Why I’m Not Attending General Assembly

    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.

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Published:
02.07.08 / 3am
Category:
Forthcoming Meetings, Global Unitarian Universalism, Policy Governance, Religion