The Second Sermon in a Three Sermon Series by the Reverend Lucinda Duncan for Follen Community Church, Unitarian Universalist Sunday, September 25, 2005
Today’s sermon is the second in a three sermon series about the covenantal roots, governance practices, and multiple challenges to contemporary Unitarian Universalism.Last week I told you that, “Ours is a covenantal rather than a creedal church. We join by promising one another that we will individually seek the truth. We meet together to find the ways of respect, as best as we can see to do.
Together we have found that there’s always more to learn about how love really works, and could work, in our lives and in the world.”
This week I speak to you about our style of church governance which we call congregational polity. We speak about it, yet we have almost no idea of what it means.
Surprisingly, says Alice Blair Wesley, the way we are organized has everything to do with our beliefs. Perhaps it is ironic that “We North American Unitarian Universalists, in all our theological diversity, actually share one doctrine everywhere in common with each other now and with our earliest church ancestors on this continent. We call it the doctrine of congregational polity.” [Wesley, p. 5:Minns] While we neither invented this form of governance nor are the only religion using some form of it today, our organization and our theology are not two separate things. Indeed, as Unitarian Universalists, we know that “our style of organization is a function of our actual theology.”
[Wesley, Minns. p. 36]
Let me give you a working definition, now, of congregational polity.
“ Congregational polity is the form of church government in which each congregation is an autonomous, self-governing, covenanted body. “In this tradition there are no bishops by any name, no synod, no presbytery, no episcopate; No organized body or individual outside the congregation can dictate or direct the decisions and activities that go on within it. The individual church owns its own properties, elects its own ministers and other church officers, and conducts all its own affairs.” [Earl Holt; in Herz; p.25-26]In other words, congregational polity is democratic in operation, nonhierarchical in structure, and accountable at the local congregational level for the following things: setting its own goals, writing its own covenant and by-laws, and anticipating and assuming responsibility for all its major needs, expenditures, and decisions.
Now let’s look at the history of this concept of democratic church governance by noting, briefly, three historical events.
The first event I discussed in some detail in last week’s sermon. In 1607, the Reverend John Robinson asked others in his congregation in Scrooby, England if they might join with him to form a new kind of religion that would keep decision making at a congregational level of personal discussion and mutual agreement. Their group grew, fled persecution three times, and eventually established a new Pilgrim community and congregation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. What is significant for us is that it is this group — the Pilgrims — who brought both the idea of a covenantally organized congregation and the practice of local congregational governance to this country.
A second point about the history of congregational polity emerges after taking a closer look at the Puritan churches organized here in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. You remember that the Puritans were not a covenantal religion. They were Calvinist. Yet as groups of Puritans arrived and established communities and churches here — beginning with Salem, in 1629, and in 1630, Boston, Dorchester, Watertown and Roxbury — they kept their conservative Calvinist theology but adopted the congregational style of governance. In other words, operating according to congregational polity does not require a liberal, covenantal theology like ours. It also explains why today other religious groups — like the Evangelicals, most of the Baptists, and the United Church of Christ — share with us a deep loyalty to the style of governance known as congregational polity.
The third historical event, organized by the Puritan ministers eighteen years after the first of their congregations was started, is known simply as The Cambridge Platform. This 1648 document was written after the Standing Order churches’ ministers met and talked for two years about the problems they saw developing because of congregational polity. Different congregations were so autonomous they took no notice of one another’s existence, needs, or celebrations. This did not build a strong sense of fellowship among all the Puritan congregations. So the Synod of ministers reconceptualized and broadened the original understanding of congregational polity.
After The Cambridge Platform was published in 1648, the term ‘congregational polity’ was no longer to refer exclusively to issues of governance within a single congregation. It spoke of a right relationship within the entire community of independent congregations. Furthermore it specified that each Puritan congregation would actively engage in an ongoing relationship of care, consultation, and aid. Every congregation would understand that they were to give and to receive, the following six activities with neighboring congregations:
—mutual care, consultation, admonition, participation, recommendation, and relief and succor.” [Conrad Wright. Walking Together. p. 21].
Of course we are participating in relief and succor this month for the seven UU congregations that were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. But what of these other activities do we engage in on our own initiative?
I find it fascinating that last year’s Interim District Executive called most pointedly for the 55 UU congregations in the Boston-area Mass Bay District to share resources, activities and social justice activities. She told us we should work together in clusters of neighboring UU congregations, talking with each others’ lay leaders, participating in each other’s events, helping each other out with encouragement, help, and care. In the context of our own history, it’s pretty clear that the cluster concept for Mass Bay UU congregations essentially mirrors what the Puritans told their autonomous congregations to do nearly three and a half centuries ago.
We certainly could add to our understanding of how covenantal theology and congregational polity might be strengthened by asking other UU congregations
— their ministers, lay leaders, committees, and activity coordinators — to share their experiences, expertise, and recommendations with us.
The congregational way, whether practiced in the local congregation or freshly understood as involving a cluster of neighboring UU congregations, is a form of governance that has as many advantages as disadvantages. We all know them, intuitively, if we have spent any time on church business at all.
We know that the weakness of the congregational form of governance is the openness of the decision making process. Everyone is entitled to offer their understanding of the truth at any time. To put it politely, one might comment that this slows the process and raises frustration. Yet the strength of congregational polity is precisely the experience of hearing and considering the merits of differing perspectives about what matters most. We welcome the process of sifting through workable solutions, of weighing possible outcomes, of mulling different ways in which agreement might be reached. What emerges is a stronger and infinitely wiser solution. What emerges, if we stay engaged and respectful and open and caring through a long and sometimes challenging exchange of perspectives, is a transformational experience. By so doing we avoid the reactive defense of many traditionally couched truths and learn more about the presence of the sacred. There is something sacred in our UU theology and process understood by us all. When we agree, simultaneously, to seek understanding both collectively and individually, this process of respect and self respect models our most precious belief. It is a sacred process that leads us forward with honesty and compassion.
When we engage in this work, what we are actually doing is connecting ourselves “with the great and noble heritage of the free faith; with the great and good of every generation who have stood against all narrow self centeredness and institutional hierarchy. We ally with those who “have stood for truth as they saw it even at the ultimate cost to themselves.” [Holt. Herz. p. 32] When we join our particular UU congregation and engage deeply with what it has to teach us, we are joining “with the freedom fighters and freedom lovers of every age and every race and nationality and every religion.” [Earl Holt. Herz. p. 32]
The bedrock of our free faith is the covenant of trust that we enter into when we join. It is lived out in our willingness to engage openly and thoughtfully in the shaping of congregational decisions, and our ability to live with the decisions that emerge. Our polity is a sacred path to the truth through love. It is an essential element of our covenant of faith in ourselves and each other. By engaging with it to arrive at the highest that we can collectively affirm, it affirms the sacred in us and confirms the ageless truth that what matters most is what we have become together. -Amen.
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Books consulted:
1. Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches, by Conrad Wright. Skinner House Books, UUA, Boston. 1989.
2. Redeeming Time: Endowing Your Church With the Power of Covenant, ed. by Walter P. Herz. Skinner House Books, UUA, Boston. 1999.
3. Our Covenant: The Minns Lectures, 1999, by Alice Blair Wesley.
4. Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century, by Paul Rasor. Skinner House Books, UUA. Boston, 2005.
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