CHURCH AND CONGREGATIONS
I have come to believe that the current crisis in our denomination is beyond the capacity of our General Assembly (G.A.), even with its new Executive Committee, to resolve. To borrow the language of addiction therapy, we have not yet (despite all appearances to the contrary!) hit our collective "rock bottom" - without which the process of recovery cannot even begin.
We are still in denial of the simple fact that we have no future as a church. I use the word 'we' in its collective rather than its distributive sense - there are plenty of active individual Unitarians in Britain who see this plainly: a significant proportion of our Ministers, not a few lay service leaders and - I would guess - the majority of newcomers to the N.U.F. itself (and quite possibly of other Societies sponsored by the G.A. Outreach and Communication Commission.) It is not however a proposition which, in my experience, is accepted by the lay leadership - usually the Trustees - of individual gathered congregations of the "traditional" sort. I shall call these congregations "churches" - even though most of them (I haven't counted) may well call themselves "chapels" or "meeting houses" - because that is the word used in the title of our G.A.
We have, and have had since at least the 1940s, alternative forms of gathered community - fellowships meeting in private houses or premises rented by the hour, retreats, workshops and other events organised at the Nightingale Centre (and elsewhere), often by one of the National Societies mentioned above. Yet for most church-based lay Unitarians, these are an additional benefit of membership of our denomination - something Unitarians do as well as belonging to a local church - or if they do it instead, it is a mark of physical or spiritual incapacity.
Traditionally, I suggest, to worship in a local church on Sundays, to have one's name on the membership roll, has been a sign not only of acceptance of the "free and enquiring religion" that - hopefully - was preached for twenty minutes or so from five-and-twenty past the hour, but also a way of acknowledging the social status of those whose labour - and moreso in the past, but still more than a little to-day - and open cheque-books made the weekly continuance of chalice and sermon alike possible - what Dot Hewerdine once memorably called "celebrating the Trustees."
I recall a conversation I had at Essex Hall, during a coffee break at one or other of those navel-gazing meetings associated with the G.A.'s consultancy exercise. A Unitarian from the West Country told me that in his chapel, you would still be a newcomer after twenty years. I asked him if he was sure it was only twenty years, and I remember his smiling acknowledgement of his own underestimate. The reality is, of course - and this is at least part of what Nietzsche meant by his famous phrase "human, all too human" - that if I have been organising the cleaning of a building for anything like that length of time (doing it myself, hiring and firing, whatever) and, perhaps, digging into my savings account to fund a substantial part of that re-wiring the insurers insisted upon - to say nothing of sorting out the manse after the last minister but two was finally admitted to a nursing home - then counting years has nothing to do with it. I don't want thanks, in fact I live in fear that the new development minister we've had foisted on us by District might organise a "surprise" party at which I will be presented with the tickets to a cruise they've all subscribed to in what they think is gratitude but which is really just to tell me I'm past it…
And of course, that worthy individual isn't past it - they were never with it. None of it was service to a congregation, to a gathered community - every last bit of it, mental, physical and financial was service to a building. Yes, such actions can be of great spiritual benefit to their practitioners and to others - ask any volunteer with the National Trust - but only when their object is clearly understood - when there is, to use the apt Buddhist term, "right relationship."
And until we, denominationally, understand that church and congregation are two different things, no one can be in right relationship with the service they undertake, whether from pulpit, organ loft or broom cupboard.
Well, so far there is nothing specific to Unitarianism in this problem - or even to organised religion - it goes on in secular not-for-profit organisations all the time.
What compounds our problem is that we have to deal not only with this lack of understanding that a local church is actually two things at once but also with the disagreeable reality that those of us who have joined the denomination in the last five or ten years are, on the whole, looking for something that Unitarianism could offer, if only because it thinks it would like to offer it - and indeed it is what almost all our Ministers are called to offer, and trained to offer. If all our freehold worship spaces were sold to-morrow, the syllabus of Ministerial training would not need to be altered by a word. Alas, it is not quite the same thing as drives people to dedicate themselves to service to buildings. To borrow a phrase of Oscar Wilde's, our long-standing lay stalwarts and our newcomers are divided by a common language.
The clearest way I can express this division is to say that it is the difference between a witness and a seeker. Organised religion is at bottom an act of witness; the metaphor par excellence of spirituality is that of searching. It is the difference between Peter the Rock and Jesus the Way… The point of "a liberal approach to worship and everyday living" as the G.A. website promotes us - and this is my witness, in the original, more or less forgotten sense of the word, the "-ness" of my wits - is that the Way does not lead to the Rock, at least in (this) life.
The evidence of my Unitarian experience is that those who crave the certainty of the Rock of organised religion will go elsewhere, and will do well to do so. Those who come through our doors and log on to our websites are spiritual seekers, well educated more often than not, who know already (but don't know that they know) that the Road Goes Ever On and who ask of us not refuge but companionship in the journey. They don't want a Church, they want a congregation. So the next time you read about, or hear of a Unitarian demanding or denouncing "Free Christianity" (whatever that is) - trust me, it's actually an argument about something quite other than the help or harm that creed can do to soul. It's about the use and abuse of spiritual community.
By Mike Killingworth