Inside the Words on the Wall

Nell Newton

August 12, 2012

We have a lovely mission for our church and it is the result of a tremendous amount of work! Now that we’ve had it on our walls for a couple of years, let’s take a deeper look at what these words say about who we are and what we believe.

“We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice.” The mission of First UU Church of Austin, TX

Such fine words! When our leadership set out to create this mission two years ago we listened to the whole congregation. We gathered hundreds of ideas and thousands of words that people gave as their dreams for the work of our church. And then we sifted, sorted, and winnowed out the most salient ones and worked them into our mission. They are a powerful vision of what we believe, and who we hope to become. And, if we look carefully they reveal some important ideas that we might not otherwise articulate.

And articulating is the whole point of a mission. Here’s a little bit of the back-story. A few years back it was determined that no one was clear about the mission of our church – the reason we all keep showing up here. And, without a shared mission some folks were unclear of what was helpful and was distracting us from our larger purpose.

Larger purpose – a reason bigger than, but inclusive of, each one of us.

Yes, there was a wonderful mission statement that had been drafted almost a decade earlier, but after the initial work it was lovingly placed in a secure location and never looked at again. That is how mission statements don’t work. Some wondered if we could just take the old one and dust it off, but wiser folks explained that it’s not like sourdough and it’s better to start from scratch each time. So, that is how we wound up conducting a series of workshops and exercises that resulted in page after page of beautiful words to work with.

Then one fine spring day the church board, our interim minister, and a wonderful consultant all holed up in a room with these pages and began the process of finding out what was important. What were we doing that was bigger than, but inclusive of, each one of us? We looked at examples from other churches. Some were really, really detailed, but we decided to keep ours short enough to fit into one sentence. Something you could carry around easily. There were many, many drafts, but it wasn’t a sausage-making process of argument and compromise. It was something far sweeter and exciting. And, once these words coalesced we collectively stopped and I think a few of us gasped. I know I got tears in my eyes because when I saw them all together, I saw us, this congregation. It was cool.

These words are powerful. And this time we were not going to let them out of our sight! We made sure that they would be in common usage, and someone saw fit to put them up on the walls. Now, let’s see what they say.

First off — we are agreeing to be in community. Even if we believe that each person is tasked with creating a personal theology we are still coming together in community. In Community is where the richness our many voices form a chorus of experience. In Community is how a potluck feeds a multitude. In Community, we can hold one another in times of joy and sorrow and hold one another accountable to our highest aspirations. There are some things that you just can’t do by yourself, no matter how beautiful your theology. Despite assorted statistics that suggest church membership is a quaint old habit on the decline in the US, we are bucking the trend and coming together as a church community!

Now, let me jump ahead and look at the middle part. We have charged ourselves with the work of “transforming lives”. This indicates that we feel that change is possible within a human life. We are not predestined, fixed, beyond help, or already perfect. Lives can be transformed. Maybe even our lives. Granted, we didn’t specify if we will transform lives for the better or worse! But I suspect that we aim to improve.

This speaks of an optimism that presumes progress is possible and that things can get better with intentional work. And we are indicating that this is work that WE will do — instead of waiting for a force outside us or above us to sprinkle transformation powder down upon us. And notice that we’re not doing this work in the aim of redemption or connecting ourselves to something from which we were disconnected by sin or failure or simply birth.

However, note that we stop with just the lives — we are not offering to help with any afterlife activity one might engage in. This is straight up, classically optimistic Humanism with no need for anything supernatural. We have the power and, some would say, the duty to transform lives

Now, let me go back to where we announce that we intend to nourish souls. Two words. Big Ideas. We are being bold here in stating that there are such things as souls and they require nourishment — AND that we will attempt to provide this nourishment! Now, let’s skirt around a few fiddly details about souls and any afterlife (again, we’ll stick to this life) — and acknowledge that if we use the word “soul” it is setting us apart from strict Humanists, who would place the use of reason and development of the human personality above all else. We are saying that we will feed something more than just our minds. And we believe that our community can be a source for this nourishment. It won’t just fall out of the sky upon a deserving few. From what I’ve seen around here, nourishing souls seems to be an active process using poetry, music, and ritual to feed and comfort in times of celebration and crisis.

Nourishing souls! This kind of talk can still get you tossed out of plenty of UU pulpits! In making this statement, we place ourselves among the contemporary UU’s who are reclaiming spiritual language and creating a place for such discussions in our church. We are still a little new at this and I suspect that we don’t have a good working definition of “soul” that everyone agrees on. But the fact that we are ready to use this word and do this work is a big step into a broader theology. Really. It’s big. Y’all are brave and bold.

We will “Do Justice”. This is biblical talk here! Straight from Micah 6:8. But I suspect we were just channeling that unconsciously —

He has told you, O man, what is good;

And what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?.”

Yeah… we’re probably not ready to go that far… And, yet, there is electricity in these words! “Do Justice!” They indicate that we are aware of injustice, and intend to do something about it. We won’t wait for an afterlife for fairness to be meted out, or wait for Karma to tidy up this mess. Instead, we will strive to discern just from unjust — it’s not always as easy as it sounds — and then attempt to be part of the weight that bends the arc of time towards justice.

Nourish souls, transform lives, do justice. Great words. There were some good words that wound up on the cutting room floor — sacred, beauty, love, nature. They were sprinkled in among all the words we received from folks, but they didn’t show up with the frequency of the others.

Here’s a word that didn’t make it up there: TRUTH. I think it did show up a couple of times – generally in the familiar phrase “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” that is one of our UU principles. But for the most part “truth” did not feature heavily. Why is that? I don’t know for sure, but I have my personal favorite theory. It goes like this – and, I’m sorry, but I have to bring up Postmodernism to get there – but here goes.

I suspect that many of us have let go of the notion that there is such a thing as a pure, unchanging, universal Truth. Even the idea that one-plus-one-equals-two really only works if you are measuring discrete objects. You already know that one drop of water plus another drop of water makes one fatter drop of water! So, I suspect that we are no longer in pursuit of a solid, lovely, singular and fixed, capital “T”, Truth.

But, we’re also probably not falling into the nihilism or relativism that is the dark side of Post-modern thought. That would be the idea that since there is no single Truth, that there is no truth at all. That doesn’t feel quite right either. Instead, I suspect that we are wandering into the Alter-modernist (oh yeah… I’m in grad school) the Alter-modernist understanding of Truth as a multi-faceted, shimmering thing that can only be appreciated from many angles and through many voices. And this gets us back to why we are gathering in community!

And there were some words that never showed up in the first place because they simply are not part of our collective theologies. Those were words like suffering, mercy, repentance, or judgment. We don’t find redemption in suffering or feel the need to repent in order to live our lives fully.

Oh, and there was one other word that made a couple of appearances, but not enough to register. It’s BODY. We didn’t think to include our bodies up there. That’s probably okay for now. I suspect they are implied. But I can’t be sure… Just in case, I’m bringing mine along…

Nourish souls, transform lives, do justice. This is our current mission. It reflects the theologies we bring with us and hope to create together. In a few more years, we’ll start from scratch and do the whole exercise over again. And then, because we are comfortable with change — new words will appear on the walls! And it will be cool. ©

Blessed Be!

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