To Understand Ourselves: NUUC’s Seventeenth Anniversary

A Service for the North Unitarian Universalist Congregation

March 16, 2003

I am told that in church life, secrets have a statute of limitations that runs out in seven years. I’m pretty sure I don’t believe that, but it is a good excuse to share a secret with you that has just aged precisely seven years.

My secret is that seven years ago, when I interviewed as a candidate for minister of this church, I was certain I didn’t want the job. I had heard some things about this church, all of which proved untrue, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. Besides I just knew that I wasn’t a small church minister. I thought my strengths would best complement a medium-sized church ministry, and besides, you know how identified I am with Unitarian Universalism, and with our history. I naturally envisioned myself somewhere as equally established in UU identity and history. OK, since we are truthful here, I saw myself, in seeking a pulpit, as seeking a pulpit. You know, somewhere that had a pulpit, already, literally. When I saw for the first time that ugly neon-blue metal lectern that we used when we rented our worship space from the Davis Middle School, I almost cried.

But I took the interview because, why not. I was already living in Columbus, and I was very attracted to the notion of interviewing without the usual exhaustions of doing so out of town. The way that our settlement process works, ministers seeking churches exchange packets of materials with churches seeking ministers. Those churches then have their search committee interview some of the ministers via phone, and then schedule some, usually three to four, for personal, weekend-long interviews on site. There is probably nothing more sacred to our tradition than the right of congregations to choose their own leadership, but the fact of the matter is that there is also nothing more tiring for both ministers seeking churches and for the committees of lay people who end up having to negotiate a process that in other denominations keeps entire bishops’ staffs busy full-time, year around.

The part of the interview process I always hated the most was the Saturday afternoon car trip through the area’s neighborhoods. I am extremely prone to car-sickness, so these trips inevitably meant that I would have to try to think of intelligent questions to ask about the city when in fact I really just needed to concentrate on not vomiting. I’ll never forget the search committee that drove me across town to see the new gourmet grocery that they were so proud of, which was distinguished for offering sushi, quite a revelation in this middle-sized Midwestern town. I remember walking around that store wondering if these very sweet people had any understanding that rather than convince me of the wonders of this community, all they had managed to accomplish was the driving of a very nauseated woman forty minutes across town in order to shove her nose in some raw fish.

So, anyway, I took the interview, and after the weekend I spent with your search committee, I knew I wanted this job even and above those with literal pulpits. I liked how Mike Zajano took on my toughest questions, including the $100,000 question: What’s the state of homophobia in your congregation? I liked how Michael Butler tried to scare me with impossible questions, but then just grinned when I failed to fall for his tough guy act. And of course, who could not fall in love with Gene Nielsen, presiding over the whole weekend as the benevolent matriarch that she is and has been to this community from the beginning.

And now I realize that right there, embodied in the search committee, was a microcosm of the small church community, its strengths, its weakness, its challenges and its joys. There were seven original members to the committee that interviewed me. Michael Butler, Keith Davis, Kathy Kuhns, Gene Nielsen, Doug Nottingham, Gwen VanHorn, and Mike Zajano. Both Doug and Keith had stopped attending church by the time I arrived in the fall. This is not surprising or unusual in a small congregation. In small congregations, the pressure that is placed on lay leadership can be absolutely crushing, and membership turn over and burn out is rampant. Indeed, the most common cause of failure for younger and smaller congregations is on one hand, the exhaustion of the leadership, and on the other, the very real fear on the part of newcomers that they will be expected to take serious and demanding responsibilities instantly. One reason that this congregation has survived is that we have managed to mostly move out of this stage of development, relatively intact. But Keith and Doug stand out in my mind as reminders of the very real costs of small church business, and of the sacrifices that persons have made to the vision of this gathering.

Since the time of that interview, I have buried both Gwen’s husband Bob, who died of liver cancer four years ago, and Gwen herself, who died of a sudden heart attack three years ago. And as I mentioned in Joys and Sorrows, just this week I have a spent time sitting with Kathy and her husband Bill, who has been ill. Time has worked both its magic and its destruction on all of us since that time. But hopefully, it has brought us closer together.

One of the great gifts of longer ministry is this opportunity to watch and to share in the movement of all of us through the different stages of life and death. It’s very moving to see young people I first met as children now gaining a new poise and maturity and heading off for college. It’s splendid to be able to hold a completely mature conversation with a thoughtful young woman who when I first met her, was a wiggle-worm child.

But it is not just to professional ministers that this privilege pertains. It is the gift that this congregation would make available to all of us, if only we would take it. It is the chance to watch the stream of life as it flows through all the stages, bringing us babies even as it carries other friends around a bend where we cannot follow; and it is all the moments of passage in between. A religious community exists in part as a place where we take note of these things; where we recognize the movement from chapter to chapter in our development as human beings. I would suggest that such conscious witness makes us more whole, that our spiritual lives become stronger and more integrated when we take the time to mark and to celebrate the passages of others as well as our own.

When I was taking some classes at the Catholic seminary on High Street, the Pontifical College Josephinium. I was startled one day after class when one of the young men training for the priesthood practically begged me to have coffee. He could tell that the urgency of his request was frightening me, and he said, oh please don’t worry. It’s just that I am worried that I am forgetting how to do church. I asked him what he could possibly mean—no one spends more time than those men at the Josephinium in learning how to do church. He said that no, he was forgetting how to do church because he was living in a world where all of his interactions were with men of the same basic age and background as him. For him church was the opportunity to see a range of people of all ages and generations and genders that we might not otherwise encounter in our lives. So of course I said yes, and of course, it was this conviction on his part that makes him today a truly wonderful priest.

Today marks the seventeenth anniversary of the first official worship service of the Dublin Unitarian Universalist Church. I have it in my files, a yellowing copy of the order of service from that service, Welcome to the Very First Service, it says, March 16, 1986. I came across that order of service when I was cleaning up files this past summer, and I realized that I couldn’t have said exactly how old we were without having seen that program, and I realized that while this congregation has done a superb job of looking into the future, we have yet to take the pause that looks back, and marks the anniversary of our creation. So today I wanted to tell the story of the gathering of this congregation. I want to tell it so we all know it, but more so that we have an understanding of who we are. For such is the job of religion—we tell stories, stories that because they return to the past in order to discern some meaning there, lend direction and purpose to our movement forward. Each week, when we state our commitment to help each other understand our selves and our universe, and today, I’d like to look backwards a little, so that we might truly understand the forces and the momentum that sustains this particular congregation. I’d like to mention in specific the character of this congregation, and then the history of this congregation, so that we all might know it and so that we will not forget.

As to the character of this congregation, what you need to know about this congregation is that even above and beyond any individual expression, it is crazy. Completely crazy. Maniacal would be the correct clinical term. I read in preparation for today’s sermon the description of the church that was developed by the committee that began the search for the community’s first minister. The committee, in outlining to prospective ministers the qualities they would need to have to minister to the brand new group, explains that they require a minister skilled in both small church and large church. You need to be comfortable, they explained, preaching to the very small group that we are now. However, in three years, you need to expect and be comfortable preaching to a large church congregation of at least three hundred members.

I expect this remark led to some hilarity when the application was received in Boston. No church within our movement has ever grown like that. And of course, nothing like that did end up happening here. And yet we did grow, and we did survive. Most new young churches do not last longer than five years. Most young small churches never make it past the fifty-member mark. The ones who do often do not make it past the seventy-member mark. The ones who do often do not make it to a point where they own their own building. The authors of that search document were optimistic maniacs, but either in spite or because of the delusions, this congregation did survive where so many others have failed. Indeed, I would say that this quality is still very much a characteristic of who we are. Ten years after the writing of that document, I met with a search committee that contained none of the same people as that original group, but which had somehow managed to inherit nonetheless the same mania. You’ll have an associate minister in three years, the negotiating team told me. Yeah right, I thought, smiling, though, recognizing in the remark both the optimism that the small church needs as well as some of my own mental health issues. This congregation has always been willing to look into the future, and to use the present as a means of building a future for others to benefit by.

But time for a little history, some things you need to know about this place. This congregation began as a gleam in Gene Nielsen’s eye. In June of 1984, our annual meeting of the National UUA, our General Assembly, was held here in Columbus Ohio. It was a historic meeting, and a time of great excitement. It was at that meeting that our current Principles and Purposes, which grace the cover page of our hymnal and which have proven such a valuable tool of self-definition, was voted on and affirmed. During that meeting Gene Nielsen was serving as Volunteer Coordinator, a hellish job that makes army supply work look easy. Gene not only managed to do her job well, though, she managed to get around to meetings with Judy Hagan, who was then the chair of our First UU Church, and the Rev. Tom Chulak, who was the UUA’s Extension Consultant. Those three folks talked about how Columbus’ demographic should warrant two, not one, full service congregations. That fall a meeting was held at the First Church to explore the possibility of deliberately starting a new congregation in the Columbus area. Judy Hagan and Tom Chulak and Gene Nielsen were all present at that meeting. Gene Nielsen emerged from that meeting as Chair of the New Congregation Committee.

And while we do not own here any relics of the true cross, I do have in my office a battered cassette tape that is a recording of that meeting, should anyone be interested to review our history. It’s a nice tape to listen to really. For a while there were rumors running about that those who started our congregation were doing so because they were disgruntled with some things that were happening at First Church. Listening to this tape is a good reminder that we were in fact wanted children with loving parents.

The committee worked hard to define the parameters under which a new congregation might be formed. The result was that in October of 1985 First Church voted to affirm and support the creation of a new congregation in Dublin. An organizational meeting of all interested was called for December 1985. A Steering Committee was named after that meeting, bylaws were written, and on Feb. 3, 1986, the church came into official existence with 22 charter members, including the Bixels and the Nielsens. The first worship service, in March, followed, meeting as we would for so many years in a middle school cafeteria in Dublin.

As rapid growth was desired from the beginning, the young group began immediate conversations about professional ministry. This was a somewhat unusual decision for new congregations, who often prefer to maintain lay leadership, and as a consequence, can have difficulties with growth. Inquiries were made about the possibility of hiring an extension minister through the UUA. However this proved more difficult than it was first thought, there not being a plethora of extension ministers available to such a small group, and because of some reservations on the part of the UUA as to the group’s readiness. About this same time, though, it came to be known that one of the regular members of the group, Therea Hansing, was herself an ordained Presbyterian minister. In January 1987, then the Rev. Hansing was hired part time as the church’s first minister.

Rev. Hansing, who was known for her excellent sermons, served the church for a year and a half before some tensions developed about her lack of interest in going through the process that would credential her as a specifically Unitarian Universalist minister, and early in 1989, Rev. Hansing and the church parted ways. The last I heard of Rev. Hansing she was one of the ministers at the King Ave Presbyterian Church here in town, and the congregation was getting in trouble with their national association for their open inclusion of gays and lesbians. I just love thinking that Rev. Hansing has had a part of liberalizing her home denomination, with our blessing, and maybe a little bit of our influence.

In August of 1989, Rev. Gary Blaine, an explicitly UU Extension Minister, joined the church full time, with part of his salary coming from the UUA and part from this congregation. The first years of Rev. Blaine’s ministry saw tremendous growth in numbers and stability, and by the time the church’s extension grant ran out in 1991, the church was able to support Rev. Blaine’s compensation independently, and so in September of 1991, Gary Blaine became the church’s first full time minister called by the church in regular fashion and supported fully by the congregation. During the summer of 1994 Rev. Blaine left Dublin to serve a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma; he is currently the minister in Toledo.

Rev. Blaine’s departure lead to a two-year interim ministry by the Rev. Christa Landon, during which time the above mentioned search committee performed its work. It was a difficult time of transition for the church, but the congregation weathered it largely because of some heroic efforts by the leadership.

In September 1996, I joined the congregation. A new building was the chief and foremost concern, and it proved to be a difficult process. Ron Mattox was chair of the building committee. It was decided that we couldn’t build on the Sawmill property as we had envisioned, and then there was the long process of deciding what to do from there. It has also been a time of trying to build an institutional base, of adding professional staff, and in general trying to move into the next stage of our incarnation.

Now, it has been three years since we’ve been here in this Lewis Center building. We love this building that is too small and has its share of idiosyncrasies. It was three years ago today exactly that we held our dedication service. Since then we’ve changed our name – I trust we are over that whole process.

Seventeen, eighteen years ago, a tree of faith was planted. That tree of faith is our congregation. It is still young, and it is still growing. Hopefully our additional maturity hasn’t dampened either our optimism or our flexibility. This remains the place where we sing together in celebration, this remains the place where we mix our metaphors. The story of this place is the story of a how a small group of people were determined to improve their corner of the world, and how they succeeded in doing do.

I told you I was disappointed at first not to have an actual pulpit. Well, we have an actual pulpit now, this gorgeous thing made by Jerry Strine with his own hands. We didn’t inherit this pulpit, and yet it is a congregational family heirloom, it is something that a century for now will speak of the work I think now how much better to build the pulpit than inherit it. I hope the story of the founding of this place encourages us all to honor our roots by working towards a future aligned with our own highest values.

READING Excerpts adapted from “A Tree of Faith” Nancy Trux, June 1986

We at the Dublin Unitarian Universalist Church have planted a tree of faith. It is new, it is young, it is vulnerable. But it is strong. It is flexible, and it is growing daily.

The roots of this tree of faith are our root experiences and individuals and the roots of Unitarian Universalist history, our religious past, as individuals, and as a collectivity. One of us was a thirteen your old girl facing confirmation and afraid to say honestly, no, I don’t believe. Another of us remembers Seder dinners fondly, and the retelling of the story of the flight into Egypt. Now we find all of our experiences honored in a four hundred year old tradition.

The stem of our tree of faith consists of our commitment to tolerance, human dignity, and a meaningful search for the truth.

The buds on our tree forecast the fruit of a true church family.

We will share birth and death together. We will lose friends to death. We will face sad times together. But the buds foretell the fruit of happy times. We will see young couples as they start their families. We will circle around an infant brought to church for the first time. We will continue to welcome new visitors as they become new members and friends. This will be a church in which people value each other and learn from one another. A community in which there is genuine caring.

We have planted a tree of faith. It is growing daily because of your nurturing. It is new. It is strong. It is flexible…

We will succeed because of our faith and trust in each other and in empowering religion.