Reflection 1 – Planning for Your Church

Come dream a dream with me.

Come dream a dream with me, that I might know your mind.

Let me start out this morning by offering plans — dreams — for this church for the next year.

We’ve learned — I’ve learned — that in those years when we dream like this, and we get focused, and plan and work toward those dreams, good things just begin to happen. Even if we don’t achieve all our goals, even if we add to our basket of failures, we still end up with a feeling of accomplishment.

And we’ve learned — I’ve learned — that if we fail to do such dreaming, because we’re too busy, or because we don’t want to do the work of bringing the dreams into focus, we will struggle. Little things can grow into big issues, conflict emerges, we seem stalled and stuck.

So we dream and we plan. I have been working with our board and leaders on dreams and plans for the coming year since I returned from sabbatical in early June. Now is the time to enlarge the circle, and to begin to put these plans in place, as we move into the beginning of the church year, which formally starts upstairs in two weeks.

There are three broad areas of this plan, though they overlap to some degree.

The first is Engaging our History and our Future.

Next September is our 125th anniversary of the founding of this  church. We’d like to celebrate this in multiple ways.

First, we’d like to extend recent work, started by Kristina Spaude during her ministerial internship with us, to more fully research our history. In particular, we want to have a better sense of all of the community organizations this church or its members have founded, initiated, or grown. We want to develop as complete a history as we can, holding up these and other accomplishments.

Secondly, we’d like to begin looking forward many years to what this church might be 25 or 30 years from now. This kind of long term planning — I’d call it planning in deep time — is less about creating detailed projections than it is about discerning our deepest values and qualities. It is articulating those things that we expect will still be true for UUYO even out in the year 2050.

Thirdly, we want to celebrate! Our quasquicentennial is a big deal,  something to be proud of, with plenty of opportunity for press and community attention. We want the building to sparkle, and we’ll be taking more about this as the year goes by; we want to be welcoming to our visitors, we want to claim the good feelings around such an event.

Which connects to the next broad area,

Secondly, we want to create systems and structures for sustainability.

We recognize that, like many churches, we’ve gotten into patterns of depending on a few people who do too much. We aren’t at our best in welcoming others into the circle of shared ministry that keeps a church like this one healthy. We need to make our shared ministries more accessible, so that a person who has just a couple hours a month can still make a contribution, or a person with gifts in say, art or music, can contribute those gifts. We also need to make sure that we aren’t asking and asking more and more until we have completely drained and burned out people. Plus, we realize that programs like Circle Suppers, Spiritual Explorations, and Pub Theology, help connect and sustain people, so we want to nurture those things.

Finally, we want to articulate our outward face.

Our outward face is how we are known in the community. This could be represented by a social service the church provides, or it could be social justice issue that is recognized in the community. A few years ago, we were the church that had the Farmer’s Market in front of it. Now that market has relocated and there are several new markets. Some years before that, we were known as the church that held the “In Praise of the Arts” juried shows, before there were other art shows like the YSU Summer Festival of the Arts. What do we want our outward face to look like today?

Success

I hope that in twelve to fifteen months we can look back on the year and see some specific things that we can count as successes. We’ll look back on a successful centennial day celebration. Our building will be remarkable. We’ll have explored our history, and be on our way to framing our future in deep time.

We’ll have greater involvement in shared ministry, from those who are just very tentatively connecting to UUYO to our most active members and leaders. Our key programs – stewardship, Religious Education, worship, hospitality, and so on, and perhaps some new ones, will be doing very well.

We’ll be clear on who we are in our community. People will begin to say, “oh, UUYO – that’s the church that does … X” And we’ll agree on what X is.

I realize that this vision could be considered grandiose. I did call it a dream, didn’t I? Not all of these things may come together. Some other situation — good or bad — may draw our attention away. We may remind ourselves that there are certain things we don’t want to be doing, as Jan suggested in her chalice lighting. We may realize there are things we do that we can’t do willingly or joyfully, and we consciously move to stop doing them.  And that’s all OK.

Come dream a dream with me, that I might know your mind.

Come dream a dream with me, that we might, together, bring hope, when hope is hard to find. Particularly here in this town and this region, lets bring hope, where hope is hard to find.

Reflection 2 – Planning for Your Life

This is the last in a series of services on Life Coaching – Building Your Life. We’ve considered a variety of topics along the way: spiritual dimensions of life and work, dealing with difficult people in our lives, personal identity, mentors, spiritual practice, and now planning your life. It seems like planning your life should have come first, before all the others, but here it is last — perhaps that was just poor planning on our part!

Now I used to be very good at planning. Maybe too good. My roles in engineering and project management in Bell Labs involved lots of planning, and I could get carried away with it. I could easily go to that place of ‘analysis paralysis’ where I got so focused on getting all the information and working out all the details — so that by the time the plan was done, reality had moved on, but the plan still pointed toward that past reality. So I now make a life practice of trying to find the right balance of planning and performing in the moment.

A Life Plan?

Now there are those who think making a detailed life plan is a good idea. I have a friend who has his future mapped out and once a year gives himself a performance review of how he’s doing against his plans, and how the plans need to be adjusted. I will note that mortality drove this — the loss of his parents caused him to reflect on what time he had left, and how he’d like that to turn out. So this kind of thing is not out of the realm of possibility.

But let me ask you. Think back to your earlier years, your young adult years, or if you are a young adult now, think back to school, or before. Has your life unfolded pretty much as you imagined it would?

If you are like most folks, our lives have unfolded in vastly  different ways than our young selves imagined. I certainly would have never imagined making the transition from science and engineering to ministry. In fact, back then I held a strong contempt for ministers, preachers, “men of the cloth” and could not fathom becoming one.

And yet, even though many us outgrow our young dreams, or life diverts us from those early paths, does this mean we should abandon planning?

Planning in the Balance

When it comes to life planning, I think it is wise to find the middle way between too little and too much planning. It’s insightful to remember that line from a George Harrison song: “if you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there”[1].

On the other hand, there’s that Yiddish proverb: Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht. — Man plans and God laughs [2]. But we should remember the corollary, If there is a god, you want to keep that god laughing — so neither neglect or get too rigid in your planning.

Planning End of Life

Now some of us may be thinking, “Well, most of my life is done. I don’t have anything to plan for.” In such a stage, we might wisely meditate on planning our deaths. Morbid, grisly, perhaps — but doing such planning might bring us a degree of peace. We might discern what things at end of life we can control, and what we can’t, and what things are important. We might realize what steps we could take now as a gift for those we care about us. Maybe we take care of mundane things like wills, powers of attorney, organizing files. We might also work on more significant things, like healing relationships, or passing on stories and wisdom.

Ingredients for a Plan

So how might we go about creating a life plan? I will merely summarize the process, for you can find plenty of guidance in the self-help section of your bookstore, or for that matter on the Internet. In planning, there are many variations, but the recipes all seem to include these ingredients.

You start with a healthy dose of self-examination. You consider the course of your life overall, what (and who) you love, and brings you joy, as well as what (and who) drains you.

You continue by imagining what your ideal life might be like, mixing proper measures of reality and fantasy to create this vision.

Finally you set goals and intentions, perhaps even timelines that help you to move toward that ideal life.

But Planning is Hard

Life planning is like so many spiritual tasks: it is simple, but not easy. The steps are not hard to describe, but putting them into practice challenges us, forcing us into deep and sometimes uncomfortable self-examination.

Perhaps the reason many of our plans fail — especially those plans laid out early in life — is that we fail to go deep within.

David Whyte tells us,

All the true vows

are secret vows —

the ones we speak out loud

are the ones we break.[3]

In doing authentic life planning, we are called to delve into the secret vows, those unconscious yearnings we can only discern for ourselves alone, separating that ‘one life you can call your own’ from all the thousand others that the world lays out for you.

Going deep may require us to break promises — old agreements, plans, expectations, that have been laid on us by family, work, and society.

Go deep, Whyte tells us – Go:

in this place

no one can hear you

and out of the silence

you can make a promise

it will kill you to break,

that way you’ll find

what is real and what is not.

And so, in the very spiritual practice of life planning, we connect with that ‘one life that waits / beyond all the others’. And so, we ‘find / what is real and what is not.’ We find a sense of what we might know as our purpose, our calling in this life.

And with great humility, and great uncertainty, we begin to uncover the life plan that is ours to claim, ours and ours alone. We live into that purpose, as it evolves, year by year, and plan by plan, and we grow into what is real.

Notes:

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Any_Road
2 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yiddish_proverbs
3 http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2012/04/09/david-whyte-all-the-true-vows-2/