Our Community of Communities
A few years ago, in the height of the COVID pandemic, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter Uprising, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I asked my mentor in ministry if we were living in the end times. This is a woman who co-wrote the Sunday School curriculum I was raised on (a curriculum grounded in the use of story and religious imagery) and who a couple decades later supervised my ministerial internship. She knows me, my faith formation, and my theology well. So, she first laughed–because, well, because we were FaceTiming from our respective isolation chambers nearly 1,500 miles distant from one another, in, as I’ve said, the middle of both a pandemic and a racial reckoning. All of it seemed unbelievable, laughable, not funny, but laughable. And then she answered me seriously, “No. Things aren’t bad enough for these to be the end times.”
I don’t believe in the sort of cataclysmic, eschatological end times described in certain Christian scriptures, so my question was largely metaphorical. And yet it wasn’t solely metaphorical. I was asking “Can I just give up because this is it? If it’s all over, if everything we’ve known and depended on is alternately collapsing in on itself and being brought down from outside forces, then can I stop trying to find or make meaning, stop trying to make a difference?” And I was asking, “Am I up to the task of living and ministering in this moment that may not be the end of the world, history or civilization, but really feels like the end? For that matter, what even is the task of living and ministering in such times?”
In her answer, “no, things aren’t bad enough,” I heard my mentor say, “Take heart, because as bad as it feels, this isn’t bad enough to signal the end of everything. If it’s not the end, there is hope.” And I heard her say, “Stand guard, because if it isn’t bad enough now to signal the end, then it can get worse.”
Now here we are, very nearly five years later. We’ve emerged, most of us, from pandemic isolation, and that particular round of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, that particular instance of extrajudicial police killing, are no longer in the news, but one or two or several hundred other things are happening around us. So this week I asked my mentor again, “Are these the end times?”
Again, she first laughed, and then answered. “For democracy, maybe.” And then she continued, “It’s not over but it’s the closest we’ve come in our time.” Then she pondered, “What do the endtimes look like, feel like? Did Europeans, in the build up to World War II, sense that the established world order was about to be toppled?”
I asked the question–is this the endtime– then and now, because when times are fraught and so much is uncertain, changing so rapidly, in our fear, our pursuit of security, I look for categories and frameworks to give me the illusion of understanding, of mastery. If I can name it, I believe, I’ll know what to do. Perhaps in time of crisis you do the same. The task of naming, of deciding what label best fits this current moment, however, belongs to future historians. Our job is to discern what this moment calls us to–what actions, what ways of being in the world–even if we don’t have a tidy label for the moment.
No one has yet asked me directly what our church’s response/action will be, should be today, next week, for the coming years. No one, that is, other than me. I’ve asked myself that question everyday since November 5, and just about every waking hour since January 20. You have perhaps been asking the same question of yourself, about your response, your individual course of action. There are so many ways we as individuals and as a congregation could respond: keep calm and carry on with life/church as usual; choose an issue and put all of our own or the church’s the human and financial resources on the line for that one issue; divert all our individual passion for social justice, or convert all our congregation’s social action ministry resources and volunteers, into a sort of clearinghouse that gathers and redistributes the most accurate, trustworthy, up to date information about unfolding events and coordinated public actions, so that our individual members can decide for themselves how to engage; collaborate with local partners; collaborate with Unitarian Universalist partners–to name but a few ways we might respond, a few actions we might take, by ourselves or as a congregation.
I don’t know the right answer for myself, as an individual. I don’t even know the one right answer for us as a congregation here, now, today. And I’m pretty sure that if there is a right course of action for us this week, by month’s end or certainly by summer, that course will need to be adjusted or abandoned in favor of some other, more efficacious path forward that we can not yet see or imagine.
One thing of which I am certain: we’re going to double down, and triple down, and quadruple down on community here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah. Fear and uncertainty tempt me to withdraw into the perceived security of isolation. Yet my faith teaches me that these are not times to go it alone. These are times that will destroy us if we don’t surround ourselves with people we know and trust, people who will hold our fears and sorrows and questions with us, people who will speak their truths and hear our truths, people who will celebrate small joys and tide-turning triumphs with us even amidst of all that is terrible, all that is unknown, all that is uncharted.
A new covenant group, meeting for the first time after church today, joins the several other covenant groups that have been meeting for some years already. These groups meet monthly for discussion of our Soul Matters themes. They form the background of our Adult Faith Formation ministry here at church. They are also small communities within our larger congregational community. The regular gathering of the same group of people, for the thoughtful consideration of spiritual themes, month after month, provides the opportunity for relationships to deepen in ways not possible in the course of snatched conversations in crowded coffee hours.
Our choir is another community within the UUCS community. The repetition of gathering for rehearsal Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings nine months out of the year, combined with the deep listening that is required to create a melodic whole out of disparate voices, lends itself to the birth of relationships that in turn grow into community.
Megan, our Director of Religious Education, fosters community in our mixed-age Sunday School classroom week after week. She leads formal lessons pulled from the Soul Matters RE resources and from a curriculum that uses LEGOs to explore our newly articulated UU values. She also incorporates time, each Sunday, for the kids to listen to one another and respond from their own wisdom, and she schedules periodic Sunday Fundays for game playing in Phillippa’s Place or out on Troup Square. With regular attendance, community takes root in that carefully crafted environment.
And it’s not just our kids who find community in Phillippa’s Place. When they go up after service to pick up their kids, most of our parents spend 10, 20, 30 minutes standing in that sunny, airy space, surrounded by the products of their children’s faith development activities, talking with one another and with Megan. Our kids, our parents, and our kids and parents and Megan all together are all communities within our congregation as a whole.
Our Green Team is a community centered on participants’ passion for our Earth and solidified through their activities. Likewise, our Anti-Racism Committee, meeting month after month for challenging, vital conversations exists as a community centered on a commitment to racial justice and forged through those conversations and ARC’s efforts to engage the larger congregation in the ongoing work of antiracism.
In addition to these discrete though sometimes overlapping micro-communities, we build and nurture community within our congregation in several ad hoc ways. Cookies, Cakes and Conversation kicked off last Friday and joins Game Night and Art Saturday as an informal opportunity to get to know our companions in the congregation, in a slightly less crowded Rahn Hall than Sunday-morning Rahn Hall. Even Lisa on the Loose, intended as a casual opportunity for church members to chat with me, (again, not always easy in Rahn Hall on Sunday mornings!) has developed into a community-nourishing time each week, as anywhere from 3 to 10 church folks, who may never have said more than “hello” to each before then, sit for 90 minutes with no agenda other than conversation.
Now, this is important.
While community is a generally accepted good, while I believe to my bones that community is a necessary core component of any strategy for the protection of our BIPOC and migrant and LGBTQIA kin at home and around the world, for the survival of entire populations who depend on US foreign aid for humanitarian relief, health programs, economic development, and peace and security, and for the mitigation of the economic devastation that seems inevitable on multiple fronts–as vital as it is, still, we have to take great care with community.
Community can lead to attitudes and practices that create and reinforce us/them–exclusion rather than inclusion. Communities, even when they avoid overt exclusion, can become insular, cutting members off from exposure and access to other communities, keeping members from another vital core strategic component this moment calls for – networking. These dangers are why I love the piece we heard this morning from Lesley Hazelton about enzo, the imperfect, often not-quite closed, Zen circle. Communities are always imperfect because they are human constructions. At their best they are also not-quite closed. They hold space, freedom, and mechanisms for entry into them from the outside, and space, freedom, and mechanisms for exit from within to the outside.
We’ve had six people sign our congregation’s membership books in the past 12 days. Our Sunday morning attendance since the beginning of 2025 has averaged 106 people, including online, in sanctuary, and babies, children and adults up in the nursery and RE. We’ve always had lots of tourist visitors. In recent weeks the majority of our Sunday morning visitors have been Savannah residents looking for a church community. We keep our community’s circle open for these seekers. And we keep it open for our current, long-time members, too, knowing that in times of great stress and uncertainty, people’s needs and routines shift. Some of us may be on our way out of this community even as others are on their way in, and still others may be finding their way back. This movement in all directions is an indicator of congregational health.
The cause for caution around community isn’t limited to the relationships between those in the community and those not in the community. Internally, communities can harbor bullies. Or, short of that, nevertheless fail to foster respectful and kind interactions and communication. Communities can fall into stultifying patterns and rigid role stratification. Their guiding principles and values can fail to adapt to changing times and circumstances. Members and friends who can’t easily participate–in the case of a church, can’t easily attend Sunday morning services or take part in social events or social justice actions may rightly feel forgotten or overlooked.
Last spring the Board of Trustees appointed and charged a Healthy Congregations Team–Dan Flaherty, Jane Hoffman, Rexanna Lester, and Jacqueline Smallwood. They have been meeting for months now, every other week, studying best practices and preparing for a fall launch of processes that will assist us in living into respect and kindness as individuals and as a congregation, while setting boundaries around bullying behaviors.
Our nominating committee, led always by the most recent past president, understands its charge to be broader than simply plugging any willing (or unwilling) volunteer into open leadership positions, but rather to also ensure that the new and perhaps unlikely members are invited onto our board and other elected positions.
Three relatively new members of our congregation, Mary Garafalo, Matt Brigman, and Summer El Talib Granado, have agreed to serve on a revitalized pastoral care committee. Their commitment, along with Susan Daggatt’s valuable input, will move us toward not allowing any member or friend of our congregation to feel forgotten or left out.
Our board and I share the task of keeping an eye on our ministries so that we don’t stray from our values, and as well, an eye both on the ever evolving mix of theologies, spiritualities, interests and resources of our congregation and the larger, ever evolving landscape of Savannah, Chatham County, the South and the United States, so we can keep it all aligned–our professed values, our lived faith, the needs of our community of communities, and the needs of the macro communities of which UUCS itself is a micro community.
These are the primary formal means by which the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah preserves, deepens, enhances its existence as a community of communities–the ones I named earlier and the ones yet to emerge.
You know that meme that pops up on Facebook from time to time? A bit of harmless time wasting silliness, or like so many other things on Facebook, a means of tricking us into giving away information about ourselves–or both. The one that posits something like “the first 8 people on your friends list are your companions in a lifeboat or on a deserted island”?
It’s ridiculous, of course. If any one of us were to find ourselves on a deserted island, it would most likely be the result of a plane crash or a shipwreck. And the people we’d find ourselves stranded with–with the exception, if we’re very lucky, of one or two family members or friends we might have been traveling with–the other people on that no-longer deserted island would be strangers, fellow travelers and airline or ship’s crew members. People we’d never met before. People with whom we have little to nothing in common with–not even the friend of a friend of friend sort of social media acquaintance. And we might form a community and we might help one another survive or we might encounter the Lord of the Flies.
But look around this room. Sign into the YouTube Live chat feature and look at the names there. Right now and next Sunday and whenever we gather for worship. These 75 or 80 other people are your companions in one of the lifeboats that will carry you through all that is to come as the result of last fall’s election. Not your only lifeboat, probably, nor your only companions. Your neighborhood, your 12 Step Program, your chosen family or nuclear family may be a lifeboat, too. It is good to have more than one community, more than one lifeboat in unprecedentedly perilous times. Still, I believe this congregation of people who may not yet be friends but aren’t quite random strangers either for they like you were drawn here looking for similar things, this congregation, this community of communities, if we take good and deliberate, just and loving care of it and of one another, will carry us all to safety–even if it is ultimately a safety that looks and feels and functions unlikely any safety we can imagine today.
May it be so. Amen.
