At the tender age of 5, UUP is on the verge of making some very important decisions about where it will go in the future, what it will do and who it will become. Any time we are looking to make big decisions it seems wise to look at what others have done, especially others who are similar to us in important ways. Their ideas and experiences enlarge the menu of possibilities available to us. There might be things we find useful or, at least, interesting. Even if we look at what someone else did and say, oh no, I like what we’re doing much better, that in and of itself is important.

With that in mind, I would like to tell you about Church of the Savior, the religious community I belonged to before moving to California about a millennium ago. Now I know the name will put some of you off, so I want to be clear, that while, yes, it was Christian, as am I, C of S was very much in the ranks of the liberal/progressive religious movement from its founding, some 60 years ago now. It was deeply and powerfully involved in providing housing, health care, jobs and justice for the poor of inner city Washington D.C. where the church was headquartered. It actively worked for peace and the end of the nuclear arms race and 40 years ago was calling for a cabinet level Department of Peace. Gordon Cosby, the church’s pastor, marched in Selma with MLK, and the church was fully integrated long before that was common. A person’s sexual orientation was simply not an issue, and they would have had no problem with me, other than that I started out there while still doing my impressive impersonation of...well, someone else. So their credentials as legitimate members of the liberal religious tradition were long, impressive and undisputable -- their name notwithstanding.

The idea of the church emerged from Gordon’s experiences as a combat chaplain in WWII. As such, he met with soldiers before battles or dangerous missions in which some of them would almost surely die and prayed with them and offered words of encouragement, assurance and hope. Through this experience, he observed that the religion in which these men had been raised and the faith and beliefs they professed had about them the strength and vitality of cut flowers. As a result, he came back from the war determined to build a church where the tenants of faith were more than just empty words, slogans and clichés but rather were incarnated in concrete, identifiable structures designed to nurture a deep inward connection to God and that found outward expression in service to the world in behalf of peace and justice.

Shortly after the church was founded in 1947, the members, probably no more than 20 at the time decided that their commitment to inner growth required a place of retreat. They located a 120-acre farm complete with a lovely old farmhouse in what was then rural Maryland, and, by mortgaging their homes and borrowing from family and friends, they bought it and named it Dayspring. Over time, they built a silent retreat center and then a church renewal center on Dayspring Farm. It looked a bit like Five Springs Resort where we have our annual church-wide Memorial Day retreat except there were much larger expanses of lawn and some 50 acres devoted to growing fruits and vegetables.

I started making yearly pilgrimages to Dayspring some five years before the Baptists decided to be rid of me. (I came to the conclusion -- very much as a result of my association with C of S -- that when Jesus said love your enemies, he probably meant not to kill them. Call me crazy, but that much, at least, seemed clear -- or it did to me.) By the time I arrived, some 30 years after its founding, C of S was made up of five sister communities, which together made up the legal entity of Church of the Savior.

After being expunged by the Baptists, I moved to Maryland to become part of the Dayspring Church, one of the five sister communities that met on Dayspring Farm. At the time Dayspring probably had about 20 official members, though the worshiping community was probably about twice that size. None of the sister communities, to my knowledge, had more than 30, maybe 40 at most, since it was a tenant of C of S that intimacy was an essential ingredient for spiritual growth, so whenever one of the communities got beyond say 40 members it spun off a new community, hence 5 distinct communities. It created something of a legal conundrum, but, as I said, based on his experience in the war, Gordon was very serious about creating structures that nurtured inner growth. It took at least two years to become a member of C of S, because the first step required completing 5 courses in the School of Christian Living. They were: New Testament, Old Testament (which I would prefer we call the Christian Scriptures and the Jewish Scriptures) Christian ethics, Christian doctrines and Christian growth. Each course was 10 weeks long, involved reading a college-level text and writing a one page weekly response. Missing more than 3 sessions required repeating the course.

After these were completed, I was free to join one of the 20 or so mission groups, each one associated with one of the 5 sister communities. Ever the outdoor girl, I joined the mission group that ran the fruit and vegetable farm on Dayspring.

Membership in the mission group required I attend weekly meetings, spend 30 minutes to an hour a day in silence, reflection, prayer and journaling and turn in a weekly report to the mission group’s spiritual director in which I accounted for how well I’d kept the daily disciplines. The report might also contain my reflections on whatever it was we were working with at the time and/or pretty much anything else of importance in my life. I spent time during the week working on the farm, attended Sunday worship of the Dayspring Church as well as tithed 10% of my income to it and went on at least one weekend silent retreat during the course of the year. Over the 12 years I was involved, my mission group had an average of about five members each of whom I knew intimately and loved deeply.

I tell you this not because I am suggesting we try and replicate C of S. For one thing, it had serious flaws of its own, plus the two communities view themselves very differently. As you can read in your order of worship, UUP sees itself as an oasis. If you had asked members if C of S was an oasis, they would have laughed at you. We were more like a caravan struggling together through the desert bringing food and water to those who were stranded - hoping all the while not to die of hunger and thirst ourselves, helping the lost find their way (note: their way, not The Way) and trying to bring peace to the warring tribes even though, at times, it felt like we might commit as many atrocities -- usually against one another -- as we prevented. C of S was Christian. We had The Book, and while it was not the only source, when important decisions had to be made, conflicts resolved, directions chosen and visions discerned, the Bible was our primary source. As you might imagine, the time commitments were hard on families, especially families with small children thereby eliminating people who would have made valuable contributions to the Church as well as gained much from it. (If you decide to Google "Church of the Saviour," go to the site that lists Gordon Cosby as the founder, and that will take you to the web page of the Seekers Church and give you more history and a slightly different slant than you will hear from me. You can also check out the Dayspring Retreat Center if you are so inclined.)

Still, C of S addressed issues that I think are important and managed to avoid several pitfalls common to religious communities in general and liberal religious fellowships in particular.

It seems to me that much of liberal religion’s identity is formed in reaction to conservative and/or fundamentalist Christianity in which some of us were raised and from which we escaped -- though, unfortunately, not unscathed. Now this in and of itself is a kind of pitfall, because beliefs and behaviors in reaction to an authority are, in a perverse sort of way, just as subject to the power of that authority as those made in compliance to it. In the old TA terminology (How many of you remember Transactional Analysis?) the Rebel Child and the Compliant Child are just opposite sides of the same dynamic, each being part of the Adapted Child. So rebellion is still a form of adaptation the clearest symptom of which is that we have a much clearer idea of who we are not rather than who we are, what we will never be caught dead doing rather than what it is we do that brings us life. This position can even lead to a peculiarly liberal brand of close-minded conservatism.

Probably one of the main reasons I was so attracted to C of S was that they took the religious terms and concepts with which I was familiar from my Christian upbringing and quite literally resurrected them from the deadly purposes to which fundamentalism had put them. I think that was a primary motivating force behind the 5 courses; they wanted everyone to understand that the terms common to Christianity were being understood and applied in some very uncommon ways. In this way they co-opted the language rather than surrender it. By intensely focusing on inner growth and outward mission, they created their own agenda, rather than being in reaction to traditional religion’s. They took the fear and guilt induced dedication and devotion usually associated with fundamentalists and dramatically exceeded it through commitments based on freedom, call and development of the true self.

Another pitfall, particularly of liberal religion, is what I call the Doctrine of Almost Anything Goes. Again, in reaction to the oppressive doctrines and dogmas that shackle our minds, repress our emotions and control us through fear, shame and guilt, we eschew everything that smacks of doctrine and dogma. Don’t you tell me how or what to believe, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, and I will do the same for you. Rather I will find Truth wherever I will and follow it wherever it goes. I will look inside myself for what makes a difference in my world. When it comes to religious experience and expression, I decide for me and you decide for you, and this is the heart of the doctrine of Almost Anything Goes.

Now, for the record, I am a great fan of the doctrine of Almost Anything Goes. I believe sitting astride a 1200 pound animal walking through the mist-shrouded forests of Pt. Reyes is as legitimate and powerful a spiritual experience as anything I have ever done in a church.

The pitfall of the doctrine of Almost Anything Goes is that "anything" can easily and very conveniently serve as an effective smoke screen for "nothing." It is a very small step from Almost Anything Goes to Almost Nothing Goes.

Also, if anything goes, then it makes it really hard to know what we mean by something like "spiritual growth," which UUP’s mission says we are committed to providing. It sounds good in the mission statement yet it is so vague, so nebulous, so all encompassing as to contain a vapor, a hint, a mere susurrus of meaning.

Often it ends up meaning a little bit of a lot of things but not much of anything. I used to say that one of the things that made me a good elementary school teacher was that I knew a little bit about a lot of things but not a lot about anything. In the spiritual realm, however, a little bit about a lot of things and not much of anything gets you to about 4th grade, and that’s what Gordon found on the battlefields of WWII. When life turns mean and hard and dangerous, an elementary school faith fades and wilts like a cut flower.

The same is true with mission. If mission can be whatever we make it, we can likewise make it nothing, thereby limiting our outward expressions of caring and compassion to symbolic donations of what amounts to little more than spare change. We preserve our individual freedom but often at the expense of vitality, depth and substance.

C of S managed to avoid this -- though, likewise, at a cost. For instance, if you asked me in what ways C of S promoted my spiritual growth, I could tell you in very precise terms: the 5 courses required, commitment to my mission group including a minimum of 30 minutes a day of silence, reflection, prayer and journaling to which I consented to be held accountable, the requirement to attend a yearly silent retreat. So, spiritual growth was very defined but not restrictive in the ways fundamentalism and conservatism are. If my mission group had gone to the Dayspring Church and said, we want our disciplines to focus on a serious study of Native American religion, they would have said, no problem. Or if we had wanted to study the Koran rather than the Bible, they would have said, great! Let us know what you come up with. Or if we had wanted to practice Buddhist meditation, after they stopped laughing at the thought of any of us sitting still for more than 30 seconds, they would have blessed us on our way. So, in this way, C of S also practiced Almost Anything Goes, yet, by the same token, almost nothing did not go and anyone who was interested could get a pretty clear picture of what the church meant by "spiritual growth."

The same was true with mission. For instance, my present call is to be a writer; which is to say I have taken vows of lifelong poverty. Now I could have gone to the Dayspring Church and said this is my mission, and they would have been fine with that so long as what I wrote helped bring healing and hope into the world (I would not have been allowed, for instance, to write romance novels as an expression of my mission) and I would need to do it in the company of at least two other people who would support and hold me accountable, as I would them. If I said I didn’t know two other people who shared this call, they would have sent me to the other faith communities where in a worship service I would have described my call and my vision and eventually at least two other people would have joined me, and we would have started a writers mission group. So, mission could be almost anything so long as it met certain criterion, but as a member, I was not allowed to not be on mission.

So the church through its very structures sought to make sure that spiritual growth and mission were vital, legitimate and substantive while, at the same time, not being dogmatically confined to one divinely ordained thing.

Membership is another pitfall religious communities face. I suppose it’s because we never want to seem exclusive or inhospitable that we make membership unconditional. Everyone gets to decide pretty much for themselves what it means to be a member of UUP, so some people, usually a small minority take membership very, very seriously and give sacrificially of their time, energy and money to the work of maintaining and growing the fellowship while others, usually the majority of us, take it much more casually and give whatever, whenever and however we feel inclined to.

I don’t have to tell you that this creates several problems.

It tends to put an inordinate amount of unofficial -- and often, unrecognized -- power and control in the hands of a few which almost always turns out to be unhealthy for both them and for the fellowship.

When the minority does the majority of the work, it causes burn out.

Leaders can end up feeling betrayed when, acting in the role that the majority are only too glad to allow them, they decide to lead the fellowship in a specific direction, one that usually requires the expenditure of money only to discover that, rather than a group of relatively like-minded committed followers, they are dealing with a herd of cats, each one following its own particular (and often, peculiar) interests.

At Dayspring I did not get to decide for myself what it meant to be a member. I took the courses, I joined a mission group, I kept the disciplines, I worked in behalf of my mission, I went on yearly retreats and I gave a tithe of 10% of my income. Everyone was welcome, but no apologies were given if someone found these requirements excessive.

So, are there ways UUP might borrow from the experiences of C of S? Maybe, maybe not, but here are a few possibilities that occur to me: I think in the liberal tradition we too easily yield important words and concepts to the religious right treating things like prayer, call, mission and even God as if they are contaminated and thus unspeakable and untouchable. I think we need to reclaim some of these if for no other reason than that their familiarity gives them power, yes, power for ill, but also, power for good.

I’d like for us to consider that we don’t have to get large to do really big things, that even in a religious fellowship -- perhaps, especially in a religious fellowship -- in the words of the venerable Mr. Schumacher, small can be beautiful.

I personally think membership should mean something specific. At minimum I think voting should require pledging even if it’s a minimum of say, $5 a week. I think we would all profit immensely from a 4-week course studying the book A Chosen Faith so that we have at least some common understandings about what we’re up to and who we are. Maybe then, when important decisions have to be made, we’ll act a bit less like a herd of cats and be able to get important things done more efficiently. It would also be a great way to build community, and besides, it’s a lovely little well written book. I wish members would view certain meetings as virtually mandatory. To skip meetings when the future direction of the church is being discussed, when budgets are being decided and when decisions are being made is to simply hang the leadership out to dry or give them carte blanche, neither of which is healthy for anyone. If for no reason other than out of respect for their extraordinary efforts and out of gratitude for the fruits of their labor that we enjoy, we should at least be present.

Now if you find the notion of disciplines and membership requirements offensive, let me remind you that you would never question the need for discipline and commitment to an exercise program for it to be effective, would you? You might even be willing to follow a specific regimen to achieve the desired results without complaining that it violated your sovereignty. And you wouldn’t expect to learn how to play a musical instrument practicing whenever and however you felt like it, would you? Why would the condition of your inner self and the life of this fellowship require or deserve less? So what do I imagine when I think of a spiritual community?

I imagine a group of people deeply committed to a spiritual journey the struggles and the fruits of which form the substance of our life together. The role of the church, the fellowship, would be to support, encourage, correct and hold each of us accountable to finding that piece of the creation that is uniquely suited to us and doing it with passion, devotion and love.

What would I expect such a community might do?

I think such a community could move mountains. I would especially hope it might move the twin peaks of homophobia and heterocentrism and set my people free, probably the last group of people for whom hate, prejudice and discrimination are officially and morally sanctioned and where, with the exception of a few states, discrimination is codified in the law.

I think it might shake the foundations of hell and tear to bits the altar to the gods of war upon which we keep sacrificing our children, especially the children of the poor.

It would heal the sick of heart.

It would restore sight to those who are blind to the ways we misuse and abuse this beautiful and incredible planet on which we live.

Those crippled by terrible childhoods, it would help walk.

It would raise the dead to life anew.

It would do these things and more.

That’s what I imagine.

What do you imagine? What do you hope for? What do you want? And what are you willing to give?