Perhaps our most significant work in the church in the coming year will be our search for our new minister. We have an excellent search committee in place who have already begun their portion of the work. But just as the results of the search will affect us all, so too does the work of the search belong to us all. Let’s set intentions this morning for how all of us will participate in making a successful search.

            We’re spending this August in worship preparing ourselves for the year ahead.

            The church year begins with our annual Ingathering service on the second Sunday of September.  August is the month for preparation.  We set our intentions.  We visualize our goals.  We ask, What do we want to accomplish this year?  What will we learn?  How will we grow and deepen?  What do we hope for our personal lives, our spiritual growth, for our families?  How will we advance our careers, plan for the future?  What will we do to give ourselves necessary rest and relaxation?

 And what do we want for our church community?  What will be asked of us?  What can we give?  Where do we hope to be as a church when we reach the end of one more year together in the this spiritual community?

Well, there’s lots to do, in ways big and small.  Life is full, as always.  But I want to lift up two big goals for the church in the coming year that will be with us all year.

            Last week I talked about the need for this coming year to be a year of membership growth.  We need to build our community back up to a membership of sufficient financial and volunteer resources to sustain the church we have come to expect.  We have a marketing team that has already begun work on creating the foundations for a growth plan.  That’s exciting, and timely.  As we move into setting targets and creating strategies for growth you will hear more.  And you can set an expectation now that there will be a role for every one of us to contribute to the success of meeting our membership growth goals this year.

            The other big goal for the coming year is a successful search for a new minister.

            I have been your minister since August of 2022.  The ministry was intended to be an interim ministry, meaning that I was hired to help you through the transition from the end of the previous ministry to he beginning of the next.

The standard interim ministry is two years.  But early in the beginning of my interim ministry with you, the Board and I agreed that we could use a longer time frame in order to do the work we felt was needed.  One year to stabilize the church after a period of conflict and the challenges of COVID; a second year to do the reflective work of identifying our strengths and addressing our weaknesses, defining who we are and who we want to be and selecting the search committee.  Then a third year to do the search committee.

            So we set the intention for a three-year interim, and we followed that plan, and here we are.  

We selected a search committee last spring.  It’s an excellent team consisting of long-term and newer church members, a mix of ages and family situations.  All of them highly dedicated church members, broad experience in various aspects of church life, thoughtful, intuitive, principled but flexible, able to prioritize the good of the church over personal agendas, organized, hard-working, good communicators, trust-worthy…

What can I say?  I think we have a winning team:

Bonnie Burroughs

Mikel Malone

Alexis Rodriguez

And Reid Swanson who is both a full member of the Search Committee and serves as a liaison between the Committee and our Board of Trustees, where Reid serves as our Vice President.

Let me pause there to clarify something about this search process that may be different from a search you might have experienced in the past.

You may remember during a past search for a minister that the process ended with the search committee presenting a candidate to the congregation, and after a week of getting to know the candidate and hearing them preach, you then had a congregational meeting and the congregation voted Yes or No to “call” the minister.

            That’s the process for when a congregation calls what’s called a “settled” minister, meaning a minister that arrives to create an open-ended relationship with a congregation expected to last for an extended period of time.  Typically, a settled minister is a full-time, generalist minister in a stable church environment.

            That’s the process that this congregation used in the last few decades when you called Darrell Richey, Jay Atkinson, and Sue Spencer.

But this church also has experience with several ministers who were hired by the Board, rather than called by the congregation, and hired with a specific purpose to do a certain kind of work for a defined period of time, rather than an open-ended settlement.

Me, for instance.  I was hired by your Board in August of 2022 to do the specific work of interim ministry.  I was hired on a one-year contract, which we’ve renewed twice.  The congregation never voted for me.  The Board hired me.

An interim is an example of a “contract” minister, rather than a settled minister.  And that’s the kind of arrangement we are looking for with your next minister.  So, this search process will end with the search committee presenting their final candidate to the Board.  The Board will meet the candidate and vote Yes or No.  If the Board votes to hire the candidate they will negotiate a final contract and hopefully the new minister will start next summer.

Again, the contract will be for one year.  And again, the contract will be renewable.  The difference is that this minister won’t be an interim, but hopefully they will stay for several years, and at some time you and the minister might even want to go through a process called “contract to call” and convert the contract minister to a settled minister.

            It may sound, with the search committee and the board doing their work, that the rest of you won’t have much to do.  But that is far from the case.  Just like Membership Growth, the work of the search process this year has a role for everyone.  You won’t get to meet the candidates or get a vote, but your input is vital to the success of the search process, and to the success of the new minister once they arrive.

            Your job, if you’re not on the search committee or the Board, is to do the soul-searching, reflective, discernment work answering the questions, what is this church, what is the future of this church, what kind of person do we need to minister to us now, and to walk with us where we want to go?

            I’ve been posing those questions to you for a couple of years now.  Now is the time to finally answer them, and to answer them as honestly and as specifically as you are able.

            It’s essential for the future health and vitality of this community that you be as clear as possible about who you are and what you want from a professional minister.  Because, when a potential minister clicks on our congregational packet to see if they’re interested in this job and has what it takes to be a success here needs to be able to say, “That’s me!”  “I want to do that.”  “I want to do that with them.”

            Over the next couple of months, the search committee will be arranging several opportunities for you to answer those questions.  I’m not on the search committee so I don’t know exactly what they are planning, but I imagine there will be some kind of survey you can fill out to give individual answers to those kinds of questions, and probably also several small group meetings where you can answer those questions as a group by listening to each other and discussing.

            Now the easy way to answer those questions is to say things like:

            “We want an inspiring preacher”

            “We want a sensitive pastor”

            “We want a skilled administrator.”

            But to say you want everything and the best of everything isn’t actually very helpful in guiding the search committee to finding the right match.  You don’t just want an excellent minister, you want your excellent minister.  You want the minister who’s excellent for you.

            Perhaps you think you’re just a generic Unitarian Universalist congregation, and they’re all the same.  But that isn’t true.  I want you to claim your identity.  The Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City is this.  And we are not that.  This is our character.  This is our unique personality.  This is what we love above all else and want to work on and be.

            Are you high church, or low?  Is a music program important in this church?

            Well is it?

            Because, you know, music isn’t particularly important in every Unitarian Universalist church.

            Is a children’s religious education program important in this congregation?  How should your minister be involved in that:  leading, collaborating, supporting, cheer-leading from a distance?

            Do you want an intellectual minister who writes his sermon carefully and reads from a manuscript, or would you rather a firebrand preacher who speaks ex tempore?  Do want a minister who wears a robe?  I’ve never even owned one.

            What if worship regularly goes over an hour and interferes with your brunch plans?

            Good with kids?  A sense of humor? A minister who likes opera, or golf, or the WNBA?

            You can say, “We want it all” but, I daresay you really don’t.  Think of the ministers you’ve had and some of the things you wished they didn’t do, or did less of, or work they spent their time on you tolerated but really did nothing to make the church meaningful for you.

            Or to put it from the minister’s point of view:

            I think I’m a pretty good minister, but I know I wouldn’t be a good minister for every congregation.

            If I was looking for a church, and I picked up their congregational packet and it said:  “We want a prophetic minister who regularly engages from the pulpit with the justice issues of the day, and leads the congregation in a public ministry advocating for progressive causes in our neighborhood.”  I would say, that’s not the church for me.  

            If I was looking for a church, and I picked up their congregational packet and it said:  “In our church the lay leadership takes responsibility for the administration of the church and the minister should expect to concentrate on the preaching, teaching, and pastoral programs.”  I would say, that’s not the church for me.

            If I was looking for a church, and I picked up their congregational packet and it said:  “We want a big-hearted minister who feels our hurts and fears, is connected to their own emotions, and yearns to be held by a congregation just as tightly as we will hold them in a warm, mutual, embrace of love.”  I would say, that’s not the church for me.  That’s a ministry, but it’s not my ministry.

            A further, larger, crucial conversation you need to have as you go into this search year, is to examine your relationship to the Unitarian Universalist Association and to the future of Unitarian Universalism.

            I have served congregations that were very connected to the larger Association, including having members of my church who served on the UUA Board of Trustees.  My experience has been that this congregation is not super-attuned to what’s happening at the UUA.  That’s another distinctive quality that makes you a particular congregation not a generic congregation.

            So this congregation may be less aware than others that over the last couple of decades the UUA has been undergoing a significant evolution.  We are becoming a more activist church.  Although Unitarians have always been proud of our position at the forefront of social issues, over the last few decades, the UUA has shifted social action to the core of our faith rather than being an expression of our faith.  And our politics have become increasingly polarized to the far left of the political spectrum and our conversations around political issues are less likely to allow for what I used to regard as hallmarks of liberal religion:  the ability to debate, discuss, to defend opinions with evidence, and when disagreements persist to tolerate dissent.

            Because the UUA, through the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, defines the qualifications necessary to become a minister of our faith, our professional ministers reflects this shift.  Ministers who were fellowshipped in recent years were required by the fellowshipping process to represent an activist style and focus of their ministry, different from that expected of longer-ago fellowshipped ministers.  And those newer fellowshipped ministers will also be expecting our congregations to have tracked that same evolution in the same progressive, activist direction.  This creates a tension, though, in our churches because some UU congregations have evolved with the UUA, while some have not.

            The recent elimination of the forty-year-old Seven Principles from the UUA Bylaws and the replacement with new language is a definitive marker of this evolution.  The question for Unitarian Universalism is how to minister across the generational gap when some members of our congregations remain attached to an old understanding of our faith, while others are eager to embrace the new?  And particularly for a congregation like that one that is looking for a new minister, but whose membership includes a significant number of people who joined the faith two or more decades ago, what can you ask from a minister, to minister both to who you are, as well as who you were, as well as where you’re going?

            It’s a question not only of what kind of minister you’d like to get, but also how you will receive their ministry with grace, how you will get what you need from your church while others might be seeking something very different, and how you will support your new minister in the difficult task of ministering to people at all points of the evolutionary line of our changing faith.

            In our opening hymn, we sang:  “We are going, heaven know where we are going, but we know within.”

            I think you do know where you’re going.  Where you want to go.  At least for yourself.  You know within.  Now is the time to say it.  To write it down in the survey.  To speak up at the small group meeting.  And from your individual knowings, discern the way for the congregation.

We sang, “It will be hard, we know, and the road will be muddy and rough.”  That’s the challenge of the search process.  But then we sang, “We’ll get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will.”

You will get there:  a new minister, next summer.  But to arrive there successfully you have to know where there is.  Not same vague dream of the perfect generic minister, perfect for some hazy future church.  But your minister, for this congregation, for this faith.

Defining that vision, of who you are and what you need, is your work for this year.  Summer is a good time to get started.  As we said in our Call to Worship:

“The sun beats down.  The schools are out.  There could be, now, deep peace, a time for soul-searching.  We might turn to examine our own lives, to sort and probe our tendencies of thought.  To sift the true from false in the things of doubt,

The sun beats down; it is a time for pause.  Even the trees seem resting for a time as if to meditate and gather strength for the more strenuous times that lie ahead.

And shall not we?  Here’s the unfinished clay, half-moulded, that still waits on us to think what we have been and as we are still yet have to become.”