Beyond Welcome: Building Communities of Love, edited by Linnea Nelson

This book was handed to me by the chair of my church’s Membership and Outreach Committee. He told me he was thinking of using the book as the text and outline for a series of programs he wants to run in the Spring to get the congregation thinking about populations who might need special attention to feel included in our congregations.

The book is a slim (133 pages) collection of 20 short essays by nearly as many authors. Many essays speak to the needs of specific identity groups: kids, youth, disabled, black, “all genders”. I was gratified to see that diversity of economic class was given an essay. Some essays speak of general issues involved in creating more diverse congregations, such as adopting a “multi/and” mindset that reaches beyond either/or and even both/and; the use of the internet to reach folks who cannot attend our physical locations; creating covenants; universalist theology. Several essays toward the end of the collection focus on particular ministries of the church: music, arts, pastoral care, religious education with families.

The book was published in 2021. The essays are from just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic or written during the pandemic. It was a time of sudden, necessary, reinvention of how we do church. How will we connect when we cannot be together in person? Is Zoom sufficient for meeting and sustaining our need for community? Will we continue with Zoom once the quarantine restrictions are lifted? This was also the time of the George Floyd protests following a period of heightened racial reckoning nationwide that had reached a critical point in Unitarian Universalism in the Spring of 2017 after more than two decades of attention but continued dissatisfaction. Most of the essays speak of frustration and sadness. Authors proclaim their love for Unitarian Universalism but are critical of a church culture that doesn’t meet their needs.

This cultural critique points to the unresolved problem of asking our Unitarian Universalist churches to be more welcoming to those currently feeling left out, let alone moving “beyond welcome.” The title seems to admit that our churches are welcoming but something more remains necessary. Our congregants get defensive when the critique seems to say that our members aren’t friendly enough. We are friendly, but the argument of Beyond Welcome is that a mere welcome says you can join us if you can be comfortable with the way we are, but that some folks need more than that: they need us to change.

But a real change, significant enough to meet the needs expressed in this book, is a big ask. The folks who have already found their way into our congregations like what we are. Unitarian Universalism has a theology but we also have a character, a culture. And while our culture is more malleable than our theology, it equally defines our identity. Any cultural change means a move away from what brought our current membership to church and keeps them connected to our faith and our congregations. They committed to our churches, and support them, because they like it the way it is. Of course it’s not wrong to ask people to be generous in giving up a portion of their personal satisfaction in order to let others find their share of satisfaction also. I will graciously scoot over so you can have a seat. I will tolerate a special service in a revivalist evangelical style, or an occasional contemplative silent worship, but only if I know that most weeks will be the intellectual sermon in the “hymn sandwich” that I prefer. How far can Unitarian Universalism bend before it breaks? How far can we stretch before we snap?

Some changes have the goal of making what we already are accessible to more people: wheelchair accessibility, adding hearing assistance systems, changing the signs on bathroom doors. But other requests ask the church not merely to open what it is to a wider population, but to be something other than it is. Beyond Welcome includes both kinds of requests and we should be clear that they aren’t the same. In a dimly lit restaurant no one’s disturbed if I use the candle on the table to read my menu. I don’t ask the management to turn up the lights. A noisy restaurant makes me anxious. But if I insisted the restaurant quiet the noise, my satisfaction would spoil the experience for the folks who find the energy stimulating. So I go somewhere else.

Eventually, every one of these authors who ask Unitarian Universalism to change the way we do church, change the music, change the style of worship, change our language, change our governance structure, and so on, is asking the current church to stop being who we are, in order to be something different. The authors might style their request as “something more” than we are, but it’s ingenuous not to recognize that something more is something different. And when a church becomes something different, what happens to the people who were comfortable the way it was?

Multiculturalism is not the answer, because a unified community cannot be two things, or more, at once. Our monoculture can be varied, plural, diverse, but it is still our single culture: the one way we are and do things. A culture might clearly reflect a single tradition, or it might intentionally draw from and honor multiple traditions (which Unitarian Universalism does far more than any other faith) but wherever it positions itself on the cultural spectrum it can only occupy one place on the line. We are who we are. Movement in either direction means change. Change means giving up. Change means loss and grief.

Although something new might be added, the new will take the place of something old, or an old way of doing something that we no longer do or do less often. A single community will be either what we were, satisfying some people and not others, or something new, hopefully satisfying some different others, but perhaps leaving out some of the formerly satisfied. We added Zoom during the pandemic and continue to use it reaching folks who otherwise could not be included in our community. But that change affects the worship experience for those in the physical church, too: slides projected on the wall, a recognition in our language that the congregation isn’t just in the room, new challenges of how we handle ritual and participatory elements of worship to include everyone, a huge technology investment, and a continued budget expense to run the technology week after week and keep it maintained.

Of course our congregational culture will change. We are not the Unitarian or Universalist church we were two hundred years ago, or a hundred years ago, or the church we were 60 years ago when the two traditions merged, or even the church of 30 years ago when I first attended a Unitarian Universalist church. The ask in Beyond Welcome is not out of bounds. The authors are pointing a way forward, and pushing for it, appropriately. But they should respect, not disparage the resistance they feel. And we should all be open to hearing different visions of what the future of our churches might be: radically new, serving new populations, or much like we have been, serving much the same people we do now. The people currently served by Unitarian Universalism are as deserving of the care and comfort of spiritual community as are the people we haven’t reached yet. We will change, but to what is uncertain. And whatever change comes it must come at a pace carefully measured so that the folks who will inevitably feel loss come along with the change. If there is to be a radically new Unitarian Universalism in the future it must be born in what we are now, and so what we are now must be tended to, remaining sufficiently strong and healthy to do the birthing.

Beyond Welcome is an appropriate text for a church discussion group. It raises important issues. And it represents perspectives that may not be currently present, or as articulately stated, in the existing membership. But to use the text responsibly it should be understood that it gives one side of an argument. It’s appropriate to argue back. Frequently the essayists make assertions without providing evidence. Frequently they speak from a particular theoretical position, or speak from a singular point of view that excludes other interpretations. Like any community the book has a right to be fiercely what it is. It’s up to the reader to make their way in.