(This is part of a series of blogs related to the Minns Lecture “The Age of Collaboration” that I co-presented with Peter Bowden.)

As people of faith and faithful promises – that is, people pledged to a covenant – there are many changes we can make. Some of the ideas I will name here arose from social media conversations. Some of them are mine; some originated from others who gave me permission to share them here; all of them are the work of collaboration.

Covenant

Today’s connected age expects both transparency and accountability in our institutions. It is easy to share documents and build databases. Transparency can build not only trust, but improve resources, information flow, and application development. The ministry that needs to be done requires all of us and all our gifts and participation.

Covenant - Democracy

The Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly has started using tools to ensure better democratic practice.

• We have many more opportunities for direct democracy, from videoconferencing to live voting.
• We need to vote and discuss directly  issues that really matter.
• We have work ahead to continue in order to ensure lots of roof for, and solidarity with, historically oppressed peoples. Digital media can help us.

Many of us are familiar with Accountability Teams, who model right relationship, living in solidarity, and helping us attend to and repair broken relationships. In our connected age, we still can benefit from the help of coaches and exemplars like Accountability Teams. But we are all on the accountability team of life.

There are none of us who do not need to attend to how we are relating to one another and this planet. We have all inherited terrible inequities and wrongs that need addressing and repair. We have all left folks out or been left out. Many of us have been barred or disregarded so frequently and so thoroughly, we have stopped trying. When the rest of us meet that disconnection, reconnection is up to us.

We bear responsibility for one another, no exceptions.

Covenant - Transparency

Faith leadership is connective and transparent.

• May all of us engage in regular social media practice as inspiration engines and invite participation in our faithful labors.
• We can stream and provide transcripts for important meetings, and provide timely and easy access to agendas and reports.
• We can crowd source many new projects.
• We can use social social media to engage, especially with underrepresented groups, and to inspire.

If our covenant - our faithful promises - really means anything, then how we fulfill those promises and practice our covenant together matters. Today’s digital tools can help us, but only if we really want to live with integrity. I certainly hope we choose that course of wholeness, though it be challenging and even scary, since creative, risky faithfulness will grow from it.

A Unitarian Universalist Association posted yesterday, “Ain’t Misbehaving. Saving My Love For You” mentions that a significant number of people who are “free range” Unitarian Universalists - people who are Unitarian Universalists by faith, but without congregational affiliation - are former leaders of those congregations.

One of the regular tests of faith - and breakers of it for many - is serving faith communities, where we can carry over the same expectations and behaviors from the larger political arena over to our congregations. That is, leaders can be held to unliveable standards. Leaders can be gossiped about, cut sharply and severely in their friendships, and even find people treating their families poorly.

There also can be congregational cultures without models of generous and healthy transitions from formal leadership back into congregational life. Leaders know how to be followers, or they are not really leaders. Giving people the opportunity to move from one role to another teaches and offers them new blessings and allows them to use their gifts for goodness in different ways.

Yet there are even some situations where either rule or “best practice” is considered to be separation and absence from the faith community for three to five years. Those rules or practices arise from a fearfulness of misuse of power. But they don’t actually address how to participate again in religious life as another congregant. Professional and volunteer leaders both face these same dynamics and issues.

I’ve  witnessed these dynamics in many faith traditions. Breaking the faith of faithful leaders in the context of religious community, by breaking the leader’s relationship with the faith community is not a new problem. Faith communities seeking to sustain the faith of faithful leaders and community as a whole have to live into at least six realities.

1. Covenants are not behavioral rules to batter people with and gain power over them. They will not prevent troubles, only remind us of promises we’ve made in faith.
2. Covenants - even the ones with the Holy that are supposed to last for all time - are reentered and reengaged. The people recovenant with the Holy multiple times in the Scriptures. How could we expect not to have to do the same thing?
3. Leaders who serve faithfully might actually lead in a direction you don’t like or that is outside your comfort zone. Holding that against them for the rest of their lives, or being surprised when you serve in leadership and meet the same expectations of compliance with your friends’ views, is trouble. Faithful leadership is not doing what our friends believe in every instance. It would be extraordinarily unlikely, particularly in diverse communities facing new challenges.
4. Forgiveness is a way of life. Generosity and graciousness are spiritual practices, for every one, without exception.
5. We need mentors and faith friends all along the way, from our earliest days entering a community, through our serving faithfully.
6. Accountability is mutual. The Golden Rule goes a long way here. If we stop to consider how we would feel about what’s being said and done were we the ones being “held accountable”, we will move more often back to mutual relationship and not into throwing around rules and holy words to bind and control one another. Accountability is mutual responsibility for the health and vitality of the relationship. If anyone chooses not to attend to their responsibilities, or views accountability as a one-way situation (“they” are accountable to me, not all of us together and not me to “them”) then faith communities have work before them to draw those individuals back into responsible relationship.

Learning how to live faithfully together, in our diversity, without everyone agreeing all the time, without everyone being alike and loving alike, is one of the great purposes of religious communities. When we eject or make it extraordinarily difficult for people who have served the community to stay in community, we are avoiding that commitment of continued relationship, in all situations and times and risking the faith of others to protect our own. We all grow stronger and more faithful when we engage faithfully the difficulties of community life. There are amazing joys that can happen in religious community, amazing gifts and blessings that communities can offer the world. Leadership and service go together, and leaders who have served faith communities can only fulfill giving their gifts and blessings when communities make it possible for leaders to resume regular community membership.

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.

What binds us together? How are we called to be?

Those are the central quests of our faithful promises that we make. Another way you can ask that question is, whose are we? what’s our purpose?

In our day to day practices of those faithful promises, it is really easy to focus on the relationships we have locally, weekly, regularly. Those can be great relationships and they can also be greatly challenging. When those relationships are challenging, we often drag in the language of covenant, meaning how are to relate to one another? what do our faithful promises call us to together?

Those are important questions. The covenant as a faith community with one is important, yes. But it is too small and too self-focused to be the only covenant we attend to, the only thing we mean when we talk about covenant.

We are one world, one humanity, one heart, many peoples, faithing together in different teaching traditions and languages of reverence. Unitarian Universalism is a both a mirror of and a part of that whole. Our bigger covenant has to be with that which is far bigger than all of us, and our different ways of relating to and imagining that which holds, calls, and binds us together, whether we call that the Holy or Love or the Oneness or Life Itself.

Unitarian Universalist Association President Peter Morales’ conversation starter, Beyond Congregations, is pointing us to that larger covenant and not to become lost in the smaller covenant, the one that gives us vibrant local congregants and an association of congregations, but the one that is also cutting out huge numbers of people who are and who are living faithfully as Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists outside of congregations. We share a larger covenant, a covenant that transcends associational lines and that calls into multifaith work, into caring for and stewarding a healthy living pluralism in this world, and in supporting many ways of being faithful Unitarian Universalists.

The covenant of the Cambridge Platform is based on there being an elect. Few Unitarian Universalists hold with that theology today. Yet that theology has shaped a culture, and shaped us away from our larger promises and a bigger faith. Why are we holding with a covenant rooted in the theology of election, where the resources, attention, and meaning of faith goes into exclusively or primarily the smaller groups of people who sign a membership book? Our Universalist heritage calls us in a different way, to a larger covenant, not as a chosen people, but as people who also and already belong to the Heart of Life, and have a purpose, a calling, and gifts to share.