DIMENSIONS OF MINISTRY
Witness for Justice
Serving Social Needs
Our Unitarian Universalist heritage calls us to promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and social service has been part of our historic identity for two centuries. In food pantries and Winter Nights shelters, in clothing drives and serving meals at soup kitchens, the congregations I have served in have had many members seriously engaged in serving people living with poverty, homelessness, addictions, and the effects of unjust social systems.
A recent experience with the Faithful Fools street ministry in San Francisco (that's me at the left, in the midst of a seven-day "street retreat" in the Tenderloin last April) has helped me to understand that this work of service is greatly enriched by building a sense of personal relationship and connection--what the Faithful Fools call "accompaniment." When we bear witness not only to the experience of those who are struggling but also to our own relatedness to them, the work of service becomes personally transformative.
Working for
Justice
Like many who first find Unitarian Universalism in a time of personal spiritual need, I came to understand the necessity of social justice work slowly. Yet as I articulated a faith that was more and more rooted in connection and interdependence, I gradually realized that I must be engaged in the work of justice in order to be a whole person. As Mark Morrison-Reed declares in our hymnal, once the religious community has unveiled our interconnectedness, we are inspired to act for justice.
My own activism first awakened around my home congregation’s embrace of the Welcoming Congregation program, and quickly expanded to include public issue advocacy around issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. As a seminary student I was invited to join the Thomas Jefferson District’s Anti-Racism Transformation Team, where I began to learn the dynamics of institutional and systemic oppression, and to recognize my own privileged position as a white, straight, college-educated and middle-class male in a culture designed over centuries to deliver its richest benefits to people like me. I have come to believe that with this unwanted privilege comes the responsibility to use it to dismantle the systems and structures that have made it possible, and reinvent them in forms that will foster justice and equity in the whole human family.
Just as individuals must work for justice in order to be whole, congregations must be work for justice in order to be healthy faith communities. As a minister, I have focused on helping the congregation expand its understanding of social action beyond service and aid work to engaging with the powers and processes that create and sustain inequality both within the congregation and in the community at large. I believe a congregation which sees justice-making as central to its identity has a vastly expanded capacity to foster personal transformation and growth as well as to become a vital part of the community it lives in.
In recent years, especially after the extraordinary experience of the 2012 Justice General Assembly in Phoenix, our congregations have begun to embrace the importance of doing justice work in multifaith partnerships, in relationship with and taking leadership from the groups most affected by the issues being addressed. This model has led to powerful work, especially around issues of Immigration and Mass Incarceration. Working with Congregationally-Based Community Organizing groups in Charlottesville and in Contra Costa County, it has been powerful to witness as the congregations' social justice identities developed toward a growing sense of solidarity and partnership with those who live every day in the shadow of oppressive structures and systems.