Introduction

Even though this is Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, we are not talking about King’s work or legacy today. You can join me this afternoon, for an interfaith community worship service celebrating Martin Luther King, at Third Baptist Church. As one of few participants from a non-Christian-identified church, I have been asked to offer the benediction.

So even though I won’t talk about Martin Luther King Jr’s work today, I think he would appreciate the value of what we will explore this morning. For King depended on strong and healthy churches to help him accomplish his work in racial and economic justice and peace.

Over the course of the fall, about a half a dozen of us, mostly UUYO board members and leaders, met every other Monday night to study Healthy Leadership. That’s the title of an online course offered by the UU Leadership Institute, a new program of trainings offered by our Association. When our group met, we’d view video talks and other materials and discuss them. In particular, we’d consider how they apply to our church here. Or, as Gerard noted, we’d notice how these concepts applied in our work or family life.

We saw just a clip of one of the videos we discussed, “The Anxious Church”, earlier. Let me ask – how many of you had strong reactions to the stuff that went on in that video? Certainly the members of our group were taken aback by the level of anxiety, anger and hostility that arose in that video. Even though we knew the video was fictional, we found the situations described felt real, and we could relate to its message. It was impressively disturbing.

Anxiety in churches and the disease model

But: why would so much animosity arise in churches — of all places? After all, aren’t churches supposed to be places where people come together in peace and love, exhibiting their best behavior, wanting the best for all? How do we make sense of this?

One of the fascinating and hopeful trends in many fields is to apply models from medicine and health to problems in these fields, resulting in more clarity and better ideas for improvement. For example, consider Obama’s attempts to reframe gun control not as a second-amendment issue but a question of public health. While the federal government cynically refuses to spend money on such research, other researchers, using epidemiological methods, are determining the effects of gun regulations on violence and community health.

Or consider law enforcement, where many police departments are moving away from excessively blunt practices of “broken window policing” or racial profiling, to models of policing based on epidemiology, such as “hotspot policing” where the police target areas that you might say are infected with crime.

We’ve also seen the idea of health applied in the business world. One of the resources our board may study at our board retreat is a book called “The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business”, by Patrick Lencioni. He argues,

“The health of an organization provides the context for… everything else that happens within it, which is why it is the single greatest factor determining an organization’s success. More than talent. More than knowledge. More than innovation.”[1]

And the medical model has been extended into understanding church life. One of the pioneers in this work is Peter Steinke, a minister and church consultant who created the Healthy Congregations training, which in turn created the video we watched earlier.

Health and illness in churches

As we have come to think of churches using a health and disease model, we begin to see that churches are systems in which everything is connected, and in which patterns of behavior can persist for a long time.

In this model, we tend not to look to blame individuals, or cast them out as evil or pathological. Instead, we look at the system of relationships and practices, the culture, and see what changes might make the overall system healthier. 

Indeed, in the video, we might be tempted to blame either the woman in blue or the minister, depending how we come down on the idea of contemporary worship. We might label them as pathological, or misguided, or even evil. However, the problem is often much bigger than one or two people. It could be that the whole culture of the church is troubled — you might call it infected, diseased. The problem is systemic in nature.

Moreover, the smallest thing often sets off a conflict. I spoke recently with a minister whose church was in conflict over using candles at the Christmas Eve service. We are wise to explore what might be deeper reasons for conflict. It’s probably not about candles! for example, in the video, one of the members noted that the minister “doesn’t care for the older people at all.”

But when conflict develops, what happens? Do we try to sweep it under the rug, “ignore it” as a committee-person in the video said, or “try to make everybody happy, without offending or losing anyone” as the worship committee chair said?

Or, when conflict develops, does it necessarily have to become a war, winner take all, with the parties “playing tough”, as the minister put it?

The interesting history of the Youngstown Church

It’s possible that such a war happened at least once in UUYO’s history — a battle that very nearly split the church apart.

As part of her history class in Chicago, our intern minister Kristina Spaude learned that her seminary is in possession of historical files that come from the American Unitarian Association, the predecessor to the Unitarian Universalist Association. These files included material from the Youngstown Unitarian Church.

When I visited Chicago last week, Kristina and I were able to view these files, a stack about three inches high, mostly letters, reports and other correspondence. I did not have time to go through all of the material in detail, but I did find a surprising example of church conflict.

In 1936, the church had called a minister, the Rev. Ward Jenks. When the Little Steel strike of 1938 occurred, he spoke frequently in favor of the union from the pulpit, which upset some of the members connected with management and ownership of the mills. Some of these members served on the board. At the annual meeting in 1939, this board decided not to present a budget, which had the effect of not paying the minister. At the meeting, many in the congregation objected, most of the board resigned, and a new board was elected.

Talk about high anxiety — that must have been a contentious, volatile meeting. And things get even more interesting. The new board realizes  that many in the opposition are withholding their pledges, so the board passes an assessment — essentially a tax, compelling members pay an extra fee or be removed from membership. At this point, unhappy members begin to write to the AUA, drawing them into this dispute. Legal action is discussed. The church nearly splits. The AUA intervenes, and ultimately a deal is made with the minister to resign in 1941, and another minister, Rev. DuBois LeFevre is persuaded to come to Youngstown to rebuild the church. It is likely that echoes of this conflict reverberated down through the coming years, for the congregation was without a minister for several years after LeFevre left.

We should be reluctant to judge the minister or the various individual board leaders in that conflict in Youngstown back in the 1930s. Instead we should look for larger systemic forces at play. For example, we might look at the economic make-up of the church of that era: professionals versus working class. We might might look at the church’s relationship with money and debt — the church was frequently asking the AUA for loans or grants to keep operating.

My point in sharing this story is that I think we have gotten much better in understanding and dealing with conflict in churches than we did in the past. We can engage with each other in love and compassion, staying connected one another, even while we disagree with one another on things that matter.

Congregational health

When we think of congregational life from a health  and disease point of view, we work on creating a culture where conflict can happen openly and constructively. Just as we take steps to keep our own bodies healthy, with good eating and exercise, we can take steps to make our congregation and other organizations healthy. With both our bodies, and our congregation, a certain amount of stress is good. Such stress, in the form of healthy conflict, means we’re moving forward, getting things done, living.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here about the techniques for creating health in congregations and organizations. Gerard named some he learned in the Healthy Leadership class. Let me list a few.

• We can look systemically, identifying larger tensions that may be behind individual personalities and their positions.
• We can avoid unhealthy practices like triangulation, secrecy, and black and white thinking- even though they may be comforting.
• We can develop fortitude in dealing with painful or stressful situations as part of becoming mature leaders.
• Just as we stress our bodies with exercise, we can engage a degree of stress and even good conflict to strengthen a vital church.
• Most importantly, we can encourage our friends in this church to learn healthy leadership practices, so we all act, in effect, as antibodies against situations that might make the church unhealthy. To this end, I encourage you to take the Healthy Leadership[2] class which we will be offering starting February 1st.

Conflict can be harmful when it gets out of hand, as the scenes in our video suggested. But the artificial lack of conflict can be equally unhealthy. In some communities, conflict gets swept under the rug. Any topic that begins to hint at conflict is quickly set aside. Whether these are challenging social justice initiatives, funding disagreements, edgy worship styles, educational priorities — all disagreement is carefully avoided. A conflict-avoidant church becomes the church that doesn’t matter[3]. In the church that doesn’t matter, people, and their passions and dreams, don’t matter much either.  In that church that doesn’t matter, there is no sense of focus, or direction, or meaning or purpose.

But I believe this church does matter. I hope you believe it matters too. I believe that if we didn’t exist as a church, all of us would mourn a great loss. UUYO is the beacon of liberal spirituality for this town and this valley, there is nothing else like us here, and it is important that we continue to exist. We do matter.

Striving, but not finding, Unity

The reading earlier was from the Rigveda, that ancient Indian collection of hymns and texts. Even though the rigveda is one of the oldest spiritual texts in existence, some of the hymns are still used today in Hindu weddings and service rituals, making it the oldest religious text in continuous use. Some of its words are timeless.

The hymn we read in translation[4] is Book 10 Hymn 191. It is the last hymn or the last book, and in my mind a fitting conclusion — a hymn pointing toward a penultimate goal of unity.

Let us be united;

Let us speak in harmony;

Let our minds apprehend alike.

And yet, the unity that we seek, the commonality that we desire, must be genuine. It is an ideal goal, something that we should not artificially assume we’ve achieved.

Common be our prayer,

Common be the end of our assembly;

Common be our resolution;

Common be our deliberations.

We may strive for commonality, but we get to such commonality only through much uncommon work, the continuous and thoughtful effort of good people who disagree and hold themselves open and share and slowly work out agreements — just perhaps because they see that beyond their current disagreements are much grander things where they will find unity. And so the work is worth it, for they do align in a shared mission to become better people, making the world a better place. And that is us seeking such genuine unity in community.

Alike be our feelings;

Unified be our hearts;

Common be our intentions;

Perfect be our unity.

Perfect be our unity. Even in our disagreements, may that perfect unity be our aspiration, may that be our end.

Notes:

 

1 Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business  (p. 3)

2 http://www.uuinstitute.org/courses/healthy-leadership-101-spring-2016/

3 http://www.firstparishbeverly.org/category/words/

⁴ http://www.worldprayers.org/archive/prayers/invocations/let_us_be_united.html