Based on the Minns Lectures by Alice Blair Wesley
Given by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Close to 20 years ago, when I was a seminarian, First Church minister Suzanne Meyer recommended me as a guest preacher to churches in the district which were without a minister. When I arrived in San Antonio, Texas, for my service, church leaders were laughing about an incident that morning involving their brand-new church secretary. Entering the office early that day, she had inadvertently set off the alarm. ADT called, checking to see if someone had broken in. The secretary identified herself and said that she could not remember the passcode. “We’ll have to ask you some questions to see if you’re legitimately in the building,” the security company told her. She successfully gave the church address and phone number, and knew who the church president was. Then, the security agent asked the “capper” – “Recite the creed!” “Oh my god!” the new secretary wailed, “We don’t have one!” “OK, you’re the church secretary,” came the reply.
That’s funny, ‘cause it’s true that we UUs don’t have a creed. But what if the alarm company had asked about the church doctrine? Who could've answered that question correctly? This sermon series on Covenant is based on the Minns Lectures given by my colleague Alice Blair Wesley in 2000-01, in which she contends that we have an important “lay doctrine of the free church” that consists of aspects bequeathed to us by our New England ancestors from the 1630s, aspects that characterize our Unitarian Universalist churches today. These are:
•Being intentionally based in the spirit of love, rather than any particular belief;
•Being concerned with the health of the wider civil society;
•Defining membership as the free choice of a person to join and to commit to promises, a covenant, without regard to gender, economic status, or occupation;
•Investing the ultimate authority of the church solely in the collective conscience and reason of the gathered members, to make all decisions pertaining to the church, by democratic vote, including for lay leaders and ordained ministers.
It is safe to say that even though generalizations about UU congregations are difficult, if not impossible, virtually ALL Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America still adhere to these points. But there is one more point that Alice mourns has not been as faithfully followed in the 350-plus years since the founding of the Dedham, Massachusetts, church. And that is, the expectation that neighboring churches will be in covenant with each other, meeting together regularly in what were called “councils”, advising each other, learning from each other, and gaining strength and comfort from each other. This aspect of the free church, says Alice, has been honored more in the breach than in reality.
Why would this be so? Why would we UUs so faithfully keep the principles handed down to us from the 17th century, and yet neglect this one point? Let’s explore what happened in our history and in our concept of ourselves as religious liberals that led to this regrettable development.
To explain how we religious liberals came to forget about the covenant between churches, Alice tells 2 stories. The first she calls the “Cinderella” story; here’s how it goes: our religious ancestors held that every soul is “like Cinderella, born into a low estate she is powerless to change, but from which she can be rescued, by the power of divine mutual love.” It was the job of the educated clergy to thus “free” the souls of the congregation, by presenting the life and glory of Christ and by showing the splendid spiritual life available to those whose hearts have been first humbled (in knowledge of their imperfect condition) and then lifted to heights of love with the Prince of Peace. And when Cinderella meets and knows the Prince, she falls passionately and deeply in love, just as the Prince already loves her. “The salient point is the ecstasy of their union” (ABW, Lecture 3).
While our ancestors did not expect their spiritual lives to be ALL ecstasy, all the time, they did expect that the experience of ecstatically transforming and sustaining religious love would be normative for church members. But after the first generation of New England members, something happened. Young adults of the second generation were not joining; brought up within the free church their whole lives, these young people had no ecstatic religious experience to prompt them. They felt connected, they always had, but there was no dramatic and emotional “Cinderella” moment for them; thus their children could not be baptized. The grandparents, the original members, found the situation untenable.
The older members decided to compromise. Members could join if they did certain things, acted a certain way, even if they had not (yet) had an ecstatic transforming experience. It was, Alice says, bad theology, based on the mistaken notion that ONLY ecstatic religious experience was the hallmark of authentic free religion. The older folks of the 1650s should have said to the young people, “Let’s talk about what we mean by promising to be a community dedicated to the spirit of love. If it makes sense to you, and if you too yearn for a life in holy community faithful to that spirit, then we invite you to join us in covenant.” (Indeed, says Alice, that’s exactly what we should say to new folks today.) But they didn’t say it, because they believed so strongly that religious commitment required the ecstatic event.
And so, what had begun as an explicit understanding of church membership as covenantal slowly devolved into more of a contractual understanding. Over time, it also meant that New England free churches – most of which later became Unitarian – became more about family connections and ethnicity than an intentional, conscious choice.
So what was the deal with those second-generation New Englanders? Why didn’t they join their parents’ churches? They attended services faithfully but did not join. Alice says that instead of being Cinderella members, they were “Cynthia” members, and here’s the story as Alice conceives it:
Cynthia is a girl who, unlike Cinderella, grows up in the court of the king; her parents are court officials, and she’s known the Prince all her life. She often hears the adults speak of how union between her and the Prince would be a good thing. The love that she and the Prince have for each other starts childishly at first and then deepens and matures. There is no “aha” moment, no experience of sudden spiritual ecstasy – just the slow and steady growth of the spirit of love until Cynthia feels not only that she truly belongs, but also has responsibility for making “the realm” – the wider world – a better place.
For some time, both concepts of “salvation,” if you will, existed in the New England free churches, which, Alice points out in her lecture, were “small u” unitarian before they became “capital U” Unitarian. Later, conservative members complained that the liberals were subverting the original theology of the church, because the Cynthia story altered the idea of God’s arbitrary choice of some people, and not others, to be bride (or Cinderella). Instead, the Cynthia members, in effect, chose themselves – thus bringing into the proto-unitarian churches a form of “small u” universalism.
The conflict of the liberals and conservatives in the New England free churches came to a head in the 1800s, and resulted in Unitarianism breaking permanently from the Standing Order. As often happens in such arguments, each side held that they were the true heirs of the founders. Alice thinks – and I agree – that the Unitarians were following the spirit of the original founders. As we saw in the first sermon in this series, theological doctrines such as predestination and the depravity of humanity are entirely absent from the founding documents of the Dedham church. Only years later did the conservatives try to assert their importance.
The fight got personal: liberal and conservative churches refused to allow their ministers to exchange pulpits – one of the key ways then and now that churches evidence lateral relationships. A new generation of Unitarian young people arose in the 1830s (200 years after the founding of the Dedham church), complaining that Unitarian services were without emotion and soul, and made things uncomfortable among churches for a generation or more.
To top it off, at this same time, a Unitarian minister of one church in Boston began to strenuously preach against the alcohol policies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – notwithstanding that many parishioners of his and other Unitarian churches made their living in one way or another from the production of rum and the infamous Triangle Trade. Between liberals and conservatives, Transcendentalists and Unitarians, wets and drys, conscious cooperation between free churches dwindled to almost nothing.
Interestingly, the contrast between the Cinderella and Cynthia style of church membership was repeated in the way Unitarian churches got started. Either a group of people would be struck by an ecstatic experience of transformative love, and come together as a church; or would over time come to realize the deepening of their spiritual commitment and then found a church. Whichever method was used, there was thought to be no need to ask for help or guidance or permission from a neighboring church, and so none was.
Eventually, as rationalism came to dominate Unitarian congregations, an expectation of an ecstatic spiritual experience fell out of favor. The idea that over time, in developmental stages, a person could come to a deeper understanding of, and commitment to, Unitarian faith led to an assumption that the spirit of love on which the churches were founded would come about automatically, evolve on its own, naturally, without a lot of effort – which undermined the idea that the spirit of love would need the attention and care and work that covenant calls for.
The final nail in the coffin of covenantal relationships between congregations, according to Alice Blair Wesley, was the rise of the model of non-profit corporations in the early 1800s, such as for the distribution of Bibles. These groups were separate from the churches, and were set up hierarchically, with executive officers and boards, often in competition with other similar corporations. From the founding of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, Unitarian churches began to organize themselves in the exact same way. As corporations, whether non-profit or for-profit, do not often cooperate but compete with each other, so it also was with many, if not most, Unitarian churches. For all these reasons, the councils of Unitarian churches virtually vanished.
I have to point out a local anomaly. Since Katrina, we have been involved in a new, close, cooperative relationship with the 2 other UU churches of the New Orleans metro area, Community Church and North Shore, in the Greater New Orleans UU cluster. There are not many UU churches that are engaged in similar relationships, and that is a shame. It should be a point of pride to us that we 3 congregations have been working on this relationship over these 4 years since the Storm – but it must also be admitted that it’s not likely this would have happened if it hadn’t been for the disaster, and for the strong encouragement (some might even say pressure) from the UUA. Whatever the motivation that got GNOUU started, I think we are doing the right thing. And should it come to pass that GNOUU raises all the funds that all 3 churches are seeking in the campaign, I would still urge us to remain in close relationship. It is not only helpful for us now, in our recovery, and an important part of our history – it is good for our future for us to be together.
We close this morning with words from Alice Blair Wesley:
We’ve come a long way in many ways since the founding of our oldest churches in the 1630s. The spirit of mutual love is yet that reality most worthy of our ultimate loyalty…. Our love, though seldom of the ecstatic variety, is warm and steady, deep and powerful to redeem and to enhance our own lives and…lives in our larger world. We might yet enter a covenant to walk together in this spirit as an Association of free Congregations, without hierarchy, with many well used lateral patterns of engagement, in which we respect each other’s independence and our interdependence in the interdependent web of existence of which it is our blessed privilege to be a part. I pray we may yet do so.
So might this be! AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
