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A Look at the Present and Future
by Rev. Dr. Richard Speck
April 9, 2006

         I thank Rev. Crestwell and you for extending this invitation to be with you once again to worship with you.  I am completing six years in the position of District Executive and have had the opportunity to be with you on many occasions in the past six years.  I have gotten to know quite a few of you such as Race and Joyce, Dixon, Monica, Dawn Star, Rev. John and Sharon, Preston, and too many more to name.  I am appreciative of each one of you who have given your energy to this congregation and to the Joseph Priestley District through the years.

         I have been invited to speak about the present and future of Unitarian Universalism.  I don’t consider myself an expert on either, but I’ll tell you what I think I know.  I’m reminded of the story of the person who went skydiving for the first time.  The man jumps out of an airplane with a parachute on his back.  As he's falling, he realizes his chute is broken.  He doesn't know anything about parachutes, but as the earth rapidly approaches, he realizes his options are limited; he takes off the parachute and tries to fix it himself on the way down.  The wind is ripping past his face, he's dropping like a rock, and at 5000 feet, another man goes shooting up past him.  In desperation, the man with the chute looks up and yells, "Hey do you know anything about parachutes?!"  The guy flying up looks down and yells, "No, do you know anything about gas stoves?!"

         I began with three readings from the past to set the stage for today.  Frederick May Eliot challenged his hearers to build a strong faith centered on freedom of belief, serving God without worrying about themselves, and speaking and acting without fear in spreading their faith.  We are confronting the same challenge today in this country.

         Each of you knows that this nation is involved in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, warrantless electronic searches of civilians, indefinite incarceration without trial of those labeled as opposing the United States, and other acts by the government that cause concern among many people.  There is also increasing poverty, homelessness, and incarceration of people of color.  I’m not here today to discuss these issues.  But the present time calls us to uphold our religious value system that gives each person inherent worth and dignity in how we interact with them.  I don’t think that the prevailing view in government agrees with our values.

         Our religious value system is seen here by the way this congregation has been evolving over the past several years.  I and the rest of the Unitarian Universalist Association have been watching you as you move boldly into your future as a truly multi-racial congregation here in Prince George’s County.  Several years ago, Rev. Don Cameron-Kragt approached the JPD and the UUA to find a way to partner with Davies on a radical plan.  The plan included advertising, new programming, and additional staff to reach out to the people of color in this region.  After considerable conversations, we agreed to join in this process and do what we could to help you realize a new vision.  You embarked on an ambitious plan to broaden your ministry to the African American community that surrounds you.  No longer contented to be a white enclave in Camp Springs, MD, the leadership of this congregation decided that the time had come to reach out in new ways to African Americans.  That included bringing a new minister into the staff team by the name of John Crestwell. 

         The professional and lay leadership have worked diligently over the past three years in gaining congregational approval toward each step of the plan.  It has been modified as we went along when the funding from outside the congregation wasn’t adequate for the whole plan to be implemented.  You made great strides in your own financial support of the congregation with some help from the UUA.  Don Cameron-Kragt willingly resigned this year to make a place for John Crestwell as your senior minister.  Many of you have made financial sacrifices to make this dream a reality. 

You have an inspiring vision for your future.  It is three-fold: 

• to raise community awareness of Unitarian Universalism by inviting our neighbors and sharing with them the good news of the Unitarian Universalist faith
• to gain and welcome new members because we have a message to share that lifts people up
• to strengthen the community within by creating dynamic programs and opportunities for spiritual growth

You are doing what the Committee on Goals called Unitarian Universalists to do almost forty years ago when they said, “We should intensify our efforts to articulate clearly our particular ‘religiousness’—asking other people if this indeed is not where they belong.”  Direct invitation is still the most common way people come into our churches.  Your web site is a portal to which many people seek information before they ever set foot on the property.  Your community newspaper shares the good news to an ever widening area.  You are asking the people that you meet if this could be their religious home.  This is helping spread our life affirming message of liberal religion. 

Our Unitarian Universalist faith is more needed now than at any time in history.  We face the dangers of terrorism, social alienation, widening gaps between people, and other ills of society where the fabric of community is being rent asunder.  Our faith lifts up the spirit of communal action for the greater good while insisting on each person seeking religious truth for themselves.  We honor the diversity that we find and do not fear those who do not see the universe the same way that we do.  As did Donald Harrington almost fifty years ago, we see a unitary dimension of experience and celebrate the unitary character of the human family.  That faith is needed in this world that sets people apart from one another in so many ways – skin color, economic class, ethnicity, sexual orientation.

You are a part of a larger movement that is bringing our congregations closer together for communal support and work.  In the Joseph Priestley District we have formed four regional committees to work with the congregations in that region on ways to strengthen and grow the existing congregations as well as seek new opportunities to start new congregations in underserved areas.  The Washington/Baltimore Growth Committee has developed and gained approval from the 27 congregations in this area for four major strategies which are: (1) building vital congregations, (2) developing racial and cultural diversity within our congregations, (3) creating a public outreach program, and (4) establishing new large congregations in the region.  People from this congregation are involved in the work of bringing congregations together for these common efforts.

The District can only be as strong as its constituent parts.  That is why we are working in these regional settings in partnership with the leaders of congregations.  That is why we partner with congregations like Davies on bold experiments that hold promise for the other churches in the Association to replicate.  That is why we hold training sessions throughout the year to give the tools to the professional and lay leaders the information they need to be more effective in leading the churches and fellowships. 

Over fifty years ago A. Powell Davies had a vision of Unitarianism for the greater Washington region.  His preaching was attracting overflow crowds to All Souls.  Instead of continuing to attract ever more people to him, Davies intentionally told members of All Souls to gather in the suburbs and start new congregations.  Five churches were started in quick succession.  This church is here because of that call to spread the faith.  Davies also knew that working together in collective action was better than going it alone so he helped form the Greater Washington Association of Unitarian Churches in 1950.  He chaired this council until his death in 1957.  It continued supporting the larger faith community for over fifty years.

We are now the ones to keep that flame burning bright that A. Powell Davies nurtured.  We are the ones to carry our faith into new lands.  The Joseph Priestley District is the strongest district in the Unitarian Universalist Association.  We have almost fifteen thousand adults and seven thousand children and youth in our sixty-five congregations.  The light is strong here.  But we could easily be twice those numbers.  A survey a few years back pointed out that there are at least 500,000 people who claim to be Unitarian Universalists.  Where are they?  We are losing ground in relation to the population.  This county has over 840,000 people.  We have four churches with a total membership of 851.  That is 0.1% of the county.  With our religious values being the quintessential American values we should be at least 1% of the population which would mean at least 8400 adult members.  And I don’t see just four congregations in our future but fifteen or twenty large congregations bursting with activity.  Now that is my hope and vision for the future of this county.  It will take hard work and dedication, but it is not impossible to achieve.  I challenge you to help make it happen.

When it comes to predicting the future of Unitarian Universalism I hope that I am better than other people in different lines of work.  A Western Union internal memo from 1876 stated, "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."  And an engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM in 1968, commenting on the microchip said, "But what ... is it good for?"  As we all know by now, both items have revolutionized our world.  I want our religion to revolutionize society and not have people ask what it is good for.

For many of our Christian friends, today is Palm Sunday where Jesus rode into Jerusalem with the adoring crowds placing palm fronds and cloaks along the streets.  Those same crowds turned on him by the end of the week as he was crucified.  They weren’t very committed to what Jesus had been saying about how to live in faith with one another.  What is your commitment to our faith that works for a great day of peace and justice in the here and now?  Will you be a fair weather UU?

To achieve our goals in the JPD of growing and spreading our faith we will need to be far more confident in witnessing what we believe to those we encounter.  We need to hone our elevator speech to tell people what Unitarian Universalism stands for, not what it is against.  We will need to deepen our conversations about race and economic injustice.  We will need to be more passionate about our faith and give more of our time, our talent, and our treasure.  In other words, we will need to hold ourselves to a higher level of commitment than has been common among many of our members.

The Committee on Goals of 1967 summed up what our future needs to be.  “Our religion, whether explicit or implicit, has a fundamental influence on our development as individuals and as a society. The future is determined by the actions we take in terms of our religious beliefs, faith, and values. No better validation of a religion has come to my attention than the proposal of Jesus, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The transcendent survival value of our religion is manifest in our individual behavior or social action: however, the fruits are not our religion, but its consequences.” 

What will your fruits be in this congregation?  How will you be known in Prince George’s County?  Will your light shine ever brighter so that more people will find their way into your doors?  Will you greet them warmly with a radical hospitality that embraces differences?  Will you seek out opportunities to work with other people of faith to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and care for the poor?  If the present is any predictor, it will be bright indeed. 

In his sermon Whose is the Future, A. Powell Davies ended with these words: “Whose is the future?  The future belongs to those who are willing to deserve it and resolved to possess it, who make neither boasts nor excuses, but whose quiet faith is such that having undertaken the task in hand, they expect to complete it.

God give to all of us a readiness to share this task, and zeal and courage equal to its burdens.”  May it be so.  Amen.

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