DIMENSIONS OF MINISTRY
Spiritual Leadership
Who Is U.U.?
Casserole Brigade
Worship and
Preaching
To lead the worship of a congregation is an extraordinary privilege. The community gathers at the intersection of everyone’s spoken and unspoken needs, expectations, and hopes. Together we might share intellectual stimulation, fellowship, intimacy, moments of beauty, spiritual sustenance, emotional heights and depths, a clear analysis, a galvanizing call to action on a pressing issue. We explore through words from inspired and inspiring sources, laughter and tears, truths of our lives, music, images, and stories, and drama.
Into all this we add the thoughts of a preacher who has been entrusted with the task of bringing all this together into a coherent whole. Preaching requires an odd combination of daring and humility: Daring, because it is audacious to imagine my thoughts are worth sharing; humility, because it is not my worship service but the congregation’s. Like all of worship, preaching is a shared act, and every service is a journey of discovery which we must take together if we are to experience its full possibilities.
Here are a few sermons and worship elements to give you a sense both of what I'm like as a service leader and preacher, and a sampling of the ways I approach theological, personal, community, and justice topics.
Celebrating the
Cycles of Life
To craft rituals and ceremonies marking the passages of life is to share in the task of naming and welcoming our most profound emotional and spiritual experiences. The liturgical freedom of Unitarian Universalism allows a minister to empower those whose life experience the ceremony honors to express what they believe and hope the occasion really means. At the same time, a public ceremony also lifts up the participants' unity with all who have celebrated, mourned, and lived through such passages. Standing so close to people when they are most acutely aware of life’s richest joys and most harrowing sorrows and mysteries, a minister is on holy ground and in sacred time. It is a great honor and blessing, and affords some of ministry’s most powerful moments.
Lifespan Faith Development
What we call "Religious Education" is in reality a lifetime process of spiritual exploration and development. If, as Unitarian educator Sophia Lyon Fahs said, “religion. . . is really a process of learning how to live,” then everything that happens in a religious community is religious education. Our process of discovery, guidance, and growth in religious understanding is the work of the whole congregation, through which we shape our identity as a community. The congregation’s lifespan faith development curricula should be an expression of its mission and shared values, affirming and enriching the lives of all the community’s children, youth, and adults at all ages and stages of life.
As a lay leader, minister, and co-minister, I have shared in working to dissolve the boundaries that sometimes separate adults, youth, and children in our congregations. I have participated in Children’s and Youth Religious Education programs; I have worked to bring young people into the sanctuary to share some part of the congregation’s worship, and to raise non-parent adults’ awareness of the Religious Education program’s activities and needs.
I have enjoyed teaching and sharing leadership in a wide variety of adult classes, on topics as varied as "Understanding Islam," "Building Your Own Theology," "Making Whiteness Visible," and "Longing for God." A particularly great pleasure has been sharing leadership of year-long Ministers' Classes including "Unitarian and Universalist History and Theology," "Hebrew and Christian Bible," and "Science and Spirituality."