Come Read A Book With Us!

The first experiment in RE group reading will be Essex Conversations -- essays around the questions of

-As Unitarian Universalists enter the 21st century, what is central to our evolving faith?

-What are our goals for lifespan religious education?

-What are the vital components of our curricula?

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/32946.UU_REads

The plan is to read an essay or two each week and discuss as the spirit moves us. Most essays are about ten pages each, so it should not be an onerous task.

This week we're reading the introduction and the first essay -- Rev. Dr. Barry M. Andrews - Educating for Faith. It's the fourth passage I've read this week pulling from William James - guess I better read up on him, too...

Finding Balance

One of the Tapestry of Faith curricula is Moral Tales -- a great collection of sessions, each exploring a moral value, with a story from one of many traditions. As a visual, you create a Moral Compass - it looks like a compass, divided into 16 wedges, each for a different value. Perseverance, Responsibility, Courage, etc. I made the compass at the beginning of the year, and printed out each of the values in 36 pt and set them in a specific spot so I could just add a slip to the weekly basket...

And then life got busy and my office piles took over and that one specific spot, well, something else must have needed that spot, or perhaps there was a strong breeze. No idea. I only know that we had a few weeks where we couldn't find the slips of paper.

Of course, when you can't find anything in your office, it takes three times as long to get anything done, and geez, it makes it hard to be in a good mood. I started coming into work EARLY EARLY one day each week, spending an hour or so attacking the mess before anyone else was in the building. The art project Mable forgot to take home. Pictures from thirty years ago that someone wanted me to have. A few thousand papers I should have recycled way back when. That sermon from that guy in St. Louis that I had been meaning to read for three years. OH, the stuff...

Finally I found the slips of paper! Or at least, most of them.

Balance has gone missing. I'll type up a replacement slip for now, and know that I can't check that one off my to do list quite yet.

Growing Potters

One of my favorite stories from our Universalist heritage is the story of Thomas Potter and John Murray. You can read a dozen versions of it elsewhere, but the gist? John Murray was a Universalist minister in England - but life got really horrendously awful. We're talking Job, here. He set sail for America, to lose himself in a new land. The ship gets within sight of the New Jersey coastline and they're stuck. Murray goes ashore to barter with someone for supplies and meets Thomas Potter who just happens to be a Universalist and has BUILT A CHURCH and has been waiting for a minister to come along. Murray shakes his head. "Not your guy, sorry." Potter tries to wrangle something out of him and it just isn't working--but he finally gets the glum man to agree -- if the wind hasn't changed and the ship is still stuck? Yeah, fine. We'll have a service Sunday.

Thank goodness that the wind didn't change. Murray went on to spend the next 39 years spreading the good word of Universalism in the colonies (and soon, the fledgling nation.)

As cool as Murray was, I keep coming back to Thomas Potter. This illiterate farmer had done some thinking and decided that Universalism made a lot of sense to him. But there was no Universalist church anywhere near, so he built a church on his land...and waited. (In the mean time, he let other groups use the church, with or without ministers.)

How can we develop Potters in our congregations? People who are willing to do the hard work, to create a sacred space and invite in change, wrestling with others' reluctance to bring forth their prophetic voices?

Awakening and Brainwashing Souls

Ever notice a word popping up in most everything you're reading, whether it's a book or an article or a website?

This week mine has been "inculcate". Dictionary definitions lean toward repetition, rote, and even brainwashing. The Online Etymology Dictionary claims that it came into usage in the 1540s, from L. inculcatus, pp. of inculcare "force upon, stamp in," from in- "in" + calcare "to tread, press in," from calx (1) "heel."

Why, yes, I am reading lots of educational theory. But I'm a Religious Educator, and a Unitarian Universalist at that -- I seem to recall our Unitarian forefather William Ellery Channing saying

The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own;

Not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own;
Not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth;
Not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs;
Not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions,
But to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision;
Not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought;
Not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules, but to awaken the conscience, the moral discernment.
In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish the spiritual life.

It's too bad Channing didn't include lesson plans and materials lists with that. It would make my job so much simpler.

Dread and Treasure

I'll admit it - sometimes I clear my desk by throwing everything into a basket. Sometimes it's an oversized laundry basket.

Then it becomes a Dread Object. You know, those things you don't want to deal with because WHO KNOWS what's in there and what will you do with it anyway and oh, if people knew what you were hiding... they would have such a horrible picture of you! Whee, anxiety. In a laundry basket. I'd prefer dirty socks, thanks.

Today I got brave and emptied the big laundry basket. I found all the props from a sermon I did in January '09, notes from a few workshops, a bunch of stuff I should have recycled long, long ago.

AND TREASURE!

A bunch of early Unitarian Universalist (1961-1963) pamphlets:

So You Are Concerned w/ Children's Worship (All three bulletins)

What Speaks to Our Children (Robert L. Cope)

Dynamic Religious Education (Jack Kent)

The Methods of Religious Education (Robert L'H. Miller)

Guide for Parents of Children Studying Child of the Sun (Beverly Shimmin)

Any Size is the Right Size (Mary Lou Page)

And a more recent addition, which I've been hunting for months:

What Did Jesus Say About Homosexuality?

My reading glasses didn't make it to work today--actually perusing any of the material will wait for a luckier day. But none of it goes back in the basket. Or on the desk.

New GOODREADS group for Religious Educators...

and anyone else who might be interested...

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/32946.UU_REads

This group is a "place" for Unitarian Universalist Religious Educators to share what they are reading as they seek to understand, to facilitate, and to grow Unitarian Universalists and Unitarian Universalism. Yes, we'll definitely hit on the credentialing annotated resource list, but revelation is not sealed and there is some truth in most every book.

Buddha in Your Backpack...

Sometimes, quite on a whim, we come up with new projects for ourselves...

My latest is to preview some of the gazillions of "Teens' Guide to X Religon" on the shelves of the local library. Partially to know what's available for our youth and young adults, and partially because, well, I can do that reading while my brain is tired... First in my hand was _Buddha in Your Backpack: Everyday Buddhism for Teens_ by Franz Metcalf.

In general, accessible and covers all the major bases of both Buddhism and the teen years. His tone has some painful moments of "I'm trying too hard to sound cool to teenagers", but he's got a passion for both subjects and some really great resources.

The sexuality section was not *quite* OWL values, but almost. Any youth who has taken OWL will be nodding their head.

(I am doing a bunch of reading towards the credentialing process for Unitarian Universalist religious educators - if you'd like to know what that list looks like, check out

http://www.uua.org/documents/recc/reading_list_annotated.pdf )