As we gear up for the new church year (starting September 10) let’s think about what we’re hoping to do, when, and how. Today we kick off our volunteer drive called, “Find Your Place.” As we call into being the coming church year, listen for the piece of the vision that calls to you and decide how you will offer your gifts of time, talent, or leadership.
Ah, the summer is drawing to a close.
The kids are getting their backpacks blessed, and reluctantly or excitedly are looking forward to another year of school.
Teachers, too, reluctantly or excitedly, are wrapping up their summer vacations and opening up the classrooms, and putting up the bulletin boards, and laying out the lesson plans. They need our blessings, too. My husband, the middle-school teacher, had his classroom set up day on Friday and his first day of instruction tomorrow.
In the cycle of the church year, our first day of the church year is still a month away. We start a church year on the Sunday after Labor Day with our Ingathering service. That will be September 10, this year. So, we still have a few weeks of summer vacation to spend between the end of last year’s church year and the beginning of the next. But now, in August, the energy starts to shift.
I encouraged us all, in July, to take some real time off, some down time, some quiet time, a Sabbath.
In August, we’re still in vacation mode, but now we begin to look ahead rather than back. We’ve moved from laying to rest what was, to planning what will be. We’re starting to put dates on the church calendar. I’m thinking about worship themes. We’re scheduling choir concerts, a holiday party. We’re organizing a month-long celebration of our church’s 80th anniversary in October. Jacki Weber and the RE Committee (hooray – we have an RE Committee!) are shopping for curricula and dreaming up fun programs for children that serve the kids we have and attract the families that will join us throughout the year.
So we haven’t quite started the church year. Not yet. But we’re getting close. And we’re making our plans.
Part of that plan includes you.
For the next few weeks, we’re going to move through a volunteer recruitment campaign with the theme, “Find Your Place.”
Think of this as the equivalent of the Spring stewardship campaign, but instead of asking for a pledge of financial support, the church is asking you to make a pledge of service.
This church belongs to you. It needs all of us. It needs all of our talents, and time, and yes our treasure – treasurer that pays my salary and allows us to have the paid staff that do a lot of the work required to keep the church running…
But belonging to a spiritual community, means giving yourself to the community. Not just investing your dollars, but investing yourself. Really getting in to the church. Putting your back in to it and your feet and head and the rest of your body. Getting your hands dirty. Doing the mental work of dreaming and communicating and problem-solving. Doing the leadership work of calling the meetings, and writing the agendas, and making the tough decisions. Doing the soul work of teaching children, or comforting a friend going through a tough time. Bearing up when the decision is important, and the meeting gets tense. Taking responsibility for your actions. Saying “sorry” when you need to, and “thank you” always. That’s what church is. And that’s how church helps us grow into the better people we want to be, and the better world we want for all of us.
The staff can’t do that work for you. Because the work of the church is not a product you receive, the work of the church is what we all make together.
So we need you here. We need your creativity, your passion, your ideas, your muscle, your help. We need you.
What’s your place, here? Where are you going to put your hands? Where are you going to make your mark? How, as we celebrate our 80th year, this year, will you take up the religious duty to receive the faith from the past, and carry it forward for a generation, before you pass it on again to whoever comes next?
Just as there is no right amount to give during our stewardship campaign, there is no required way to participate as a volunteer. Unitarian Universalism celebrates our individual diversity. Some will be called in one way, some in another. You have one set of talents or interests. Others have different skills. Some folks prefer a regular commitment they can schedule on their monthly calendar. Others prefer to be on call, or they can’t make a lengthy commitment but are happy to contribute intensely in a single project. Some are natural administrators who thrive in the work of committee meetings. Others say, “just tell me what needs to be done, and I’ll do it.”
I believe there is some service at our church that fits exactly who you are and what you can joyfully do. Over the next few weeks in worship you’ll have the opportunity to listen for the places in the church that need to be filled. And look around the church itself. And examine your own heart’s longing. Where do you see yourself? What would satisfy you, while serving the church?
And then, after worship on August 27, and again on September 3 (the Sunday of Labor Day weekend), find your place, sign-up for some service you can do for the church over the next year.
So, you’re part of the church year plan, but what is the plan? What vision will you be serving in your work for the church this year?
Well, currently the Board and I are working to create a strategic plan for the church. We have a draft completed and we will review and finalize the plan at a Board retreat later this month. The plan plots intentions for the coming year and the following year, which are the remaining two years of my interim ministry with you, with the vision that the church and the congregation will be as healthy and strong as possible in order to attract the best minister available and to help that ministry be successful when it begins in August of 2025.
So you can find the draft strategic plan already posted on our shared Congregational Life drive (it’s in the Administration drawer, under the Governance tab, in the Board of Trustees folder). And you can look for the final strategic plan to be shared with you about the time the church year begins, once the Board finishes working on it.
So today, I can’t share details about the plan, but I want to share a brief thought about the act of planning itself, and this leads me to a bit of my personal theology that I’d like to share with you.
You’ve heard the phrase, “God has a plan.”
That’s meant to be re-assuring. “God has a plan”, we say. Sure today might look bleak. Yes, you got some bad news. Yes, this seem like a set-back, but God has a plan.
That might be comforting if the bad news isn’t too bad, where the set-back really feels like it might be temporary and you’ll get over it without too much bother. It is true that sometimes what seems like bad luck turns out for the best. It is true that if we’re headed down the wrong path that meeting a road-block that requires a course correction might be a good thing.
But if the news is really bad, I mean really bad, wildfires in Maui bad, then telling someone that “God has a plan” is horrible. To say that God is using the destruction of your home, the destruction of your entire city, is using your pain and suffering for some greater purpose – in other words your tragedy is the deliberate choice of God, a God who, you also want to say loves you with a love greater than human love, and a God who presumably could have worked some magic to bring about the good future without hurting people along the way, well that makes God into some kind of monster, certainly not the Spirit of Love I believe in.
But if “God has a plan” is an absurd thing to say in light of that kind of tragedy, then it must be equally absurd in light of the smaller set-backs we say. I hear the compassion in the soothing phrase, “God has a plan” but as theology, it’s ridiculous.
Or you might have heard the phrase that’s the theological cousin to “God has a plan”, the phrase “There’s a reason for everything.” Well, yes there is, but not a divine reason. Everything has a cause, but the reason is human choices and natural laws of physics and biology. Natural disasters occur naturally, not because God causes them. Wars happen because of human greed and lust for power, not because God wills them. People lose jobs, and relationships end, and accidents happen, because that’s the nature of the world, and the nature of human beings, and things just happen. Not by divine plan.
I don’t think that’s the way God works. I don’t think God is in charge of every little moment, manipulating every little action. Giving happy days to some and tragedy to others. Sunshine for some, and thunderbolts for others. I don’t believe in that sort of God.
I don’t think God has a plan.
I think God has a vision.
Think about what we mean when we say we have a plan. A plan is a series of steps laid out with the purpose to get somewhere. The plan is the path. But to have a plan implies that there’s a destination, a goal, a vision. A plan and the vision are different things that have to go together. A vision without a plan is just a pleasant dream. A plan without a vision will get you nowhere, or anywhere.
So, I give to God the job description of creating the vision, dreaming the dream of what might be, envisioning the realm of love and light, the paradise, the heaven on earth, and holding on to that vision, and holding the vision out to us to inspire us and draw us forward.
But I give to humanity the job description of making the plan.
Where we are going, hopefully, is toward the divine vision. How we get there is up to us.
God has eternity. God leaves the days to us.
That doesn’t mean God is absent from our lives, but it means God doesn’t manipulate our lives, or the natural world. God can’t, which is why bad things sometimes happen to good people. God doesn’t have that power.
Instead, God has a more subtle power. God mingles in our lives, infuses our moments with divine longing, inspires us, advises us with that little voice of moral conscience and reason in our head, whispering, “wouldn’t it be better if you did this rather than that?” But the work is up to us. What we choose is entirely up to us. And the world moves forward based on our choices and the natural laws of physics and biology.
And then, once we’ve made our choice, and the wildfire happens, or whatever, we have taken a step forward, reality becomes what it is in the present moment, God looks again and says, “OK, the vision is still the vision, and now the world is here, perhaps closer or further from where God hopes we will eventually arrive, and God comes again with the next suggestion, the next inspiration, the best advice for the present reality, whispering through our conscience and reason, “OK, now try this.”
Our church plan will work the same way.
There’s a vision statement, titled “desired outcome” for every functional area of the church. And under each desired outcome there are several suggested “strategic steps” of actual work that might be done to realize the desired outcome.
Once the Board finishes their work on the strategic plan, all of this will be communicated to the various committees that are responsible for doing the work. The committee will adopt, or revise, the vision statement the Board wrote for them. And the committee will either take up the suggestions from the Board, or they might decide to work in some other way. The plan is up to you. To us.
The vision will remain before us, luring us, calling us, drawing us to it. We see that church of the future in our imagination, and we feel that church of the future pulling us forward, inspiring us,. And then we look down at our feet and we decide which way to walk. And under our own power, with only the work we do for ourselves, we take a step.