I’m enrolled this year in a year-long, UUA-led, training course for interim ministers.  Although I have previous interim training and experience, I thought this was a good opportunity to refresh my knowledge and to have a group of similarly-situated colleagues to reflect with during the year.  We meet every other week for three hours on Zoom.  The class has been very helpful to me.

At the session this past week we were working on issues of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in terms of welcoming new people to the congregation.  One concept in particular struck me:  the danger of a single story.  Assuming a single story ignores the complexity of individuals and falsely assumes that all persons of a particular group are alike.  

The same can be said for congregations.  One of the interim jobs is to learn the congregation’s story, tell it back to you, and work out its implications.  But congregations are complex.  It’s too simple to tell a single story and believe we can explain everything about our past and predict our future from it.  Your story might be true, and I might have a different, but also true story.  Or my simple story might miss something important, or mis-interpret, or be biased toward naming a problem I want to work on, rather than what the congregation really needs help with.

As we come to the end of a long mediation on Identity, I’ve tried to offer several different ways we might define ourselves.  Here’s the conclusion:  they might all be true.  We might be all those things.  And even more besides.