"New Frontiers of Faith"

READING

AWhy I Come to Church@

Let me tell you why I come to church.  I come to church B and would whether I was a preacher or not B because I fall below my own standards and need to be constantly brought back to them.  I am afraid of becoming selfish and indulgent, and my church B my church of the free spirit B brings me back to what I want to be.  I could easily despair; doubt and dismay could overwhelm me.   My church renews my courage and my hope.  It is not enough that I should think the world and its problems at the level of a newspaper report or a magazine discussion.  It could too soon become too low a level.  I must have my conscience sharpened B sharpened until it goads me to the most thorough and responsible thinking of which I am capable.  I must feel again the love I owe to others.  I must not only hear about it but feel it.  In church, I do.  I am brought toward my best, in every way toward my best.

It may not be so for everybody, but for me, this alone would make me seek a church.  If I stayed away too long, I would be afraid of slipping into self-centeredness and low ambitions and careless thinking. The sharpness of my moral perceptions might be blunted, and nothing would sharpen them again.  I need to be reminded that there are things I must do in the world B unselfish things, things undertaken at the level of idealism.  Workaday enthusiasms are not enough.  They wear out too soon.  I want to experience human nature at its best, and be reminded of its highest possibilities B and this happens to me in church.

It may seem as though the same things could be found in solitude, but it does not easily happen so.  In a congregation, we share each other=s spiritual needs and reinforce each other.

We meet each other as friends and neighbors anywhere and everywhere, but we seldom do so in the consciousness of our souls= deepest yearnings.  But in church, we do B in a way that protects us from all that is intrusive, yet leaves us knowing that we all have the same yearning, the same spiritual loneliness, the same need of assurance and faith and hope.  We are brought together at the highest level possible.  And I think that is something the significance of which is so great at last to be beyond description.  We are not merely an audience, we are a congregation, and we unite B unite in quest of truth and God and life=s own loveliest hopes and visions and for the reinforcement of our dedication to the service of our fellow human beings.

Life must have its sacred moments and its holy places.  We need the infinite, the limitless, the uttermost B all that can give the heart a deep and strengthening peace.  We need religion with its faith and purpose; we need it as experience.  We need the touch of beauty, bringing back to life its lustre and its loveliness.  We need the unutterable communion of our spirits with the spirit of the highest B all that joins the soul with what it yearns for, all that can raise the frailty of our incomplete humanity toward the level of the spirit=s aspirations B that our earthly dust may meet and mingle with the majesty and mystery of God.

                                                                               ‑ the Rev. A. Powell Davies (1944)

SERMON

I usually open the historical overview of Unitarian Universalism I do for our Newcomers= gatherings by saying,

AMost people think that Unitarian Universalism got started in the >60=sY.  And they are right, but it was the 1560=s, not the 1960=s.@

Well, today we continue our journey of being free to be faithful by taking a look at the UU events that preceded and followed the influential decade of the 1960=s B the twentieth century that now (it is hard to believe) is already a dozen years behind us.

The controversy of the late 19th century had been quelled by the Rev. William Channing Gannett, whose document, AThings Commonly Believed Among Us@ settled the tensions between those who resonated with the Unitarian Christianity as articulated by William Ellery Channing and others, with its belief in God and the spiritual leadership of Jesus; and those who sought to move away from identification with Christianity, declaring more a faith in the human ability to discern Truth and live what is Good.  The document stated, in part:

We believe that to love the Good and to live the Good is the supreme thing in religion;

We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious belief;

We honor the Bible and all inspiring scripture, old and new;

We revere Jesus, and all holy soulsY.

We worship One‑in‑All B that life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the soul of man its Ought, B that Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the sons of God, B that Love with which our souls commune.

The result was a period of what Samuel Atkins Eliot called Alyrical theism.@  At the turn of the century, there were 457 Unitarian churches in North America, 301 of them in New England, and 60 of those within ten miles of the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill.  We were rather geographically concentrated.

One of the characteristics of this lyrical theism was an unfettered optimism about the future.  As one of the popular statements of faith at the time concluded, we believed Ain the progress of mankind onward and upward forever!@  That optimism was shattered by the onset, and ongoing carnage, of the Great War (what turned out to be World War I).  There was also a bit of controversy amongst us as former President of the United States, William Howard Taft, was the moderator of our General Conference (what we call today General Assembly), and made an urgent plea to the Conference to pass a strong resolution of approval for all President Woodrow Wilson and Congress Ahave done and are doing@ to win the war in the interest of peace in the world.

John Haynes Holmes, minister of Community Church in New York City, rose to speak against it and in favor of a position of non‑resistant and complete pacificism.  Taft and his resolution, however, carried the day by a vote of 236 to 9.

The end of the war in 1918 released an impressive amount of creative energy among us.  Many Unitarians, and Universalists, supported Wilson=s establishment of a League of Nations, and began spreading their interests beyond our borders.

It was then that we began renewing our ties with our historic co‑religionists in Transylvania.  Carved out of Hungary and given to Romania as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Transylvanian Unitarians were denied basic liberties, were in danger of their property being confiscated, and were put under restrictions as to their right of public worship and assembly.  Working with our British counterparts, we were able to stem the tide of oppression so that the Transylvanian Church could survive and maintain its historic presence in this ancient Carpathian kingdom where Unitarianism had first emerged.

Further expansion and cooperation occurred in Czechoslovakia, especially with the establishment of the Prague Church under the leadership of Norbert and Maya Capek, as well as efforts with an Independent Church in the Philippines.

 This decade following the war saw a boom in churches and in income to the American Unitarian Association.  Interests among our ministers then included spiritualism, modernism, evolution, ethics and social philosophy.  Growing out of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, as well as with the studies of William James and John Dewey, Unitarian thought moved even more toward a faith centered in personal experience fine‑tuned by conscience and reason.

Then came the Depression.  Many churches lost heavily in the crash, as did the Association.  Churches were consolidating, and some dissolved altogether.  These years were ones of struggles and missed opportunities.  For example, the Rev. Ethelred Brown founded the Harlem Unitarian Church, but it languished for lack of support and recognition from the Association.  Another start‑up was the Bronx Free Fellowship, a congregation of blue collar working families who were the first to avail themselves of the educational genius of one Sophia Lyon Fahs, then at Union Theological Seminary in NY.  Unfortunately, she did not appear on the Association=s radar until much later in the 1930=s.

What turned it all around started in what he called Agripe sessions@ at his church.  The Rev. James Luther Adams called together others who shared his concern with the downward spiral of the movement.  The result was the creation of a Commission on Appraisal, which eventually offered a wide‑ranging report that set the stage for a new period of growth.

The Rev. Frederick May Eliot led the way.  He chaired the Commission and later was elected President of the Association.  Restructuring and revitalizing were his main priorities.  Along the way as well, he helped to integrate into the Association the most vital and distinctive movement to influence it since Transcendentalism: religious Humanism.

Humanism considered the individual human being to be the center of things and espoused a Afaith in the supreme value and self‑perfectibility of human personality.@  They gained much momentum and established Humanism as a lasting and valued influence in the Unitarian world.

This time also saw increasing relations between the Unitarians and the Universalists.  After flirting with the Congregationalists in the early part of the century, the Universalist Church in America began a series of efforts to align itself with its theological cousin, a dream one of its founders, Hosea Ballou, had expressed a hundred years earlier.

It began with the agreement to honor joint fellowship for ministers, the consolidation of their separate Youth Organizations (the youth are always ahead of us!), and the eventual publication of a joint hymnal, Hymns of the Spirit, in 1937.

The Universalists had been traveling a similar theological track during this time, also dealing with the advent of Humanism, but also dealing with an unstoppable decline.  The distinctiveness of their gospel of Universal Salvation had waned as this notion found greater and greater acceptance B albeit unofficial B in many of the mainline churches.  Thus they struggled for a purpose.  Even such attempts to re‑position Universalism as Brainard Gibbons= eloquent declaration of

[a] new type of Universalism . . . which shifts the emphasis on universal from salvation to religion and describes Universalism as boundless in scope, as broad as humanity, and as infinite as the universe

did not do the trick, and they continued to slide in numbers until consolidation with the Unitarians in 1961.

The years leading up to World War II and during it turned the attention of both organizations to develop means of service.

 
         The Unitarian Service Committee had its origins in a committee formed in 1938 to aid Czech Unitarians.  It was formally organized in 1940 and Dr. Eliot called it Athe most important Unitarian event in this century.@  Among the original officers for the Service Committee was Mr. Harold Burton, then mayor of Cleveland and a distinguished member of our church.  The Service Committee sponsored Waitstill and Martha Sharp in their work helping Czech refugees escape from the Nazis, and later, facilitating the escape of 28 children from occupied France to the United States.

During this time, the AUA was also finally turning its attention to religious education.  In 1937, Dr. Eliot appointed Sophia Lyon Fahs to be the editor of curriculum.  She was 61 years old at the time.  It has been said that in 1837, William Ellery Channing announced a revolution in religious education, but beginning in 1937, Sophia Fahs made it happen.  Her New Beacon Series became the mainstay for just about every Unitarian R.E. program.  Years later, in 1959, she would be ordained B finally B at the age of 82.

Unitarianism entered into a period of growth and continued close relations with the Universalists which led, as I mentioned, to consolidation of the two organizations into the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961.  Accompanying this consolidation was another hymnal, Hymns for the Celebration of Life, which reflected far more than in the previous book the influence of Humanism on both movements.  Not only were hymn texts often altered, but instead of readings taken almost exclusively from Biblical sources (as was the case in Hymns of the Spirit), most of the readings in the new book were of contemporary origin and even contained a smattering of selections from world scriptures.  But in one area, it was not sensitive at all.  Witness these words from one of the readings by Edwin C. Palmer:

Great and marvelous is man=s progress on the earth,/ He has discovered his strength,/ He has wrought mighty works.