Thoughts on Ministry
At the most fractured time of my life, the compassionate love of a blessed community was a saving grace. That is the grace I seek to embody and to offer to others as a minister. The core of my understanding of Unitarian Universalist ministry is the concept of the compassionate community. I believe humans experience the wholeness of our divine nature in relationship and in compassionate connection with one another.
A minister is called to a congregation and covenants with them to perform particular tasks and take on certain agreed-upon roles, which have been described as Pastor, Preacher, Prophet, and Priest. At another level, the minister is covenanted to be someone in the congregation. The minister invites the people into relationship with one another and with the One; the minister embodies and models those relationships as best she or he can; the minister empowers people by helping them discern where their opportunities for spiritual relationships are; the minister embraces people by offering comfort or challenge when life calls for them. Our covenant with the congregation to be one who invites, models, empowers, and embraces is what sets ordained ministers apart from the ministry every member is called to.
Nineteenth-century Unitarian minister Mary Safford said that we create sacred space by treating the church community as our home. Hospitality, the act of inviting and welcoming others into space that we make sacred by our being together, is the sacrament of this home. Creating what Sam Keen describes as “hearths”—intimate communities of connection, compassion, and concern—and then expanding their reach through acts of radical inclusiveness, is transforming work.
My own call to the ordained ministry arose out of being part of such a “hearth” in a painful and then celebratory part of my life. I am called to invite others to enter that sacred space. To minister is to help people find and sanctify “hearths” of their own, where they may experience firsthand that our life is not bound within our personality or body, but spreads out in a vast web in which each of us is both an intersection point and a single thread, reaching out to the next single thread.
My call to ministry is also a call to be present with people as they experience the inevitable gains and losses of a loving life. It is an immense and holy privilege to embrace people as they confront the ecstatic joys and inescapable hurts of life as finite beings. Compassion is not a way to take someone’s hurt away, but stay with them through it, and to invite them not to turn away from pain in denial or refusal.
One genius of Unitarian Universalism is our insistence that no particular source among the acknowledged “Sources of the Living Tradition” is the exclusive or universally best path to wisdom or to relationship with the Sacred. Each source and path must inform the others, and each seeker must respect and engage with the paths that are compelling for others, while also respecting and following our own. To minister is to honor the multifaceted path, to nurture and shelter it within our communities so that all may find their way to that Truth which is accessible to every person.
It is not enough that we form compassionate communities to care for ourselves and others within the walls. James Luther Adams taught that a family which expresses itself only within the "family," and does not seek justice, equity, and compassion for the wider world, actually becomes a form of assistance to the powers of evil. The Hebrew prophet Micah says that the Holy One demands that we "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God." To minister then, is also to seek a wider community of compassion and justice.
The creation of compassionate, justice-seeking communities within which we range widely and with joy in search of Truth, and stand with one another in life’s trials, losses, and triumphs, is my best understanding of the way we align ourselves with the Creative Power of the Universe. That alignment, the human capacity to participate in the ongoing Creation, is the sustaining, transforming, compelling reality of our lives. It is the theological context for my ministry.