The UUCW Nugget
November 9, 2016
 
Office Hours
(Sept 6, 2016 - 
June 29, 2017):
Mon, Tues, Wed: 
9 am - 3 pm
Thur. 9 am - 2 pm 

Congregational Mission Statement
"The members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist 
Church of Worcester covenant to be a congregation of love, hope and justice inspiring people to take on the challenges of a changing world."
  
Welcoming Church 
Mission Statement 

The LGBTQI and Allies of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester strives to further the affirmation and celebration of LGBTQI individuals in all aspects of the church community. We also seek to increase the visibility of UUCW as a Welcoming Congregation within the greater community.
 
The Work of Citizenship
(with appreciation for Howard Thurman's "The Work of Christmas")

Beloved,  I will be at the church tonight from 6- 9 pm (in Fellowship Hall) for those who would like to gather in order to share in their response to the election results.  Bring a goodie to share if you desire.

When the last campaign ad has aired;
When polling stations are closed and the count has been certified;
When pundits and politicians have turned in for the night
And pollsters and political operatives are turning their thoughts to the next big race
The work of citizenship remains:
To care more for the marginalized than for profit margins
To be mindful that quality education is far less expensive than mass incarceration
To insist that military intervention is a last resort,
Not the preemptive prerogative of the powerful
In short, to know that our true wealth is the welfare of all beings and the planet that we all call home.  

Blessings,
Aaron

Swimming Against the Tide
Rev. David J. Miller, Minister Emeritus

These are not easy times for churches.  So, our work to maintain a vibrant and fiscally sound congregation here in Worcester and the challenges we face must be seen in the context of radical changes that are happening in present day America.  Churches today are swimming against a powerful tide of change.

In recent years in the Worcester area, we have seen six Roman Catholic Churches shuttered, upwards of a half dozen UCC churches closed, one Episcopal church dissolved, and Temple Emmanuel merged away and its building sold to Worcester State University.  In addition, the Worcester County Ecumenical Council, once a vibrant organization with its own building and a full time executive minister, closed in 2007.

In a recent article in Free Inquiry Magazine(May 19, 2015), James A. Haught (long time member of the Charleston, SC, UU Church) reports:

Catholic intellectual Joseph Bottum says the "seven sisters" of mainline Protestantism-Methodists, Presby­terians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, northern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Congregationalists-were once the very heart of America.  They set the nation's values and principles.  They were the essence of respectability.  Foreign-rooted Catholics and less-educated evangelicals were seen as marginal outsiders.

But, astoundingly, mainline Protestant­ism has collapsed.  In 1965, over half of America's population belonged to the seven sisters-but today, that number is below 10 percent and sinking steadily. ("Flatline Protestantism," one demographer calls it.)

Haught also reports that, "Surveys find that twenty million American Catholics have left their church. Thus, one-tenth of U.S. adults are ex-Catholics.  Born-again fundamentalists are also fading."
 
He further argues that "We are living through a societal transformation.  America is riding the secular wave that previously swept Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and other advanced democracies."

A recent article in the local paper reported that "About 21 percent of incoming Harvard freshmen are agnostic, according to a survey conducted by their student newspaper, The Crimson Review.  Agnostics also outnumber Catholics (17.1 percent) and Protestants (17 percent) and even atheists (16.6 percent).  The annual email survey was completed by 1,184 students, which comprises more than 70 percent of the class of 2019."  (Telegram and Gazette, October 3, 2015, page A8).

In his recent book, Creating Change through Humanism, Roy Speckhardt states (p. 109),
 
...according to a Barna study on religion, women are fleeing from traditional religion in record numbers.  While women remain more religious than men overall, women's attendance in church has sunk by eleven percentage points since 1991, Bible reading has plummeted by ten percentage points, and Sunday school involvement is down by seven points.  The number of women who are "unchurched" has risen seventeen percentage points-that's now more than half of American women who haven't attended church in the last six months.

Explanations for all of these changes will vary according to one's point of view, and several factors seem relevant to me.
For starters, more and more people are no longer convinced by supernaturalism and supernatural explanations of natural and "spiritual" phenomena on planet earth.

Moreover, religion in general and the church "brand" have been severely damaged by right wing religious extremism and the steady stream of publicity that it gets in the news media.
In an article in the Boston Globe (August 4, 2016) Katherine Ozment argues that

One reason so many people have left religion is the mingling of church and state in the first place. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and coauthor of American Grace, and others have explained that the widespread exodus from organized religion we're now seeing across the country began with the introduction of politics into the pulpit - and vice versa.  According to this theory, the counterculture of the 1960s, during which institutional mores were challenged, created a backlash in the form of the Moral Majority, which eventually gave rise to the religious right and today's culture wars.  It was then, when religion started to be more about conservative politics, that many began to flee the pews.
 
And in The Humanist, September/October 2016, Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, is quoted as saying,

If you ask millennials what comes to mind when they think of Christianity, when they think of church, they will tell you it's anti-gay, anti-doubt, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-sex education...we really don't care what the church is for when you have that much baggage.

The trend Mehta describes may be unfair to people who advocate more progressive religious values, but they get comparatively little media coverage.

As the Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester swims against this tide, our strongest asset may be that we maintain an inclusive outlook that contrasts strongly with the exclusionary ideologies and moral demands of those religious groups that are alienating so many from religious organizations.  Beyond that, I think we need to stand up for social justice and to be seen in the public sphere as standing up for social justice so that people can see that we are not part of the negative church brand that causes alienation.

Further, these are not easy times for churches, and those of us who cherish the life and work of our local congregation need to give our whole hearted support to our church and our minister.
Contact Information

Phone:

508-853-1942

Email:

office@uucworcester.org

Fax:

508-853-2065

Website:

www.uucworcester.org

 

 

 

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