Unitarian Universalist Association religious leaders speak often about covenant as an association of congregations, especially our relationships to one another.

Talk for five minutes and someone will haul out the Cambridge Platform of 1648.

Thanks to an excellent series of Minns Lectures by the Rev. Alice Blair Wesley, the conversations follow a predictable route. We are independent congregations who share responsibility for one another.

That Rev. Alice Blair Wesley was calling Unitarian Universalist Association members to a recovenanting is often skipped right over. She wrote, “we need to do two things: to reclaim and creatively adopt covenants in our free churches, in our own liberal way, for our own time, and to invent what we have never yet had, a Covenanted  Association of Congregations.” (Lecture 5, p. 3)

The conversations about

• Regionalization (shifting from District middle judicatories to larger regions of shared resourcing, faith community and staffing),
• living into Policy Governance (Board sets policy, General Assembly confirms it, Staff & Congregations figure out how to fulfill it), 
•  Fulfilling the Promise (anti-racism, anti-oppression work),
•  the Fifth Principle Project (making our democracy really work, especially for historically underserved and underrepresented peoples), and
• Affiliates (originally, a way to connect external organizations, then transformed into non-congregational, internal faith communities), and
• Congregations & Beyond (vital faith communities of many kinds in covenant together, serving the world together)

are essentially efforts to reclaim and creatively adopt our promises to one another and to the Holy (yes, check out the language of the Cambridge Platform of 1648) and figure out how we are called together in service as a faithful people.

The Orlando Platform is one of the ways the Southern Region of the Unitarian Universalist Association names that calling, particularly in relationship to Regionalization.

Our promises are binding, but how we understand and live out those promises over time changes, has to change, in relationship to our own spiritual growth, our changing world, and our changing appreciation for our shared calling.

Faith communities do not have to be congregations as we have known them to be faithful communities. How can an association of congregations live in covenant with emerging and new forms of faith communities that has a broader and deeper understanding of congregation. We have left behind the understanding of the Cambridge Platform that only the saints may form the congregation (the voting body and religious leadership of the worshipping community). The idea of congregation that many people have - that is is local, with a building, with a Protestant culture of worship, with occasional charitable good works, and with a lot of programming for its members - is only one way of being a faith community. There are many, many ways for faithful people to be called together to worship, to learn, to give thanks, and to give back. Now we have another opportunity before us to find a way to promise together in diversity to serve the Holy in this diverse world.

Sharing a concern that we actually live out the piece of our covenant where the Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees is responsible for creating ends and UUA staff and congregations for figuring out how to achieve them, how could Congregations and Beyond achieve our Association’s goals? This is my personal speculation, since a formal statement from UUA Administration connecting the two has not been released. The UUA Board ends are in bold type.

What are our goals as an Association of Congregations?

First, we have the preamble understanding:

“Grounded in our covenantal tradition, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association will inspire people to lead lives of humility and purpose, connection and service, thereby transforming themselves and the world.”

Our primary question, which we must always answer, is: how well are we leading lives of humility and purpose, connection and service, that transform ourselves and the world?

Congregations and Beyond must invite us further into living humbly, purposefully, connected to one another and serving the world with transforming love.

Congregations that unlock the power to transforms lives. People:

• develop a personal practice
• participate in meaningful worship
• learn and practice empowered leadership and generosity
• find their ministry in the world

The first two practices are things that probably primarily occur in congregations and faith communities. The second two practices, however, are ones that we can nurture both inside the congregation and as congregations risking faithfully in the larger world. If we focus only on achieving the first two, consider the third to refer only to congregational administration, and think of the fourth as highly individual, then no, there’s no requirement to live faithfully as part of the larger world, beyond the membership rolls and congregational walls. However, I believe that interpretation fails the first and larger understanding or really transforms people’s lives after a certain stage of faithing is reached.

Congregations and Beyond imagines more face-to-face opportunities for people, more opportunities for service, more ways for folks to connect with our religious movement, which surely must involve congregations as well as other faith communities.

Our congregations are:

• Vibrant - joyful and excited about their ministries
• Intentionally multi-generational and multi-cultural
• Embracing and struggling with issues of oppression and privilege
• Open and inclusive in their outreach and welcome
• Ministries deeply shared by ministers and the laity
• Active participants in ministerial preparation and development
• Growing in membership
• Living their mission in their communities

Yes! Joyful diverse faith communities where everyone’s gifts matter, are cared for, and useful in serving the larger world are exciting communities. They’re also communities that are not insulated from the rest of the world, but are deeply part of the issues and concerns of their local areas and our earth.

Congregations and Beyond will only be effective if it is a ministry of every body, working together, taking responsibility together, engaging our troubles, sharing our strengths, and serving our world with courageous love.

Congregations that live in covenant with other congregations in our Association through:

• A strong, articulated sense of Unitarian Universalist and community identity
• High expectations of their members
• Full participation in Associational life
• Networking with each other

Yes. Congregational life isn’t just about the First Congregation of Prudent Hope and Excellent Boundaries. Vibrant faith communities know who they are, care about other community members (not only membership rolls), attend to the stranger and make them neighbor and kin, and take responsibility for the vibrancy and health of the whole world.

Congregations and Beyond invites imagining how to better sustain and engage one another, the estranged and the seeking.

Congregations that move toward sustainability, wholeness and reconciliation.

Our congregations answer the call to ministry and justice work:

• grounded in the communities in which they live
• nationally and internationally
• with interfaith partners and alliances

The public engages in meaningful dialogue and takes action informed by our prophetic voice and public witness.

These ENDS are all of equal importance and are to be achieved within a justifiable cost, with their priority set by the President.

The invitation into the Unitarian Universalist Association is not currently the same as the invitation into Unitarian Universalism. Some of our faith communities operate that way, but many do not. We can change that. We can engage this faith even more fully and more generously, caring more attentively for our planet and for one another. We can work more often, better, and more faithfully  with local, regional, continental and international partners. We are the only ones who can decide to take up the faithful risks, to experiment, to fail and learn from our failures lessons other than not trying, to be more generous than ever before, and to live humbly, joyfully, and purposefully in service to and with transforming love.

What’s beyond congregant serving programs, worship services, faith development and administration? It isn’t just hospitality hour. Sometimes faith communities think primarily or entirely about “their community” as being the same as “their membership”. What kinds of wonderful can happen when our congregational identity is as a vibrant, living part of the whole larger community in which our congregation is located?

Another way to learn from what’s possible with Congregations and Beyond  comes from a congregation that has become a regional community center - First Unitarian Philadelphia working with Rev. Nate Walker.  First Unitarian Philadelphia is a faith partner to community initiatives in the areas of Spiritual Growth, Wellness, Education, Culture, and Civic Life. The congregation’s strengths and the building’s strengths (downtown, large, landmark facility) serve the larger community’s needs for a central place to meet and grow thicker and stronger community. More than 2,200 people use the facility each week, 10 times the number of members in the congregation…and growing!  First Unitarian is preserving an historic building and making a more accessible space - not for itself, which is easy to assume, but to better fulfill its mission as a regional community center.

Becoming a regional community center is a relatively easy change for many of our congregations. It is an attitudinal shift, an embrace of an historic mission to serve the whole world (of which we are just one part), and developing real trusted partners (not just renters) in the larger community. Doing so to save a building - which is how the First Unitarian story was reported in the UU World — isn’t a change. That’s still “what can others do for us?” The change is living out of the question, “what can we do for our local community? what can we do faithfully for and with the whole world?”

First Unitarian Philadelphia points out the fact that we don’t have to have big congregations to have big effects. We do have to know our strengths, build partnerships in our communities, and take some faithful risks in serving, growing spiritually, and being weavers of wider, stronger communities.

There have been plenty of great ahas! and sharing during the Congregations and Beyond conversation in Orlando, because that’s what happens in learning communities where diverse people share their best thinking, their hearts, and what they are already doing. For me, this has been even better because the sharing in the room has been so connected with the sharing in the Facebook Public Group (Unitarian Universalists Exploring Congregations and Beyond) and on Twitter with the #congbeyond hashtag. That sharing amongst one another and as a faith community as a whole has been made easier with these tools and with Chris Walton of the UU World creating a Storify. We even were able to have a brief tweetchat at noon on Thursday.

My personal hope coming from all of these conversations is that we are taking another opportunity to grow faithfully, as individuals and in all kinds of faith communities (congregations - and there are all different kinds of congregations - are still only one kind of faith community). I have found that faith community in the digital sphere is possible using our creative spirits and a lot of goodwill. I have found that we can support folks in crisis, answer the call to mercy and compassion, laugh and cry together, pray together, seek understanding and share wisdom together. The technologies of social media only work when they meet and reflect how we grow faithfully and grow in community. That’s true too for other, older technologies, like what many people think when they say “congregation”. At the end of the day, this life of faith involves faithful risk, courageous love, and the generosity to share with trust and with hope.

How do you do something you’ve never done before?

That’s the big question before all of us when we’re dealing with changes that challenge us in how we’re used to living, whether we are talking about how we work or how we make community or how we live faithfully.

The Congregations and Beyond conversation started last night and the first order of business had to be in working through how we would be together. Why? Because we are a diverse group of people who do not share the same cultural assumptions about how to work together, how to learn, how to share.

One of the things technology brings us is the ability to weave real time learning communities across big differences. There are emerging and established cultures about how those communities work. Those cultural differences are often rooted in different assumptions about, for example, participation and sharing than we may have for how to participate in other cultural settings.

Working with cultural differences and not just demanding we adopt a particular culture is part of the creative faithing and learning something new ahead for Unitarian Universalists. We can build on past learning experiences. We can stay connected not only to one another but to the transforming power of love. This is diversity work, learning how to faithfully live into the abundant blessings of life and to add to those abundant blessings.

So when I meet a place I don’t understand (which is often), I have a chance to learn something new, to risk faithfully, to fail sometimes, to learn from those failures. If we do not risk faithful failure we are not risking faithful success.

Where is my faith community? My faith community is wherever I can gather with a few others (or a huge number of others) and reorient myself to the Holy, to the transforming work and power of love, to gratitude, generosity, and wonder.

Sometimes that might be in a building. More often, I meet my faith community from known and beloved members to strangers and even enemies out in the realm of social media. We use these easy, accessible tools throughout each night and day to learn faithfully, pray, encourage, worship, and work together in faithful service.

Faith communities are about attention, intention, action, and devotion. We use all kinds of ways to come together as people of faith. Social media is just one of the terrific possibilities for us to join in creating shorter-term & enduring faith communities. These can grow from, serve inside, and exist apart from faith communities that choose the powerful
suite of tools related to buildings.