Ohio-Meadville District Blogs

by Rev. Joan Van Becelaere, Ohio-Meadville Dist. Executive

Ohio-Meadville District staff have never worked with so many congregations at one time all focused on the same issue – mission.  Why are so many of our congregations involved in renewing, re-articulating, revising or rediscovering their mission and sense of purpose right now? What’s going on here?

It looks like there’s a kind of convergence of several different elements all at once.

1) Many of our congregations are involved in or have taken the Healthy Congregations curriculum where   teams are asked to work with their congregation’s mission statement. Teams have found that their current mission statement may not be adequate or doesn’t really express the congregation’s core purpose.

2) Visitors are asking more questions about a congregation’s purpose and mission when they check out a church. Congregational leaders find they need better answers to these queries.

3) Leaders and members sense that there has been a major shift in society that is creating new pressures on our congregations to redefine their core identities and revisit/revise their sense of purpose.  They need a new mission for a new day.

Why is mission so important now?  Alban consultant and author, Gil Rendle, recently noted: “People no longer join congregations because they want relationships or because they want to “belong.”…[P]eople now come to congregations because they want a purposeful relationship with others who are seeking a purpose and meaning in response to the questions that they feel in their lives. For many the function of relationships in congregations has now shifted from being only social to being also purposeful. “ (Journey to the Wilderness, Alban Institute, 2010)

Rendle notes that this shift is difficult for many congregations to grasp. Many congregations continue to think that providing warm and friendly relationships – a feeling of family – is their chief strength and the reason people join and attend. But now congregations find this is no longer an adequate mission. Instead, they are being asked to take on a different role and purpose as a place where people look to participate in something larger than themselves and come to shape meaning for their lives.

“For many leaders,”Rendle writes, “the new reality feels like a wilderness in which the territory is suddenly foreign and feels dangerous.” It feels like living in the wilderness.

Michael Piazza in his new book Liberating Hope says that the church can move beyond just offering a place for relationships. “In a world changing at the speed of the Internet, the church can offer transformation, and, in a world where people live with few margins, the church can offer a space of grace in which to find meaning and purpose. It is as if the church is poised and open to a new kind of spiritual experience that moves people away from frantic patterns of modern hyper-productivity and toward a renewed sense of awe, mystery, and incarnational life. We want to feel God, to relish the Sacred, to ponder the questions of meaning, faith, and transcendence.”

I believe that our congregations are feeling called to re-articulate their sense of mission and purpose in response to these larger social and spiritual shifts.  We Unitarian Universalists need to rediscover, re-energize, renew our core sense of purpose as a movement and as individual congregations if we want to be thriving, active, agents of transformative change and love in a 21st century world.  But how do we discover and discern that purpose? We can’t look to history for it. Purpose changes as the needs of society and people change.

To find our core purpose for today, one that will carry us into a healthy future, we need to ask ourselves some new and difficult questions. Questions like:
How is a religious community, a congregation different from:

• a. Political Advocacy groups (ACLU)
• b. Social network (Book Clubs, Facebook)
• c. Group counseling (AA)
• d. Social Service agencies (United Way)
• e. Family and friends

In other words – does a religious community have a unique purpose or calling?  If so, what is our congregation’s unique calling?

We will have to ask ourselves questions like this and more as we discern our mission for today. Unfortunately, no one is going to give us ready-made answers. There are no ready-made answers. (And we wouldn’t want someone to hand us the answers even if they could.)

Instead, we need to talk to one another in our communities, engage in dialogue together, openly and honestly and deeply.
And people have begun that conversation.  I think that is why everyone is talking about mission. And will continue to talk about it for some time to come.