Last week, I put up Tony Lorenzen’s thoughts on what we need in the next president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). This week, it’s Tom Schade’s turn:

We need leadership that pushes us toward relevance. Unitarian Universalism will grow to the extent that it is relevant to people who are not now UU’s. Relevance does not grow out of intent, but impact. So, a criteria that we need to expect from our new younger, female President is: Can she lead people who are not UU’s?

What do you think we need?

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg  has a lot to say here. It’s more wide-ranging than the title might indicate. And it gave me a John Adams quote I didn’t have before:

I do not attach much importance to creeds because I believe [one] cannot be wrong whose life is right

That’s pretty great, isn’t it?

There’s a lot in here about the value of covenant and being together, and I think this is my favorite of that:

Another way of expressing this difference is that some sociologists of religion have noted an important shift from a paradigm of Believe-Behave-Belong in which newcomers to a religious community first had to believe the right doctrines, then behave correctly, and finally were allowed to belong. The postmodern paradigm reverses the order to Belong-Behave-Believe. Today, most newcomers first want to feel like they belong (that they are in an open, safe, accepting community), then they are open to reflecting on ethics (how they behave) — and over time they may find that their beliefs are shifting through being in community. As the saying goes, “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”

What would it change if we reversed that order?

There’s so much in this rich sermon–and it led me to something else perhaps more valuable. But that’ll be another day. Soon.

Dan Harper is the Directory of Religious Education at the UU Church of Palo Alto.  This is the text of his presentation about religious education and peacemaking. There are two things I’d like to hold up from it in particular. Here’s the first:

As the religious education committee and I reviewed all these various factors…we began to talk explicitly about feminist theology, which is a core theology in my denomination. Feminist theology reminds us that so-called women’s work is just as important as so-called men’s work. Feminist theology reminds us that children of any gender are at least as important as adult males. Feminist theology reminds us that we are embodied beings, and we need more than words and information, we need hands and bodies.

I’m going to go further than Dan Harper: If you have not spent any time studying feminism and feminist theology, you are almost certainly not competent to talk about Unitarian Universalism as it is practiced today.

And here’s the second:

…we realized what really made a difference was not trying to teach essentialist skills…

and yet

…we also included some activities that could come across as essentialist in orientation, because we had adults who were passionate…

Since you can’t buy passion at any price, some mindsets regard it as worthless and sell it as cheap or throw it away. Do you?