"Growing Lifelong Unitarian Universalists at NHF"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
March 21, 2010

Why do they leave us?  We do everything we can to make Northern Hills a warm and loving place.  We really try to be welcoming to everyone.  We invest our time and money in the facility; we support the programs with our best efforts; we really do care about each other.  Can’t they tell we want our church to give them what they need to live a happy, productive and peaceful life?  We do all this and still, historically, most children who grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church have ended up somewhere else as adults.  Why do they leave us, and what can we do to change the situation?

The chance to pick a sermon topic was purchased by our Mom’s Covenant Group at last year’s Auction.  When I met with some of them to find out what they wanted and why, there was no hesitation at all.  They told me the group had come to consensus around the question, “How do we grow Life - Long UUs, and how are we going to do it at NHF?”  Now, these parents are investing themselves in Northern Hills Fellowship - going to Children’s Religious Education Committee meetings, chairing the Membership Committee, selling Fair Trade  coffee, leading worship services, donating to the Auction and more.  They want NHF to be strong so we can teach their children about religion, so that they can have family time together on Sunday, and so that they can maintain a little sanity in a world that sometimes feels claustrophobic to religious liberals.  These are all good things, but they want more than that.  They want their children to become Unitarian Universalists, and to love UUism so much that they remain UUs all their lives. 

I became a UU partially because of my daughter, Katy.  Before I go on about that, I’ll add one footnote.  When I first became a minister, Katy said it was OK to mention her in a story, but that I should own my own feelings and opinions and not attribute them to her.  So, I will say that after my divorce, I was looking for a church that would work for both me and Katy when we found the UU Church.  At first, both of us really loved the Religious Education program there; Katy bonded with the Director of Religious Education, and I started teaching RE classes.  But when that DRE had to resign his position, Katy never felt comfortable in the Young Religious UU group again.  Through her teen years she attended worship with the adults and said she got a lot out of that.  Now, she still considers herself to be a UU, but as a parent of two children under five years old with a husband in grad school, she hasn’t found church membership doable right now.

Do I wish she would go to a UU church?  Well, sure, but you know I am very proud of her and happy for the kind of person she has become.   She is a wonderful mother and wife, is ahead of me on many issues, and she has a “Heart of Compassion.”  What more could I ask?  And, you know, back in the 90s when I was teaching RE, the goals for our RE program were to teach our kids about all religions and to help them get a good moral grounding to help them wherever they ended up.  We really didn’t talk to them about becoming a UU Young Adult.   Most UUs then and now have left the churches of their childhoods, and maybe it’s been too easy for us to assume our UU kids will do the same.  We hope to give them a strong foundation to go out into the world and make their own decisions.  We are creating “Wonderful People,” not necessarily “Strong UUs.”  Why do they leave?  Well, maybe because they get the message that we expect them to.
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You know, for our young parents, my stories about UUism 2 decades ago probably sound like the dark ages, and they are ready for a new game plan.  It’s not much consolation to point out that church attendance in this country has been going down continuously since the fifties or that we are not the only church which has trouble retaining its youth.  I used to be a Membership Committee chairperson, and every time someone leaves the church I want to know why.  What went wrong?  Was it a failure of UUism, the programs we run, a disagreement with someone, or something beyond our control?  Certainly, it is important to hear their feedback, and to learn from our mistakes when we make them, but in the 15 or so years I have been debriefing those who leave, rarely have I heard anything that would help us make our people into lifelong UUs.  But we don’t have to settle for a futile scenario in which we try our best but just can’t seem to retain our youth as members.

In her book, Full Circle: Fifteen Ways to Grow Lifelong UUs, author Kate Tweedie Erslev described a time when she and several other young adults who had grown up as UUs got together at a General Assembly, and even though they had attended different churches they felt so easy with one another.  They could finish each other’s stories of going to Youth Cons, taking part in Social Justice actions, or leading a worship service as a teen.  Later, when she was in a workshop with other UUs, none of which had grown up in our church, they were asked to discuss the question, “Is Unitarian Universalism a Faith?”  While others struggled with “that religious word” and batted the concept back and forth, she felt dismayed and unable even to take part in the conversation.  To her, the answer was, “Of course it is; it’s my faith!”  It had fed and comforted her, had been her religious home, and she couldn’t imagine Unitarian Universalism as anything less than a faith at least equal to any other.  I’ll just have to say, that’s the way I feel about it myself.

Rev. Francis Manly commented on what can be missed if our children don’t come to a similar conclusion:
“It seems to me that if the majority of our kids continue to grow up to be “small-u” UUs (but join Episcopalian or Presbyterian churches because that’s what their spouses are, or join no church at all) then we have not entirely failed, but we have failed in something important.  That is, we have not helped them to understand and to feel that Unitarian Universalism is indeed a real faith tradition in its own right rather than just a place to learn about religion.”
Now I don’t know what the parents here think about the word faith, but I think they are saying very clearly they want their children to have real, educational and transformative growth experiences while they are in this church which will give them a life-sustaining value system for their lives.  So let’s not send any more mixed signals.  That’s what Northern Hills Fellowship needs to be about.
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Kate Erslev, frustrated by the defeatism inherent in focusing on the reasons why people had left, came up with an ingenious project which took just the opposite tack.  She interviewed 82 life-long UUs to see why they had stayed!  Her book contains a wealth of suggestions gleaned from the life affirming spiritual experiences of adults who grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church.  Many parts of Erslev’s book resonate strongly with what I believe, and I’m recommending to Brenda to use it with the Children’s RE Committee, Teachers and Parents.  However, the Moms wanted to know what I thought we should do at Northern Hills, not just a laundry list from a book, so let me tell you my philosophy of Religious Education.
 
In my letter to parents in the RE Prospectus I have written that I believe children are religious beings in their own right.  They are not simply sub-adults who will develop religious needs later.  Every day children try to make meaning out of their experiences of the world – just as adults do.  They need to make sense of birth, death, and everything in between, and children are capable of thinking deeply.  Therefor, Northern Hills needs to be a full-fledged church for children, providing them pastoral care, participatory activities which challenge them to grow, and opportunities for experiencing the holy, just as we do for adults.  A second key point in my RE philosophy is that parents are their children’s primary religious educators. when most religious questions arise for children parents are there, and they understand parenting means helping their children through these times.  Children want to know what their parents believe about the ultimate issues of life.  So, NHF partners with families to support children religiously.  Our Children’s Religious Education program needs to include classes and activities which help them and their parents grow in their Unitarian Universalist faith.

Erslev and I totally agree that the number one thing that both children and adults do if they remain with us-and that is that they embrace their Unitarian Universalist identity.   They became, and we become Unitarian Universalists by going deeply into our history, principles and worship experiences.  If we expect our children to learn and take up a Unitarian Universalist identity, then we must take it to heart ourselves.  We can’t be wishy washy about it; we have show them that we are proud Unitarian Universalists.

Our UU Religious Education identity derives from the history of liberal theology and progressive educational practices.  RE teachers know this because our RE courses contain the beliefs we religious liberals hold dear.  But if the rest of us don’t make UU values explicit through our actions, the assumptions underlying our faith remain hidden from our children.  For example, they need to know:

1. People can bring about good in our world;
2. Our choices are important - to us and to others;
3. We use our brains to think through our choices, and we root our choices in love;
4. We learn best in a community, and our church helps us choose wisely; and
5. We grow as we learn, and we will change, but love remains.  

I hope all of us are willing to commit to showing our children how dearly we hold these things.
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It almost goes without saying that in order to keep our children’s interest, we must offer engaging experiential classes and projects for kindergartners thru 6th graders, Coming of Age and Our Whole Lives for 7th and 8th graders, and a vibrant Young Religious UU group for high schoolers.  In addition, we must create opportunities for interaction with our multi-generational community, for children’s and youth involvement in worship, and for participation in social justice projects.  The best way to learn and internalize UU values is through living them out.

As a small church, we have a problem keeping classes for each age full all of the time.  So, we must be creative in our approaches to programming, share with other UU churches when we can, and above all grow the number of children in RE.  Our children need opportunities to participate in social action alongside adults.  We can’t take on a dozen new projects each year, so we must make the most of our involvement with the Interfaith Hospitality Network, People Working Cooperatively and Valley Interfaith Food and Clothing, and I continue to ask these agencies to make sure our children can participate in some of their activities.  I’ll put in a special plug here for everyone who can to join the NHF team in the 5K walk for Valley Interfaith on April 10th, and if you can’t walk, how about pledging some money to someone who can.

Our teens have special opportunities to learn from people outside our church when they go to UU Summer Camps and Youth Conferences, or Cons for short.  They get to hang out with large groups of UU kids from all over our Heartland District, and teens usually love Cons enough to make them want to stay involved in their home Youth Groups.  During full-immersion Con weekends, their understanding of UUism is challenged and deepened by other UU kids, and they cooperate to create their own worship services and service projects.  The kids who go to Cons are the most likely to become life-long UUs.   The Chalice Camp we started last summer provides a similar experience for younger children, where they are fully engaged in UUism and interacting with several UU adults and children. 

Brenda and I, and other church leaders need to take every opportunity to interact with our children and mentor our youth.  We are here to serve all the members of our church community.  Children need pastoral care and spiritual nurturing as much as adults.  I encourage everyone to become involved in the lives of our children here.  They are learning about UUism in the classroom, but they’ll learn more about it from watching and relating to us,  and we can learn much from them.

Our children are a vibrant and essential part of our church community.  I propose we add a statement something like this to our Covenant of Beloved Community.  “Northern Hills Fellowship is place where children experience nurturing relationships, learn UU values and history and a tolerance for other religions, and participate in spiritually enriching, intellectually challenging, and heart grabbing worship.  Children from our Religious Education program go on to become life-long UUs and leaders of our Association.”  Will you join me in making this provocative proposition a reality?