The mission of our faith has both a personal and a public dimension. We look to both refashion ourselves as just persons and transform the world as agents of justice. But in our outward directed work, we must remember that we seek to help people who have their own inner work to do. The question becomes, “from where does justice come?

            We’ve been talking about Mission in the church for the last few months, and for the rest of this month.

            We come today to the work of the church that some folks think is the mission of the church:  justice work.

            I hope by now, I’ve made my case that the church is here to do many things, not just one thing:

            Worship, which fills the perennial human need for regular connection with the transcendent quality of life.

            Lifespan Religious Education, which, for children, supplements the secular education of public school with moral education and connection to a religious tradition, and, for adults, fills the perennial human need for exploration and contemplation of life’s deepest mysteries, such as we’re currently doing in our Big Questions class.

            Pastoral Care, which fills the perennial human need to care for one another, receiving practical and spiritual care during life’s challenging times, and providing care to exercise our spiritual gifts of service and compassion.

            Fun and Fellowship, which fills the perennial human need for society, for friendship, for un-programmed play time, for goofing off.

            Next week I’ll get to another program area, Membership, which is our mission work of spreading the good news of Unitarian Universalism and inviting more people to experience the benefits of our faith by growing our membership.

            And today, the program work of Justice-making.

            All of these program areas are supported by the foundational and primary mission of our church, which is to create and sustain community.

            That’s really our mission:  to create and sustain community, to be rather than to do any particular thing.  To simply be here, healthy and strong, and nimble, and eager, and available to do whatever the shifting needs of our community and our larger culture ask of us.

            All the other programs areas I’ve been preaching about, and the one I’ll speak about today, and the one for next week, are expressions of the core of our faith.  The programs are not the center.  The center of our faith is community.  Community is the core.  Community is the base.  Community is the gift and the primary role of why we’re here.  Community is the gem at the heart of our church, a treasure worth protecting and defending, and worth remembering when in our zeal to do something else, anything else, we start to threaten the most important thing we are, which is a community, a congregation, a church.

            In the church where I grew up, the Methodist church, and in most churches, I believe, “Mission” means work outside the church community itself.

            No one speaks about “the mission of the church”, rather, the church’s mission work, is the work the church does to help the needy and the suffering outside the church doors.  The church usually had a local mission, perhaps to support poor families in the neighborhood with food and clothing, or an after-school tutoring program for children, and the church often supported international mission work also, like building houses in Tijuana, digging wells in Africa, or collecting used eyeglasses and shoes to distribute in Central America.

            There might be a “mission church” which was a satellite church, specifically planted to serve a particular community distant, either geographically or culturally, from the main congregation.

            Kids went on “Mission trips” to Guatemala, or to Alabama.  And the adults who gave their lives to this work were called, “Missionaries.”  Usually a part, or sometimes the whole, of Missionary work, was to proselytize for Christianity.  Sometimes, digging the well, or setting up a school, was just a cover for the real work of the missionary, less admirable, or at least less immediately obviously helpful.

            But in any case, whether actual charity work, or proselytizing disguised as charity-work, missionaries worked outside the church.  Not leading worship for the home congregation, not teaching Sunday school for the congregation’s children, not setting up the fellowship hall for a fun Bingo night for the church members, not visiting church members in the hospital or in their homes.

            Mission work was a particular slice of church work directed outward.

            So, near the beginning of my ministry, in the 1990s, when Unitarian Universalist churches started to be encouraged by denominational authorities to develop “mission statements”, I think it was natural for folks to think our mission must mean work outside the church.  A corporation has a mission statement to tell you what they produce for consumers, not to tell you about the health plan they offer employees.  A non-profit has a mission statement to tell you how they serve others, not the benefits volunteers receive from working within the organization.

So that exercise of writing church mission statements, when we were told that it’s not enough for us to merely be, but that we also had to do something, many of our churches neglected to consider the doings that we do to create and sustain our own communities, and reasoned that if mission work is the work that missionaries do outside the church, that a church’s mission defined in our mission statement, like a corporate or non-profit mission statement, must be about the work we do outside the church, for others.

            Worshipping together, having fun together, educating our own children and caring for our own members, began to be portrayed as not enough.  We were taught that was selfish and small.  We were criticized as “country-club” churches. We were encouraged to get out of the sanctuary and engage in the world.  We were told to claim our power to be a force for good in the world.  We founded statewide justice ministries.  We demanded that the UUA take leadership on national social issues.  The question of the mission statement wasn’t just, “what are you doing?” but more pointedly, “what are you doing for others?”

            Of course, our churches went right on having worship services, and RE programs, and bingo nights.  And we also advocated to expand marriage laws to include same-sex couples, and worked to address climate change, and visited immigrants at detention centers, and marched for women’s rights, and racial justice, and against gun violence.  And we wrote church mission statements that included both the internal and external doings that we do.  As you did here:

“Ours is an inclusive religious community that inspires personal and spiritual growth.  We care for one another.  We strive for social justice, a healthy environment, and a peaceful world.”

But I, at least, maybe you, too, noticed a shift in our church culture, where we began to feel that the outside work, the mission work, was the real mission of the church.  We began to feel that the rest of the church work we did, the internal work, the preaching and teaching and fellowship-building and pastoral care, was only there to build our strength and vision so we could go out and do the real work, which was outside the church.

Not for ourselves, but for others.

And those of us who came to church to get our own needs met, started to feel like we were doing church wrong.  We felt a little guilty asking, “Could I just come on Sunday and sit quietly, and not have to think about the troubles of the world for one hour?”

We felt hesitant to say, “I’m getting older and my social circle is shrinking and I come to church to meet friends not to be an activist.”

And we wondered, as mission work became the mission of the church, “Where can I go, if not to church, to explore theological questions like fate and free will, and what happens after I die, and whether there’s a God?”

First at the denominational level, and then in our seminaries training new ministers, and now in many of our UU churches, justice work has become not an expression of our faith, but the core of our faith.

The real mission of our church, as I see it, creating and sustaining community, has been moved aside.  And I sense, sorrowfully, and I’ve even heard ministers say, that if the church community stands in the way of our outside justice work, the community might have to be sacrificed.

What began thirty-years ago as a helpful re-balancing of our church’s emphasis, maybe we were a little too insular, became over the next decades an imbalance in the other direction, a re-alignment of what churches are fundamentally here to do.  That disturbs me, obviously.  It’s not good for our churches.

It’s also not good for our church’s social justice ministry.

Here’s why.

When creating and sustaining community is at the core of our mission, and all of the church programs, including justice work, are seen as expressions of our faith, not themselves the core of our faith, then our churches are well-positioned to serve a variety of spiritual needs:  worship, education, fellowship, pastoral care, and justice-making. Different people have different gifts and interests.  All of us can be encouraged and strengthened as we need.  All can choose to do what fulfills them.

That sounds like a church to me.

When justice-making gets moved to the center of the church and all of our other programs are recast as supports for our justice ministry, then the church suffers in numerous ways.

Worship becomes weekly lectures about the horrors that injustice makes in the world.  One congregant described that kind of worship to me as CNN Headline news about the tragedy of the week.  A little of that is necessary.  We live in the world.  We need to see what goes on around us.  It’s good to have our hearts broken in worship now and then and our righteous anger inflamed.  But if worship is only worship to inspire justice-making then we miss all else that worship is for, especially worship’s primary purpose of regular connection with the transcendent quality of life:  Awe.  Humility.  Mystery.  Even doubt.  And if we miss the transcendent aspect of worship then whatever justice-making we do will also lack that transcendent quality.  We will become the missionaries filled with their own ego and pride who go out as as God’s ambassadors to the world, rather than partners in a divine project bigger than any of us.

Religious Education for justice-making becomes consciousness raising around political issues.  But religious education also has a role in teaching the underlying moral principles that legitimize our work.  What is justice? for instance, is an important theological question that we ought to consider carefully before we start asserting our vision of salvation on others.  Why be good? is a theological question.  Why does it matter? is a theological question.  Our justice-making will be more powerful and sustainable and effective if it’s grounded in clarity about the spiritual issues at stake, not just the political issues.

Pastoral Care?  Well let’s be clear that people in our pews are dealing with a lot of personal issues.  Not everyone has the physical strength to stand on a street corner or march in a protest.  Folks might need to attend to their own marriage falling apart before they can help someone else.  Maybe they’re already spending their time caring for children, or an elderly parent of their own.  It is perhaps a personal sacrifice for a missionary to go to Africa to dig wells, but it also requires a certain amount of privilege to have a life where packing up and going to Africa is a possibility.

And Fun and Fellowship?  Well perhaps it does seem selfish to throw a party at the church when homeless people are sleeping outside.  But think of the obvious problem in the words I heard the minister say when she was willing to sacrifice members of her community if they wouldn’t get on board with the justice work she wanted her congregation to do:  who’s going to do that work if you don’t have a community?

Listen, I applaud the justice-work of this congregation and our UU congregations nationwide.  I am inordinately proud of the Tuesday drop-in program this church offers, and am happy to support it with our volunteers, and space, and money, and the administrative help I can give.  I am proud of the food we collect on Sundays, and the sandwiches we make.  I’m proud that we supported UU the Vote.  I want us to be more involved, not less, in the social issues of our day.

Every church I’ve served has done extraordinary justice work.  My congregations and I have built housing, created space for a free neighborhood preschool, supported a neighborhood garden, offered after-school tutoring programs, distributed hundreds of bags of free groceries every week.  My congregations and I have sponsored everything from little free libraries, to suing the Federal Government over free speech and free assembly issues.

My purpose here is to celebrate social justice work as an expression of our faith.  If I wanted to join a country club, I could probably find one.  But that’s not what I want.  I want a church.  A church that worships together, and teaches its members from toddlers to elders, that cares for each other, that has fun together, that invites more people to join us because I truly believe that we have something really good here that people really need, and a church that works effectively as agents of social change addressing the real suffering of real people in the real world.

I want to be an inside church and an outside church.

For people who are spiritually activated by social justice work I want this church to be a place of health and strength that supports that expression of our faith.  And, I want a church that provides an equally supportive base for the worship-minded, the education-zealots, the fun-lovers, and the care-givers.  And the good news-spreaders that we’ll get to next week.

I want all of that.  Not a piece of that.  I want to do all of that, in a way that supports and strengthens each program area in a mutually-reinforcing whole.  And the way we do that is by keeping community strong and healthy, safe and secure, the treasure at the center of our church.