline, as colleague Alma Crawford urges. Healthy turmoil serves to sharpen issues and elicits new perspectives. But in a community where the members feel the organizational structure is tenuous or shaky, everyone avoids conflict like the plague.

On the contrary, mature, hardy communities tangle for impact or resultant change rather than injury or retaliatory damage. They struggle openly in order to minimize the lying and cruelty that often contaminate our communal life. Universalist forebear Hosea Ballou’s words uttered in 1805 still ring relevant: “Let brotherly and sisterly love continue. If we have love, no disagreement can do us any harm; but if we have not love no agreement can do us any good!”

VIII. Beloved Community Balances Justice with Joy

“And what does God require of us, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?” wrote the prophet Micah. This question marks a watershed in the evolution of religion when we migrated from animal sacrifice to human service, from ritual worship to social righteousness. If we pay heed to Micah’s threefold imperatives of justice, kindness, and humility, our houses of devotion will definitely stand in good shape.

Micah contends that these ethical demands appear from beyond our ego or imagination. They come from the Eternal One, from the Creation. They aren’t intriguing, optional challenges we’ve dreamed up. They are transcendent claims on human life. They are what is expected—make that, required—during our earthly adventure.

The first imperative is to do justice. Not to think or visualize justice, but to do justice every waking day of our lives, not merely when we feel like it. Justice entails mending a broken world by making sure what belongs to people gets to them, be it freedom, dignity, or resources.

But justice needs to be braided with joy in the sustenance of our beloved clans. Authentic community-weavers take their mission seriously, but never grimly, recalling that the German word for blessedness, seelisch, is directly related to silliness in English. For as Edward Field reflected, “If someone is to lead us, let it be a small person who doesn’t ask us to follow but just goes for their own heart’s sake, someone who talks a little silly sometimes.”

Did you know that those in Martin Luther King’s inner circle often remarked how comical and zany King could be? This giant moral activist was also a prankster. Imagine that. Remember that. Go and do likewise.

Indeed, keeping our eyes on the prize of the beloved community requires a great struggle, but not a humorless one— rather a tussle mixed with abundant mirth, poetic grace, and serendipity.

IX. Beloved Community is Semper Reformanda

“Semper reformanda” was the rallying cry of our 16th-century Transylvanian Unitarian kin, Francis David, and seconded by the affirmation of modern-day Unitarian sage, e. e. cummings, who mused, “We can never be born enough.” In short, an expansive Unitarian Universalist web remains permeable and fluid rather than tight and set.

We free-thinking mystics with hands belong to a springy venture, not a static organization; a movement anchored to no single moment, no particular guru, no one vow, but tied to innumerable events, persons, and scriptures.

X. Beloved Community Is Ultimately Held in an Eternal Embrace

A closing Universalist hallmark: we were created by a loving God; we are buoyed by that same transforming power along life’s pathway, and we will finally return to its kindly, tender grasp. As Paul put it, “Love will never come to an end.” The Universalists harbored a poignant phrase of their own: “Rest assured!”

When I was an intern at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockford, Illinois, I made it a habit to use my weekly column there to work through important issues I needed to think about as I prepared to visit the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UUA. I found those weekly columns to be an excellent place to offer the religious community of which I was a part my thoughts on a variety of issues, from theology to religious education, social justice to faith development. Since access to a weekly column isn't part of my job here in the Prairie Star District, I thought I'd use this blog to fill the void.

 

So here's what's coming up for me. At the end of this month I'll be presenting a workshop at our Annual Conference and Meeting in Kansas City (April 23-25, 2004). The title of the presentation is "Strengthening Our Ties: Growing a Multigenerational Community of Faith." The entire conference (and the track in which this workshop appears) is focused on growing healthy, vital congregations, and I definitely believe that being a multigenerational community of faith is crucial to a congregation's health and vitality. But now that I'm actually preparing of this workshop, I'm beginning to wonder whether or not I can present my case in a clear and compelling way.

 

What I'd like to do here is work through a few of the premises behind this claim, with a view toward refining my thoughts into a coherent presentation. So for the next three weeks, I'll be looking at a different element of this formula: multigenerational communities of faith equal healthy, vital congregations. For this entry, I'd like to take a look at the word "multigenerational."

 

The first thing that I think needs to be made clear is that there is a difference between the words "multigenerational" and "intergenerational." Intergenerational should, I believe, be used in the way intermural is used in school sports. It means that the activity presented as intergenerational includes two different generations, in the same way that intermural sports means that an event includes at least two different schools. It is the opposite of intragenerational, which means that an activity is reserved for members of a specific generation only. Most activities in a church are intergenerational, except for religious education classes, youth groups, young adult groups, and programs geared mainly for elders. Everything else, from worship to potlucks to board meetings to social justice activities are more likely than not to have at least two different generations participating in them. (For more thoughts on generations, come to the workshop!)

 

This means that when we use the word "intergenerational" to refer to those Sundays where the children are part of the worship service, we're ignoring the fact that every Sunday's worship service is intergenerational. In that regard, we're selling ourselves short. Churches do intergenerational programming all of the time. What we don't do as often (or as well) is multigenerational programming. And by this, I mean programs where all of the generations (or at least as many as possible--but definitely no less than three) are present. So a church has three types of programs: intragenerational, intergenerational, and multigenerational. A church that plans exclusively intragenerational programs is probably doomed to die. A church that plans only intergenerational programs is most likely missing some important opportunities for all of its members to deepen their relationships with others. And a church that intentionally promotes multigenerational programs is at least aware of the possibilities for growth and learning that being in contact with a variety of ages, from toddlers to elders, provides.

 

Next week: Community.