Trustee Talk

Are You Thinking About GA Yet?

RevRose — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:59:19 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but I’m committed to reenergizing this trustee blog as a key tool of my communication with the people and congregations that I represent as the Metro New York District trustee. For those of you who didn’t know your trustee had a blog, she does! Our District Executive, Andrea Lerner and I, along with Laurie Golson, intrepid District Administrator, are putting our heads together to make Trustee Talk a more obvious source of information for you (perhaps an RSS feed is in order?)

In the meantime, let me start by reminding you all that it’s time to start thinking about General Assembly 2009–this year in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, from June 24 through June 28.

Yes, GA is a long way away, and finances may be a concern for some of you. But let me encourage every one of you who has enough vacation time to get away to start thinking about coming to our annual meeting of congregations. I’m as excited about going to this year’s GA as I was unhappy about last year’s GA. Why? There are so many reasons I can’t blog about them all, but I’m glad to give some highlights:

Though Salt Lake City is the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), key supporters of the dreaded Proposition 8, most of the people who live in Salt Lake are NOT Mormons. We who are liberal religious people have an opportunity to model what an open, affirming and positive religious gathering can be in a city that probably doesn’t get to see that a great deal.
The wonderful lay leadership education module known as UU University is now embedded directly into General Assembly at no extra charge. Instead of coming two days early and paying an extra fee, registrants get a choice of learning tracks that can help them be better leaders back home.
This year’s Ware Lecturer is a Metro District resident: the fabulous Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell of Princeton University (and part of the Princeton congregation!) You’ve seen and heard her brilliant political and social analysis on MSNBC throughout the last Presidential election cycle. If you come to GA, you can hear her in person.
We get to vote for a new UUA President! The Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman and the Rev. Peter Morales are both candidates for leadership in our movement. Ministers and delegates to General Assembly are the voters who will determine our new president. (Yes, absentee voting is permitted, but isn’t it more fun to come so you can see our democratic process in action?)

I’ll have more to say in a future post about my own Presidential choice. But for now, let me encourage you to find your own reasons to attend our annual General Assembly in Salt Lake City; I look forward to seeing you at our District Ingathering!

Ft. Lauderdale: Another View

RevRose — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:34:12 +0000

Thanks to all of you who continue to write, call and email to discuss my decision not to attend General Assembly; I’ve been both enriched and challenged by the conversations. I also continue to be grateful that, as people of faith, we take seriously the gift of free religion we have been given, and that we struggle with the parameters of that freedom.
My board colleague, Tamara Payne-Alex, recently returned from a trip of several days to the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center; I’ve gotten her permission to post below a brief reflection on her experience there:

I am writing from the airport in Ft. Lauderdale. I
have just spent three days here attending a conference for work. I
stayed at the Hyatt Pier 66 and went in and out of the Convention
Center multiple times each day with a very diverse group of Afterschool
professionals.

In terms of security, I was never once during my stay asked for ID.
I never observed anyone riding shuttles to the convention center from
the hotels asked for ID. Individuals on foot entering the Port were
stopped outside the perimeter by a man in uniform. Security felt casual
and unintrusive when observed from my perspective. A diverse array of
folks seeking to gamble on the day cruise ship moored at the port or
attend the conference chatted and laughed as they passed through the
perimeter checkpoint. These pleasure seekers were dressed in shorts and
flipflops, sported oversized totes, backpacks and body piercings.

The population of Ft. Lauderdale is very diverse and very brown. Coming
from the Bay Area and as a POC, it is for me the most comfortably
diverse environment for a General Assembly that I can recall in recent
history.

I hope all of you here in the District will add this piece of information to your mental files as you continue to make your decision about whether to attend this year’s General Assembly. I know that Tamara’s experience will be helpful for some of you, and will weigh less heavily for others. In the meantime, keep those calls and emails coming! And for those of you who will be in Ft. Lauderdale, I look forward to continuing our conversation there; just meet me outside the security perimeter….

The Future of Youth/Young Adult Ministry

RevRose — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:27:13 +0000

In the last several weeks, there have been a host of rumors about the future of youth and young adult ministry within the UUA. Recent announcements about a shift in emphasis to youth and young adult ministries rooted in our congregational life (which has been discussed for some years now) became confused with the elimination of funding for both Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) and Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network (C*UUYAN). In addition, there was some miscommunication at the UUA staff level that contributed to the sense that our youth and young adults were being set adrift in some important ways.

As your trustee, I wanted to alert you to this letter, written last week by our Board Secretary, Paul Rickter, that provides some much needed clarification on this important issue. I quote the letter below in its entirety:

February 19, 2008

On behalf of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board of Trustees, I’m writing this message to set some facts straight regarding recent announcements affecting Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) and Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network (C*UUYAN).

Over the past few weeks, there has been much discussion about letters sent out by the YRUU and C*UUYAN Steering Committees announcing the decisions by the UUA staff to discontinue their budgets, decisions which would effectively result in the dissolution of YRUU as a continental organization and severely affect C*UUYAN. In this discussion, two facts need to be emphasized:

The fiscal year 2008-2009 budget will not be approved by the UUA Board of Trustees until its meeting in April, so there has been no decision to end financial support for YRUU or C*UUYAN.
YRUU and C*UUYAN have status as UUA sponsored organizations that can only be changed by a vote of the UUA Board and we have never voted to change those arrangements nor even received such a proposal from UUA staff.

In short, no decision has been made about the future of YRUU or C*UUYAN and no decision will be made until, at the earliest, the April 18-20 meeting of the UUA Board. And any decision we make will continue to be informed by consultation with all stakeholders in youth and young adult ministry, including both organizations’ Steering Committees and the community of youth, young adults, and their adult allies.

In faith,

Paul Rickter, UUA Secretary

I wanted to make sure that our youth and young adult leaders and members were aware of this development, and I want to encourage any of you who are interested in having a conversation with me about your concerns to be in touch. I welcome your input; I’m eager to hear your concerns so that I might lift them up at the forthcoming April meeting. As a congregational minister with a growing number of youth and young adult members (and as the mother of two Unitarian Universalist youth just beginning to come into their own), I am committed to the creation and continuance of a healthy, vigorous and spirit-filled Unitarian Universalism for young people, in Metro New York and throughout the country. Please let me know your thoughts!

In the meantime, please check out FUUSE, the web home of the UU youth and young adult community, for discussion and commentary on these issues, and of course, www.uua.org, for clarifying statements from our president, Rev. William Sinkford.

Why I’m Not Attending General Assembly

RevRose — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:50:07 +0000

As your UUA Trustee, I have always believed that one of my tasks was to encourage congregations and congregational leaders to make an investment of time and treasure on behalf of our liberal religious tradition. I am a Unitarian Universalist minister who first saw the enormous potential and possibilities of our faith when I attended my first General Assembly in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1987. I was a new UU, and in fact had married into the faith; my husband grew up in the Community Church of NY and his parents, Gladys and Isaac McNatt, had been vigorous activists for liberal religion before Bob was born. (Bob’s first liberal religious meeting was the 1958 meeting of the International Association for Religious Freedom –IARF; he was four years old!)
At Little Rock, I first learned the power of General Assembly. Our primary purpose in gathering yearly is to conduct the business of our association of religious communities. But that is hardly the only reason to attend GA. In my years as a UU, it has become a gathering of congregations that serves to educate and to motivate, to inspire and indeed to recruit faithful leaders in our liberal religious tradition. I myself was one such leader. At GA, I first fell in love with our free faith, and I have never wavered in my belief that liberal religion is the hope of the world. But we cannot be a beacon, we cannot be a way station for people hungry for meaning and purpose, if we forget our heritage, our history, and the ways in which we differ from other religious traditions. Here I take a page from my African-American heritage, remembering the old saying that unless we know where we are coming from, we cannot know where we are going.
This June, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations will hold its annual General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In many ways, Fort Lauderdale is an impressive choice for us as a liberal people of faith. But for a variety of reasons, our Association will hold General Assembly within a federal security zone. This means that, for better or for worse, it will be the United States government that decides who can or cannot be with us—in worship, in community, and in our plenary sessions, as we attempt to exercise the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process. This situation exemplifies our Fifth Principle writ large, and I am consumed by the idea that we have given the US government the capacity to dictate to our General Assembly who might and might not join us.
It is my heartfelt belief that the church has a distinctive role to play in its relationship to authority. Dr. Martin Luther King said it best in his 1963 book, Strength to Love: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”
Many of you may know that my sabbatical project has been to serve as a faculty member for the ICUU Leadership Training meeting for emerging East African congregations in Nairobi, Kenya, which begins this week. What you may not know is that I traveled to Kenya more recently, as part of the UU Service Committee fact-finding mission examining the escalating crisis there. I was privileged to spend six days there speaking to people from all walks of life, from academics to cab drivers to market women. Throughout the trip, I was struck again and again by the Kenyan people’s commitment to a full and free democracy. They share, as Unitarian Universalists do, an unshakable belief in the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process.
These are community leaders who walk around with the Kenyan Constitution in their pockets or portfolios. They have been threatened with death—indeed, as I write these words, one opposition Member of Parliament has already been murdered—but they will not give up their dream of a free and democratic Kenya. One of the most chilling things I learned on my trip was the consensus among groups that religious leaders in Kenya had no moral authority to call for change, no capacity for ending the current crisis, because they were seen in most quarters as partisan at best, and complicit with the government at worst. It was especially chilling to hear the religious leaders we met with agree with that assessment.
As I considered my choices about the forthcoming General Assembly, the voices of native Kenyan people were ringing in my ears. These brave and wonderful people are faced with a corrupt government, no sign of peace, and the imminent destruction of one of the most incredible places I have ever visited. Yet they take risks we cannot begin to imagine, on behalf of the same dream of democratic governance that we in the US have long been jaded about. And in the midst of those risks, and the crisis in their own nation, Kenyan religious leaders found themselves without voice or impact, because of the earlier choices they had made.
I realize that the decision of the UUA Board to hold GA in Fort Lauderdale is not a high-stakes contest for the soul of our country. But our decision does say something regrettable about the current distance between our religious ideals and our governance. I also believe that the ideals that General Assembly is meant to represent are ideals that are not well served by the petty behavior of our government, or our association’s complicity with that behavior.
So that is why I am not going to General Assembly this year. I have no intention of telling others what they should or should not do. The right of conscience embedded in our Fifth Principle is an eloquent declaration of how we ought to behave with one another, no matter how we feel about this issue. I will continue to be in conversation with any of you who are still thinking things over. And because we are sisters and brothers within the liberal religious tradition, please know that I refuse to demonize you, no matter what your ultimate position. We are all children of a loving and beloved Creation, and we forget this essential connection at our peril.
Because of my responsibilities as a UUA trustee, I still must travel to Fort Lauderdale. It is my current understanding that our board meetings will be conducted outside the federal security zone, and so I will be able to attend. Thanks to the foresight, understanding and commitment of the UU Ministers Association, I certainly will be able to attend Ministry Days—the pre-GA gathering of ministers—without crossing into the federal zone. I am more grateful than I can say for their thoughtful consideration and their respectful stance. If you are interested in reading their thoughts, please click on this link: http://www.uuma.org/md08letter.htm.
I sincerely welcome your comments as you consider what you and your congregations will do in the face of this unfortunate situation. Please know that I am well aware that I represent you all, and our shared vision of Unitarian Universalism; it is your commitment to that shared vision that first sent me to the UUA Board of Trustees. At the same time, the call that first brought me into the embrace of liberal religion is too strong and serious to be denied. It is that call, and my understanding of it, that has led me to refuse to attend General Assembly this year. For now, I look forward to GA 2009, when I can once again join with my sisters and brothers in faith, to work, to learn, and to celebrate the holy, all within this faith that we love.

Fort Lauderdale GA Has Issues

RevRose — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:45:25 +0000

No New Yorker living in the post-Sept. 11 world is the least bit surprised by the often over-the-top security measures in place here. Residing as we do in the eternally orange zone, we long ago grew used to being asked for ID to enter any building short of a McDonalds. There are few high-rise office buildings here that aren’t decked out with a webcam, poised to take a grainy shot of you and transfer it to a visitor’s badge. Perhaps our town is a little paranoid, but once you’ve lived through a terrorist attack and remain a terrorist target, it’s hard not to think about avoiding The Next Event. Separate from all these issues, I’m a black woman in America, and thus live without any expectation of living without some kind of scrutiny. I learned long ago to keep my ID current, to keep my temper in check, and to keep my eyes open for the names of my interrogators, in case I have to file a complaint.
But the security challenges that have gradually been revealed in the run-up to the UU General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale are quite another matter. The recent memo from UUA President, The Rev. Bill Sinkford, UUA Moderator Gini Courter, and UUA Planning Committee Chair Beth McGregor, has acknowledged the considerable difficulties inherent in the Fort Lauderdale arrangements, and yet asks us as board members not to move the site of our annual gathering. If the conversation on the UU Ministers’ Association chat and other venues is any indication, this request may be easier made than granted.
There is something squirrelly about the thought of the religious community that once published The Pentagon Papers subjecting its gathered delegates and Sunday-morning worshippers to search by the Department of Homeland Security. More than one of us who’ve spent the past several years preaching about the slippery slope of American civil liberties will have to decide if we feel like sliding down to Florida next June, much less explaining it to our congregations. The estimated $800,000 loss that the Association would have to absorb in order to change venues could be just as tough to justify to the fiscal conservatives among us. And nearly everyone seems too well-behaved to ask why the Planning Committee hasn’t taken a harder line with officials who assured UU site visitors five years earlier that the convention center would be outside the security zone in June 2008. Inquiring minds want to know….

Second Thoughts…

RevRose — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:53:11 +0000

    One of the most enduring commentators on our system of governance is the Rev. Alice Blair Wesley, who for some years now has encouraged Unitarian Universalists to pay closer attention to lateral relations among congregations. We should, she believes, be much more attentive to the ways that congregations can work together, support one another, even call out one another on both individual and collective behavior. Hers are provocative arguments that call congregations to re-examine their covenental relationships, and live more fully into a reimagined version of the Cambridge Platform that grounds and inspires our movement.
    If Rev. Wesley’s aspirations for congregations are sound, it makes sense that some among us might be similarly inspired to speak with others about broader matters of governance. So after a lot of personal stewing about the dangers of the policy governance model and its impact on our association, I decided to speak instead with leaders in our own Metro New York District. After all, our district itself uses the same model, and I have felt good for some years now about MNY’s responsiveness to our congregations.
    It was the perfect topic for my part of the quarterly District Board Meeting, and I was really glad to have brought it up. I felt affirmed about my distaste for the language of policy governance, with its jargon about “ends” and”owners” and other terms that make me grind my teeth. But I was reassured, too, about the practical effect of policy governance on the ability of the district to accomplish tasks, and about the ability of leaders, within the policy governance system, to actually LEAD. (Any one of us who serves a congregation knows how hard that can be I heard again and again that district board members found the system of policy governance one of consistency and clarity.
    So I await, with a lot more pleasure than I imagined, the next UUA Board meeting, where we will have a more in-depth conversation with large congregation leaders who are living with policy governance “on the ground.” I am hoping to put to rest at last my misgivings about what such a system of governance will mean to the work of our association, and whether it will mean the disruption of relational ties that are vital to every religious enterprise. If any of my gentle readers are familiar with policy governance in their own life’s work, I especially welcome your thoughts and comments.

First Thoughts…..

RevRose — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 22:37:26 +0000

So, I’m home from my first meeting of the UUA Board! After getting some much needed sleep and catching up with parish life back at my home congregation, I’ve had time to think about the experience and to report to you about the good work I believe we are doing on behalf of our congregations.

You can be confident about the dedication of the Association’s board–though we have fun when we can, the workload is intense and the days are long. Because this is the start of a new two-year cycle in which committee assignments change and new board members like myself get oriented, the meeting started even earlier than usual. When you add to that the continuing work of the board to move to a model of policy governance and to wrestle with the unique challenges this mode of governance represents for a religious community, you get one VERY long total meeting, with lots of working groups and a retreat embedded within it!

The toughest part of this first meeting for me was the workshops on policy governance. I am just not a fan, and reading John Carver’s book, "Boards That Make a Difference," only made things worse for me. It was hard to be in a room filled with people who have been working hard to gain clarity between the role of the UUA board and the UUA staff (something the Carver model does very well) while fighting the nagging feeling that we were all signing up to be on the board of the United Way. My great fear: In the desire to create clear firewalls, policy governance asks religious institutions to give up their relational character. My great hope: that I’m wrong about my great fear.

Welcome, Everyone…

RevRose — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:00:00 +0000

…to my first posting on this occasional, moderated blog devoted to my work as your representative on the UUA board of trustees. I’m honored to serve the Metro NY District, and look forward to communicating with you about the work of the UUA board and about issues that concern you. I hope this blog will also create a space for you to have conversations with me about some of these issues, and a separate posting will set out the ground rules for those conversations. Please be in touch, and welcome!