Let me begin this morning on a personal note. This fall I entered my twentieth year of service as senior minister of All Souls. I find myself alternatively humbled and amazed by this. One friend told me that clearly I had no vocational imagination, and I can understand how it might appear that way. For me, however, the gift and privilege of serving this great congregation seems only to grow with time. And for All Souls itself there is nothing unusual about long ministries. In fact only last month did I attain the average tenure of my eight predecessors, just slightly over nineteen years. This sturdy fellow cast in bronze by St. Gaudens, Henry Whitney Bellows, served All Souls for forty-three years. I offer this, by the way, neither as a threat nor as a promise, only to underscore the remarkable stability and continuity that distinguishes our history as a congregation.
You have more to do with this than we, the ministers, do. Last Friday evening, at a wonderful gathering of the Family of All Souls Society, members who have made provision for All Souls in their wills, I recounted a story from the end of my first year as your minister. When I came to All Souls, twenty-nine years old, straight from my doctoral program, I arrived with absolutely no ministerial experience. In fact, I had only preached five sermons in my entire life, and three of them were about Thomas Jefferson. So every week I devoted twenty to twenty five hours to sermon preparation. At the beginning of June, Maxine Beshers, then president of our Board of Trustees, came to my study and asked if she could have a few words with me. After an exchange of pleasantries, she said that, from conversations with other congregants and her own observations, the one thing she would suggest is that I spend a little more time on my sermons.
Time wasn't the problem. The problem was experience. Life experience. Life, yes and death. When I arrived almost every member of this congregation was more versed in the things I knew I had to preach about than I was. I shall never forget your patience -- and there are many of you here today who surely remember how much patience was required -- and your kindness to a young minister who knew what to do perhaps, but really didn't yet quite know just how to do it.
These gifts -- patience, kindness, generosity of spirit, and at times, forgiveness -- have blessed my life among you. I shall be forever grateful.
This said, while long ministries can bring stability they are not an unmixed blessing. Patterns and habits can be set, routines established that turn into ruts. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a congregation may lose its vitality. A devotion to safety and comfort -- doing things the way they have always been done -- not only in our institutional lives but in our personal lives as well -- can quench the spirit, stifling imagination, subduing possibility.
As business people know, there are only two directions a company can go. It is either growing or declining. One can harbor the illusion of holding on to the status quo, but that is almost always a symptom of decline. For congregations too, if we don't strive on a regular basis to reinvent ourselves, we will lose the animating spirit that kindled the hearts of our forbears. Henri Bergson, the great French philosopher, wrote a book called The Two Modalities of Morality and Religion. One modality is dynamic, the other static. During static periods, the religious authorities set up shrines to honor the past. This may seem on the surface to be respectful, but it only puts the spirit under glass. For instance, among the Jews in the post-exilic period, ancient prophets were honored and modern prophecy banned. This served the priests' agenda. After all, prophets tend to be as hard on priests as they are on the secular establishment. But it doused the fire of true, transformational faith.
As I enter my twentieth year as your minister, I am therefore conscious both of the advantages and the dangers of continuity. How easily, without our even noticing, can the animating spark flicker and even die. By far the best way to honor our past is to dare as our forbears did to chart a new and better future, not to rest on their laurels, or even to rest on our own, but to have new visions and dream new dreams.
All Souls was founded in 1819 after William Ellery Channing gave his famous "Unitarian Christianity" sermon in New York City. Catherine Maria Sedgwick, a popular 19th century novelist and member of the first congregation, described the group as "strangers from inland and outland, English radicals and daughters of Erin, Germans and Hollanders, philosophic gentiles and unbelieving Jews.... In this, our association, there is at least one of every sort."
As All Souls grew, the church moved uptown and the congregation began to include community leaders such as William Cullen Bryant, poet and editor of The Evening Post; Peter Cooper, businessman and founder of Cooper Union; Herman Melville, during his years of personal hardship; Louisa Lee Schuyler, Sanitary Commission organizer and founder of the Bellevue School of Nursing; Dorman C. Eaton, civil service reformer and author; Nathaniel Currier, who (with his partner, Ives) created a new standard of pictorial excellence; as well as important bankers and businessmen.
For almost 180 years, the people of All Souls have expressed their beliefs through ethical action. In 1862, members of All Souls founded the United States Sanitary Commission, which nursed the wounded on both sides of the Civil War and later became the Red Cross. The ASPCA was established in New York City by two members of the All Souls congregation. More recently, the AIDS Task Force has won both national and city-wide honors as a model AIDS ministry.
The core values of this community of faith---the open mind, the open heart, and the open hand---have been embodied in many visionary programs during its 178 years of social activism. New York City and the nation have benefited from the untiring transformation of vision into mission at All Souls.
Which brings us to the present, here on the cusp of the Twenty-first century. Over the weeks ahead, our Board of Trustees, other congregational leaders and the ministers will be presenting an agenda for the future that together we have been developing over the past two years. It will include undergirding and enhancing our social outreach programs, making all our facilities handicapped accessible, modernizing, refurbishing and expanding our meeting spaces, revitalizing Sunday morning adult religious programs, and honoring Wally by supporting part of the music program with a special endowment in his name.
This morning I want to focus on a new idea included in our future agenda that is close to my own heart, one that I think add a new dimension to our life together and our engagement of the larger community. Simply put, we are hoping, if the necessary financial support is forthcoming, to establish a Lifelines Center, linking minds, hearts and hands, a center whose express mission is to foster and nurture connections among individuals; to create lifelines that will enhance our relationships with one another in love, work, society, and spirit.
Let me first frame this vision in historical perspective. A century and a half ago, the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows and the leaders of All Souls did a remarkable thing. They founded the American Sanitary Commission, which provided medical assistance to the wounded on both sides during the Civil War. In concert with his lay leadership, Bellows raised six million dollars (a staggering sum at the time) for this effort. He was responding to the greatest need of his own era: to move beyond ideology and division in order to serve those who were suffering, both Union and Confederate. In his denominational work, Bellows acted in the same spirit. Founder of the Unitarian Ministers Association, he helped our fledgling denomination move beyond criteria of political and theological correctness, to bring people with widely divergent views together under a big tent---ample evidence of the "large, roundabout souls" Bellows sought to nurture at All Souls. This set the tone for the mission of All Souls at its best: to be a church of open minds, hearts and hands. Our present outreach efforts and non-doctrinaire worship follow in this tradition.
Society today suffers from a different kind of division. People are not connected with one another as they once were. Ours is a peripatetic, atomized society, in both personal and vocational terms. The demanding job market often separates family members geographically. Crowded schedules have created a decline in civic engagement; even families which live under the same roof often do not see much of each other. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for people to feel themselves intimately and profoundly connected with others, especially in densely and diversely populated urban centers like New York City.
One of the most pressing needs in our society today is to restore the communities which nourish our sense of meaning and support our sense of purpose. While myriad programs throughout our city offer cultural or educational enrichment, most people attend these on a one-time basis, alone or as part of a couple, and then leave. In contrast, the Lifelines Center is designed to bring people together around topics of mutual interest, then facilitate an ongoing relationship in small group settings among those who wish to pursue these topics.
Many centers and think-tanks promote a given ideology or set of teachings, or seek to meet a variety of individual physical or emotional needs. The Lifelines Center is different. Its primary focus is neither the transmission of information (education, in other words) nor traditional forms of outreach and service. Rather, the purpose of the Lifelines Center is to create an environment that fosters human connection and interaction around the primary issues that animate our lives. With no political or ideological bias, it will offer programs relating to work, love, society and spirit in the hope of connecting people with each other for mutual enrichment.
The primary goal is not to disseminate information but to facilitate connection: to create lifelines among individuals, to link hands, hearts and minds. The heart of the Center will be a weekly evening program, often featuring a major speaker and taking place in the sanctuary. Dinner for up to 125 people will follow in Fellowship Hall. Around the dinner table, participants can get acquainted by discussing their reactions to the presentation. Trained Lifelines Facilitators (usually members of All Souls) will help guide the discussion at each table. Over dessert, either the speaker, a panel, or a facilitator, will lead the full group in a question and answer session. The following Sunday after church, we will invite all those who are interested in exploring the topic further to meet in the chapel. A Lifelines Fellow (a trained professional) will help to shape both the discussion and coordinate plans for future meetings of the group. The Lifelines Bulletin will provide ongoing information on all our Lifelines Circles, to permit those who missed the originating meetings to join in at a later date.
We will also sponsor monthly weekend seminars on a wide variety of subjects, giving All Souls members and neighbors an opportunity for a Friday evening, and all-day Saturday experience in community. When appropriate, these sessions, too, will lead to an ongoing affinity group or seminar for those who wish to pursue the subject.
The range of subjects sponsored by the Lifelines Center will be broad, but will focus on our relationships with others in the sometimes overlapping categories of Love, Work, Society, and Spirit. Topics could range from parenting, keeping marriages vital, and forgiveness (connections in the dimension of love); to ethics in the workplace, decoding the internet, and surviving retirement (connections in the dimension of work); to challenging racism, establishing new models for education, examining values in the media (connections in the dimension of society); to prayer and meditation, finding a path to God, and the body/mind/soul relationship (connections in the dimension of spirit).
Many subjects-death and dying, taking care of aging parents, theology and the arts, modern personality theories and stages of growth, to name a few-would touch on several of our core relational categories.
Following in the spirit of Henry Whitney Bellows, our goal is to heal division by facilitating new connections between individuals. The Lifelines Center will foster a climate of mutual respect. Our goal is to meet together on common ground, to unite in an atmosphere of reverence for life, and to enhanced relationships with ourselves, each other, our work, and our God.
This vision, of course, is a work in progress. The Center will develop and change by the usual course of trial and error. Your insights and participation will ultimately shape its course far more than have those of us involved with the original design. All I can say is this. The next time someone asks me how I can stay in the same position for twenty years, my answer will be a simple one. Neither All Souls nor its ministers stay in the same position, not for twenty years, not even for one. In the spirit of our founders, we are ever seeking, ever changing, ever adapting to and rising to new challenges. The goal is not to be a great church, but to be a good one -- good for us, good for our children, good for our neighbors.
I hope that by Anniversary Sunday in two weeks time, we will be in a position to launch this campaign. A few of us can make this possible, and then the rest of us will join in to complete the necessary work, the work of turning vision into mission.
Copyright All Souls 1997
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