Love on the Loose
At the board retreat last Saturday, one of our UUCS board members said, “In order to plan for this year and beyond, we need to know how many members we want to have. And what kind of members do we want to have? ” Then, as if to signal that her questions were both rhetorical and not rhetorical, she went on, “No one ever wants to answer those questions, here or in my previous church, because they are political questions.” Our discussion moved on in other directions before I had a chance to answer, so I’ll do it now.
These are theological questions rather than political. And I believe they need to be answered in reverse order–what kind of members do we want to have? first, and then, how many members do we want to have?
Church folks, ministers and lay leaders and members of congregations endlessly debate what kind of members we want (and subsequently, how do we attract potential members of the kind we want)–people like us, people different from us. Across all sorts of criteria: educational background, socioeconomic status, race, age, political persuasion. There are backing arguments for each of the positions–why it’s better to attract new members who are like us or not like us according to any of those criteria, and further, there are backing arguments for why it is or is not ok to say aloud that we want new members who are like us or not like us.
Some try to avoid the pitfalls of that approach to the question by arguing that we want new members who share our beliefs–but that has its own pitfalls for a faith that is and has been staunchly non-creedal, one that encompasses beliefs ranging from atheism to UU Christianity. Still others, and this is the group I usually fall in with, will say, we want to attract members who share our approach to matters of faith and religion. Who understand that there are many paths to the truth, that we each must eventually find our own way in the search for meaning and answers to life’s big questions, and that the search is more fruitful when we do it alongside other seekers.
I still think that's a useful answer to the question of what kind of members we want in our congregation and in Unitarian Universalism writ large, but our Soul Matters packet for this month of September gave me another way of framing my answer. Among the worship resources for the Practice of Welcome was a quote from author Shauna Niequist: “True hospitality is when someone leaves your home feeling better about themselves, not better about you.”
I think the kind of members we want in our congregation are people who come into our church home and later leave, feeling better about themselves for having been here. We want members who feel better about themselves when they hear and see and experience that we welcome families of all constellations, and individuals of all genders and sexual orientations. Who feel better about themselves when they’re offered and take part in opportunities to serve their community, to work for justice, to contribute toward the healing of our planet. Who feel better about themselves when their spirits and intellects are tended and engaged and celebrated in worship and in adult education offerings. We want members who feel better about themselves when they’ve heard that we don’t expect them to recite a creed, let alone believe it. When they hear that we know they are capable of engaging the big questions of life on their own terms–and we expect them to do so, in the company of fellow seekers, inspired by sacred texts from around the globe and across the ages. We want members who feel better about themselves when they realize that they’ve been to several of our services and never heard a suggestion that they were born sinful or that they need to be saved from their inherent, essential nature. Who feel better about themselves when they leave on Sunday mornings with children who are enthusiastic about what they learned and did in RE and, knowing they are cherished here, want to be back next week.
Now, it may sound like I’ve said everyone is the kind member we want, because who wouldn’t feel better about themselves after time spent at our church? Isn’t everyone made to feel better about themselves by all the things that make us feel better about ourselves–all the things this church is to us? But that’s not so, of course. Some people feel better about themselves after time spent in religious community that closely reflects their own ethnic group, or after time spent in the faith community that has sustained them and their family for generations, or after time spent in a church that provides more answers than questions, or that offers a more relentlessly positive theology, spending less time on the hard parts of life.
No, not everyone is the kind of member we want, but only because we are not the place where everyone feels better about themselves. However, you’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that the far from exhaustive list of many kinds of people we want as members I just recited neither explicitly includes nor excludes people who are like us or different from us across any sort of demographic divide. Put another way, in defining the kind of members we want as anyone who feels better about themselves for being part of this church, this faith movement, we allow the people who are seeking a church to decide whether or not they are the kind member we want.
I realize that complicates marketing and outreach efforts. We can’t simply send a mass mailing to targeted ZIP codes or do whatever it is social media marketing experts advocate for reaching particular age, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups. But growing a congregation of people who feel better about themselves, and therefore become more fully and authentically the people they are called to be, is worth the more creative and challenging effort of bringing our ministries, our programs, our existence to the attention of people we might miss if we were to more specifically define the kind of members we want. Because people who experience a deep and genuine sense of hospitality here will, over time and through their participation in our congregation, become better resourced spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, to serve the community and heal the world. As indeed most of you say has happened to you through your time and membership here. And thus not only will our numbers grow. So too will our impact on Savannah and points beyond grow, our impact on the world, our impact on the environment.
And speaking of numbers, what about that board member’s other question–how many members do we want? There are practical considerations, of course. How many can we fit in our sanctuary? How many can find parking on Sunday morning? How many seats are there in the choir ‘loft’? How many Sunday school rooms can we equip and staff? Do we have the music and RE resources to room two services each Sunday. These are significant questions. Appropriate for a board discussion with thoughtful and informed input from the staff member with the greatest knowledge of our internal capacity and the greatest knowledge or access to knowledge about the ways other congregations creatively and practically address such issues–that is to say, with thoughtful and informed input from the minister. But the minister has another role, as important if not more important than the holder or accessor of knowledge. The minister is the keeper of the vision. And in that capacity I say, we want as many members as there are people who find or will find this to be the home from which they depart feeling better about themselves for having been here. That may be 150. That may be 450.
The movie line is “if you build it, they will come.” The church’s line should be, “if they come, we will build the capacity to welcome them home.” We’ve got talented, creative, skilled, generous members–seven of them were here yesterday, on an August Saturday morning for a building and grounds committee meeting–we got the members and the motivation to figure it out. Sustainably, for the long run. 150 might feel comfortable and doable. But if it’s 450, we’ll figure it out.
I’ve been talking for a while now about a non-standard definition of hospitality but am turning now to what we might more typically think about, when we think about a church being hospitable or not.
Once upon a time, in a city far, far away, I showed up at the Unitarian Universalist church I’d been attending for a while, for what I thought was a potluck dinner, bowl of beans or potato salad or something in my hand. Alas, it was not an open invitation, potluck dinner. It was a more organized kind of dinner for which reservations were to have been made in advance. The woman who informed me of that fact was harried and seemed annoyed with me. “Oh, well,” she said, “Fred Peterson’s date stood him up. You can have her place at that table.”
I didn’t take Fred Peterson’s date’s place at the table. I went home instead, and for the rest of my time in that city I traveled much farther afield each Sunday to attend services at a different UU church. The minister of the first church got word of what had transpired that evening and sent me a note. He apologized, and he explained that the woman had had a bad day. But one less than hospitable welcome was enough for me to get the message that I was neither welcome or needed at that church.
Fast forward thirty years and I was on the other side of the lack of hospitality equation. A Unitarian Universalist couple who had relocated to Savannah visited our church, and I gave them a less than hospitable welcome. That was enough to send them out our doors and into a different UU church farther afield. This happened very early on in my time here–the first month perhaps. My anxiety about being new, and my unfamiliarity with our ministries and offerings, came across as unfriendliness and disinterest. It was not the responsibility of those visitors to divine my insecurity or give me/us a second chance. Just as it had not been my responsibility to guess that that woman in that other church had possibly had a bad day, or to, as I have speculated in the years since, that she really meant her “you can take the place of the no-show” as a gesture of hospitality–a way of saying, “we want you here even though we weren’t expecting you, so please take this seat that would otherwise go empty”.
Our invitations into our church community matter and the welcome with which we receive visitors matters. Which is not to say that ministers aren't allowed to have a distracted day or that lay leaders can’t have off days, or that churches only have one shot at offering a sincere and inviting welcome. But if one of the central
tasks of the church is to be hospitable in the way I discussed early, that is to say make people feel better about themselves for having been here, then we do need to pay attention to the basics of welcoming folks into our services and our social hour and our other ministries–so that visitors don’t make up their minds and hearts about us before we have the chance to offer that deeper hospitality. Hospitality is a job for our membership chair, our ushers, our coffee hour volunteers, our worship associates, me, and all of you.
The good news is, the Soul Matters packet suggests yet another winner of a definition of hospitality, this one from Sister Joan D. Chittister: Hospitality is simply love on the loose. When we let loose the love we have for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah, the love we’ve experienced at UUCS, the love of ourselves that has deepened through our membership here, when we let our love loose, then everyone–from visitors to our church on Sunday morning to all the people we meet throughout the week–will encounter us as the embodiment of hospitality.
Loving the church, being loved by the church, feeling better about ourselves for our participation in the church–these are all points of the cycle of hospitality that flows from blessing us to blessing the congregation to blessing potential new members to blessing to blessing the planet and the world community to blessing us again. When we let our love loose we don’t merely sit at the welcome table–we set the welcome table, right here on Troup Square, for all kinds of people we can’t begin to imagine might pull up a chair and take a place that might otherwise go empty. Just as if we had been waiting for them.
And we will have been.
Amen