Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, a little more than 60 years ago, an American denomination centered in the Northeast (that would be the Unitarians) found itself in a quandary. The Depression had forced a number of its churches to close their doors. The years of World War II had offered little opportunity to remedy its shrinkage. Now the war was over, the GIs had returned home, people were spreading out across the country, the economy was booming and so were the hospital delivery rooms. As Unitarians moved west and south, they found no suitable churches. But the denomination didn't have the resources to start more than two or three churches a year. What to do? The solution they chose was the Fellowship Movement. Almost exactly 60 years ago, the first Unitarian Fellowship was founded, in Boulder Colorado. About four years later, the Unitarian Fellowship of Stanislaus County was organized.

The Fellowship Movement spanned about 20 years - from 1948 through 1967. During that time, between six & eight hundred small lay-led fellowships were founded. At least 323 survive. We are one of them. California has 42 active congregations that started as part of the Fellowship Movement. In our area, that includes Fresno, Livermore and Davis as well as Santa Rosa, Redwood City, Humboldt and Chico. The Movement accounts for the establishment of about 30% of today's Unitarian Universalist congregations. 30% in 20 years is pretty impressive when you recall that some of our churches were founded more than 300 years ago.

A Unitarian lay leader named Munroe Husbands was the energy - and the only director - of the program. He traveled tirelessly to organize and then to assist new groups. He had an assistant, and some help from ministers, but most of the work was his. To say that he ran a shoestring operation would be an understatement. In fact, during that time, the Universalists approached the Unitarians about co- sponsoring a new, startup congregation. They proposed that each denomination contribute $2500. The Unitarians declined. Husbands' entire budget was only $2300. You get the picture. Especially as the number of fellowships increased, the department just wasn't able to offer that much help. Husbands usually made two road trips each year, spending 5 or 6 weeks on long circuits. He stopped to encourage and consult with young Fellowships and to check on places that seemed promising for new starts. Especially outside the Northeast, most of the Fellowships were pretty isolated. Most needed Husband's enthusiasm and advice.

A new book by Holley Ulbrich, professor emerita of economics at Clemson and a member of the Clemson Fellowship, chronicles the Fellowship Movement. She researched documents, sermons and other available accounts, did interviews and visited surviving fellowships. It makes pretty interesting reading, and I've bought a few copies, hoping that a number of you will be interested enough to go through it. The book has implications for the UUA as a whole, but I found myself - not surprisingly - reading it with our own Fellowship in mind.

But let me pause a moment to talk about terminology. When the Fellowship Movement began, the American Unitarian Association required 50 pledging families for acceptance of a new church into its structure. These families were expected to support a minister. This just wasn't practical in many of the far-flung locations outside the Northeast, where Unitarians were relatively or completely unknown. So a Fellowship was defined as distinct from a church. To quote Munroe Husbands, "Ten or more religious liberals in a community where there is no Unitarian church (or a suburb of a large city that does support a church) may become a Unitarian fellowship when they have expressed their approval or sympathy with the purposes of the Association . . ." At the same time, the threshold for churches was raised to 65 families

When a fellowship grew large enough to have a building, call a minister and so on, they were expected to change their name. Well, you can imagine how well that order was accepted! As you will see, the fellowships tend to have certain attitudes about authority. Some saw the name change as a sign of growth and achievement, but many simply refused to change. And others chose to call themselves a congregation or community or society. Or some combination of those. Today, the name gives little hint of size, level of ministry or ownership of facilities. Some examples: Eno River UU Fellowship in North Carolina has over 700 members, several ministers and extensive facilities. The UU Congregation of Santa Fe, New Mexico is over 300. Nora Church in Minnesota has about 70 members. Go figure!

But back to the Movement. Ulbrich gives "a pastiche of typical stories about the formation of fellowships . . . `Two or three of us met over coffee and decided to contact Boston . . . We placed an ad in the newspaper and lined up a meeting space . . . Munroe Husbands came from Boston and met with us . . . At the end of the evening we had signed up more members than we expected and were on our way." The ads were provided by the Layman's League. One read, " Unitarian churches are dedicated to the progressive transformation and ennoblement of individual and social life, through religion, in accordance with the advancing knowledge and the growing vision of mankind."

So I looked at the little write up of UUFSC history *. It starts out, "It all began on the 6th of January 1953, when a few former Unitarians and their friends, who were natural Unitarians, met at the Hotel Covell for the purpose of forming a Fellowship. That gathering proved to be encouraging and within three weeks the first speaker, Joe Bartlett, spoke on Unitarian History . . . Thirty attended. . ." It continues, "Later that year, when it came time to sign the charter, thirty-one men and women registered as Charter Members." I'd say we fit the pattern.

Like other new Fellowships, our group began by holding services in homes, then backyards. That soon proved unworkable and a variety of locations were used. Again, it's a common story. In 1957, the Fellowship moved into "Group Hall" at 6th and J, and settled in, even painting and making curtains. However, the building was sold in 1963 and they had to move on. It was a rocky year, as they moved from one unsatisfactory place to another, but in December, 1964 they bought this building from the 7th Day Adventists. We've been here ever since.

Ulbrich talks about the importance of getting a building and also of having programs for children. In fact she says that a major factor in a fellowship's survival was providing children's religious education. She mentions one organizational meeting that took place with 75 kids playing in the yard outside. It must have been quite something. These were the baby boom years, after all. In fact children's programs were the main reason for the formation of some fellowships. Mt Diablo, in Walnut Creek is one of them. Essentially all UU congregations include members who came for their children and found that they have their own reasons to be members. Our Fellowship wasn't expressly started for children, but it didn't take long before we had a church school program. In fact, during one period, the kids and teachers met more regularly than the adults!

One way our story differs from most other fellowships is our experience of professional ministry. All the fellowships were lay-led at the beginning. A few - notably Humboldt - have stayed that way. A few more called ministers within the first several years after they organized. Most took longer - some decades - before calling their first minister. Our congregation did things differently. Right from the beginning, we had some ministerial services. First, help came from Rev Ford Lewis, who was the minister of the Unitarian Church in Stockton. He was declared "Honorary Minister" less than a year after we got our start. (I think that means they didn't pay him.) For one year at Group Hall, we had a rotation of three ministers, each of whom preached once a month. Over the next two years, Rev Leonard Kirkegaard would "handle three Sundays a month and . . . do Pastoral work on Saturdays." Apparently we were lay-led again for about a year and a half before Rev. Boyd Tucker agreed to come out of retirement and serve the congregation.

This type of pattern continued for quite a while. We'd have a minister - often part time; then be lay-led for several years. Then another minister was secured, and so on. That pattern changed when Rev Jeanne Beaufort Hill was called in 1983, but some of our members have told me that the church considered going back to lay leadership in about 1999 or 2000. I don't know if this makes us different in attitude or practice from other surviving fellowships, but I find myself wondering about that possibility.

Ulbrich extends her view beyond history into the present day. She's looked at characteristics that seem typical of Fellowship Movement congregations but not other UU churches. Part of her understanding involves factoring in the influences of the times. She characterizes the 50s as being marked by a sort of conformity and blandness of culture. This was rejected by the poets of the beat generation and by opponents of McCarthyism and red-baiting. The 1960s, of course, were marked by counterculture and protest. Activity around Civil Rights, women's issues, and then environmental protection and opposition to the war in Viet Nam were intense. Thus the two decades of the Fellowship Movement coincided with a "cultural context of revolt, experimentation and intense individualism. Those who joined fellowships felt like they were casting off an oppressive history and creating something new and unique." Ulbrich also speaks of a certain "libertarian streak that coexists uneasily with the need to affiliate with like-minded others."

Ulbrich posits that those cultural forces, together with the independence needed to sustain the fellowships have produced four characteristic elements comprising "Fellowship Culture" - traits common in congregations which began as part of the Fellowship Movement. The first is preference for an informal, intellectual and participatory worship style, one with minimal ritual or liturgical pattern and few elements. Second is what she dubs - somewhat tongue in cheek - as `flat-earth humanism.' She defines this as a highly humanistic theology that shows the same intolerance toward other theological understandings that can be seen at the opposite end of the theological range. She credits it to reaction against traditional orthodoxy or Biblical literalism - and a clear determination to be different from them.

The third trait of Fellowship Culture is resistance to growth. A certain tension can exist between the intimacy and coziness of a small group and the desire to provide fuller opportunities and be a more significant voice. Fellowship members may be ambivalent toward newcomers and reluctant to see increased membership. They may resist a widening of theological range or perspective. Finally, Ulbrich lists resistance to authority, perhaps of any kind, but demonstrated in relationship to clergy and/or the UUA. Fellowships often feel little connection to the larger UU movement, seeing Boston as distant and generally not very helpful or even relevant. They may resent turning leadership over to a minister. Ulbrich clearly notes that not all these traits appear in all the fellowship-origin congregations.

She also reports that UUs have very different opinions about Fellowship Culture. An excerpt from a 1994 sermon given by the late Rev Dan O'Neal asks:

How shall we then describe the fellowship movement? Was it just so much wandering through the wilderness worshiping the Gods of isolated rationality and sterile anti-spirituality? Or was it the triumphant entry into the promised land of religious freedom and the New Jerusalem of unencumbered and liberating reason?

When I read those questions, I want to say, "Give me a break!" Neither description seems appropriate. Each is far too extreme and both seem severely biased toward the perspectives and preferences of the questioner. And, of course, I read them through the lens of 2009 when the sermon was written some 15 years ago. I want to look at the more complex realities of our congregations today.

It seems to me that Ulbrich's book, and our own capsule history, provide a sort of mirror that can be revealing. How does our reality match the descriptions? How do we, how should we, value the characteristics we find? I think our task is to continually look into such mirrors and try to understand ourselves as clearly as possible. Part of that involves asking what we bring along from our history, including the cultural forces at play during our formative years. Once we identify those traits, we must ask, "How well do they serve us today? What should we keep? What needs to be let go? What insights have been brought by newcomers? How can we be the best 21st century northern San Joaquin Valley congregation possible?"

I don't think these are simple issues. I certainly think we took some important steps and gained some real insights in the decades which included our founding. I hope we've continued to learn and that we've modified our outlooks in some ways. I wonder if it's appropriate for congregations in very different contexts and different parts of the country to share characteristics that seem rooted in the circumstances of their founding rather than the particularities of their communities or the current perspectives of their members. I hope we can balance our fond memories and affections for particular people and practices with the changing needs of our religious community today.

And I hope that we can begin to talk more about these issues and questions. I hope you will think about the characteristics Ulbrich identifies and whether they describe us. I hope some of you will read the book. I really hope one, or a group, of our long term members will take on the task of updating our own history - which currently stops in 1992 *!! I'm pretty sure that something worth remembering has happened in the 17 years since then, and we ought to record it! And I hope that you will join the conversation circle after this service. We may not be able to go on too long, but we can get a start on an exchange that could be quite valuable to us and to the Fellowship we love.

[* Read more about our fellowship's history. The printed version stops at 1992, but the web version goes to 2000.]

February 22, 2009

This is one of our Minister's Sermons. We also have a brief biography of Rev. Simons, and the latest edition of Grace Notes, a column she writes for our newsletter.
We have another sermon collection, from our Guests.