This church year will be my last year before retirement. Although I’m sure I’ll still preach occasionally, I don’t plan on seeking another regular church job. So this preaching year is my last opportunity to look systematically at some of the foundational categories and concerns of faith. Today I’ll invite us all to start a year-long journey of constructing a personal faith, whether you’re considering these questions for the first time or coming to some conclusions.
In August, in the cycle of the church year, we prepare for the church year ahead.
In August, we rouse ourselves from the Sabbath rest of July and we begin to stretch our muscles, set the goals, create the strategies, and gather the resources that will carry our church through another year.
The new church year begins with our Ingathering service, on September 8 this year. Today we are in the final week but one of the old church year. We are about to let the old year go, but before we do, we ask it to do for us the final task of every ending church year, to tie us forward into the coming church year, in the year after year ongoing life of the church.
I’ve already spoken this month about two of our big goals for the coming year.
I’ve spoken about our need for the coming year to be a year of membership growth. The future of our church, to be blunt, depends on reversing the membership loss we suffered during the COVID pandemic and the internal conflict the church experienced, and growing back to the size congregation we were in earlier years. We cannot sustain the church we have come to expect, with the programs we love, and the staff support we depend on, without the greater financial and volunteer resources available to a larger congregation.
We don’t need to double in size, but we need to be a little bigger, about 25% bigger.
So next year we need to begin a deliberate campaign of growing our membership. I hope that you will take up a portion of that work as, to be successful, we need everyone to be involved.
Our second major work for the coming year is conducting a successful search for a new minister. My interim ministry is contracted to end in June of next year, giving us this year is to search for your next minister.
We have a Search Committee in place. They have begun their initial meetings. Soon they will ask for your input in helping them craft a comprehensive picture of our church, naming our hopes and dreams for our future, and defining the qualities we are looking for in a professional minister. There will likely be a written survey for you to fill out. And there will likely be a series of small group meetings, where Search Committee members will facilitate discussion to gather the information they need.
During the small group meetings the search committee members will ask probing questions and look for exacting answers to questions like the spiritual questions we’ve been exploring for the last couple of years: what is the unique identity of this congregation; what do we care about, what spiritual values does this congregation uphold that makes it worthy for us to support with our time, talent, and treasure, and what do we want to do together as a congregation to live out those values?
If all goes according to the plan worked out at the Search Committee retreat last month, they are hoping to post our job opening on the UUA jobs board in November, review applications from ministers in December, interview candidates in January, present a final candidate to the Board in March, and negotiate an agreement in April. I’ll finish my ministry in June 2025, and your new minister will join you in August, one year from now.
In the cycle of the church year, I spend my August work time, preparing for the year ahead.
It’s been my practice, as I look at the coming year in worship, to plan all of my preaching in a year-long cycle: a liturgical year.
I think of a year in worship as one extended arc, from September to June, or as a journey that we begin in September, with a distant goal. Each week is a step on the journey, with the intention that when we reach June we will have arrived at a new place, a new depth of understanding, a new learning, a growth year for our souls, just as next year needs to be a growth year in our membership.
So I begin worship planning by thinking of a theme for the year. I ask, where is the congregation spiritually. What elements of a healthy community need a little blostering? What do the people need, that I might be helpful with. What does the church need?
My first year with you I found my annual theme in the three foundational concerns of spirituality: identity, meaning, and purpose. I felt after a couple of years in which the church had been pulled sideways by Covid shutdown and controversy, that we needed to get back to foundational stuff in the church. So we looked at the three core spiritual categories by asking three questions, “Who am I?” in the Fall; “Why does it matter?’ in the winter; and “What Should I do?” in the spring.
Last year, we needed to tackle the interim work, so our year-long theme was the five tasks of Interim ministry. So in the fall we looked at our History together. You remember we told the story of the congregation and celebrated our 80thanniversary together. Then we looked at issues of Leadership in November and December. Maybe you remember my analogy of the way a good shepherd leads from the middle of the flock. Then we looked at Mission and Vision in the winter months. And we ended with a series of sermons relating the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism to our work in the larger world, exploring the fifth task of re-making strong Connections.
This year, as I set about the task of planning a year in worship, I was faced with a complication I never had to face before: this year, will be my last year in ministry. Not just my last year as your minister, which would have led naturally to some spiritual work around the issues of leave-taking, and loss, and re-orienting toward an uncertain future. That would have been a fruitful worship year appropriate for the closing of an interim. But this was also to be my last year in ministry entirely as I plan to retire after my last day with you, June 29, 2025.
So, perhaps a little selfishly, I started to ask myself the question, not just what would be good for the congregation to hear this year, but also, with my last opportunity to have a regular pulpit to preach from, what do I want to say?
As I conclude a career of leading congregations, work where I’ve been responsible for guiding the spiritual lives of others, which in a Unitarian Universalist context consists more of asking provocative questions than it does teaching answers from a catechism, I wondered if I had come to any conclusions. For myself, if not necessarily for others. What was it all for? Was I any different now? Had my thinking changed? Had I learned anything about spirituality, about creating healthy communities, about people? Was I any closer to answers? Or maybe I had just grown more comfortably knowing there were no answers to the deepest questions of faith, which is its own kind of answer.
So I came up with a worship year that is a little different from the years I’ve presented in the past. The year-long theme is “final thoughts.”
My plan is to spend a year looking at the perennial spiritual issues, nearly all of which I’ve thought about and preached about multiple times since I entered seminary, 30 years ago next month. These are the perennial spiritual issues that preachers and congregations, and anyone interested in a spiritual life, comes to again and again. But this time, when I turn to them again, for the last time as a professional minister, I thought I’d give myself the challenge to see if I can come to some summing up of my thoughts and feelings.
To organize the topics, rather than dividing the year into smaller sub-themes, the way I did with the three spiritual questions, or the five tasks of interim ministry, I used the calendar holidays, both secular and religious, scattered throughout the year, to find a relevant anchor for each spiritual issue.
So when we get to the High Holy Days and Yom Kippur, in October, I’ll speak about sin and forgiveness.
When we get to our own church’s Founder’s Day, the second week in October, I’ll talk about the spiritual issue of our relationship to our ancestors.
When we get to Halloween, at the end of October, I’ll talk about life after death.
On November 3, I’ll give an Election Day sermon and talk about the Unitarian Universalist principle of democracy and the spiritual challenge of living in a diverse community.
On November 10, for Veteran’s Day, I’ll talk about the spiritual issue of “sacrifice.”
And so on…
And if you want to see what I have planned for the entire year, you can visit my website: rhmcd.com, where I’ve posted the complete schedule through June.
Along with choosing preaching dates, and preaching themes, and writing sermon titles and blurbs, for every Sunday I’ll be in the pulpit through the year, I also choose two readings and two hymns, for every Sunday.
You know that it’s important to me in crafting worship that the readings and hymns support and amplify the theme of the day, so I did that. This year, I gave myself the additional challenge of not repeating a hymn or a reading anytime during the year.
I figured, again, that this year was my last opportunity to create worship as a professional minister with my own pulpit, so I wanted to dip into the hymnal as deeply as I could, and reconnect with as many of my favorite readings and hymns as I could before I let it go.
Our closing hymn today, for example, is my favorite hymn in our hymnal, although it’s hard to pick a favorite among so many that I have come to cherish over my thirty years creating worship.
This hymnal, by the way, was published just a couple of years before I started my ministry, so I’ve grown up with it, as a minister.
Now with all that talk about my last year in ministry, and my retirement, and my favorite hymns and readings, it might sound like I was being a little selfish in my worship planning.
Instead of asking what the congregation might need, I started with my own situation.
“What’s in it for me?” you might be asking.
It is the minister’s job to guide and help a congregation’s spiritual life through their preaching, not simply to attend to my own interests. But I reasoned, and I hope this is true, that a year-long review of the perennial issues of spirituality, could be beneficial to you as well.
The holidays bring up spiritual issues for all of us, whether we’re starting careers or approaching retirement, or whatever our life situation. When we get to Yom Kippur you might be thinking about sin and forgiveness and appreciate hearing your minister’s thoughts on the subject. Or later in October you might you might find questions arising naturally about the spiritual issue of the afterlife amid the ghosts and skeleton decorations of Halloween and you might wonder what your minister has to offer on the subject.
So our worship will continue to be tied into your year, as well as my year, and tied to our year in the life of the church.
So I want to challenge you this year, the same way I challenged myself. I challenge you to engage with these perennial spiritual issues, to let yourself be provoked by the provoking questions, and as I offer some final thoughts from my own experience, see if you, too, can come to some conclusions for yourself.
There’s an academic branch of theology, I learned about in seminary, called Systematic Theology. For those who are willing to tackle it, Systematic Theology is an attempt to address all of the perennial issues of theology and tie them together into a unified whole. In the Christian tradition a Systematic Theology might include thoughts about angels, the Bible, sin, Christ, the role of the Church, the end times, the Holy Spirit, salvation, the nature of man, the nature of God.
The first Systematic Theologian was the Universalist, Origen. And in later centuries many others have developed their own take: Aquinas, Calvin, Schleiermacher. We won’t attempt anything on that scale. But I challenge you, I encourage you, to make personal use of this opportunity this year, to build for yourself a defined faith for yourself.
I hope we will all be somewhere different when we reach June of next year than we are today.
That’s my goal for us every year, that our life together in the church not be just a succession of random events, first this and then that, reactive to the news of the day, and the whims of the culture, and the passions of the pastor, but that we approach our membership in a spiritual community with the clear intention to grow spiritually: to probe the mysteries of existence, to ask the deep questions, to challenge ourselves to become better people, to climb Sunday by Sunday, step by step, as on a ladder, toward the transcendent goals of the good, the true, and the beautiful. I want us to approach membership in a church deliberatively, purposively, faithfully. I want us to feel confident that we can claim a faith of our own. Not, “What’s on the marquee this week?” but what’s the next step on my journey of faith?
There isn’t the regular shape of an arc that I usually try to give my worship year. Because the weekly worship themes are tied to holidays the issues come up in a rather random order. So, the journey this year is a little more like crossing a river by jumping from one stone to another, rather than following a well laid-out hiking trail.
But by the end of the year, if you’ve been following along, you should have a fairly complete set of thoughts about a fairly comprehensive list of the perennial spiritual issues. From the nature of humanity and mortality in September and October, through the issues of liberation, creation, loyalty, and God in April and May.
Let our handrail through this year, be our love for each other, the good will among us, the good fellowship of our community, our care and concern and hope for each other that each of us might flourish into becoming the best possible version of themselves they can be. Let our guiding star be a vision of the shining individuals we will have become a year from now, the vitality of a healthy, growing congregation, and before this soon to begin church year is over, next August, the welcoming of a new, talented, generous, minister, eager and ready to walk with you on the next leg of your journey.