March 2009

REsources for Living

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE  LARGER FELLOWSHIP

OK, here’s your quiz for the day. Define the word “polity.” Stumped? Polity is the way that a group chooses to organize or govern itself. OK, I’m guessing the two quiz questions for me are “What does this have to do with being a Unitarian Universalist?” and “Who cares?”

In fact, I imagine that if you asked most grown-ups, they might have much the same reaction, from not knowing what polity is to not really caring. But think about it. Polity is about how we are connected. Do you ever feel like you’re a UU by yourself? That nobody outside your family shares or even understands your religion? Do you ever feel like it would be nice to be part of a really big group of people who get the idea that we can have a religion that doesn’t tell us what to believe, but encourages us to explore and grow and be the best people we can be? Well, you are.

There are more than 200,000 people who are members of Unitarian Universalist churches. Now, that’s not nearly as many as there are Catholics or Baptists or Sunni Muslims, but it’s still a pretty big number. And the way that we try to connect those 200-and-something thousand people is our polity. UUs have what is called “congregational polity.” That means that each UU congregation gets to decide things for themselves. Unlike, say, the Catholics or the Methodists, where someone higher up in the organization tells a church who their minister will be, UU churches choose their own ministers. Each UU congregation owns its own property, decides for itself whether and how to take a stand on issues like opposing war, and generally decides matters for themselves. Within a particular congregation, a committee usually called the board of trustees or board of directors makes some decisions. But that committee is chosen by a vote of the congregation. And for big, important questions, like bringing in a new minister, every member of the congregation gets a vote.

But our congregations aren’t just floating out there all alone in the world. Each church gets to make decisions for itself, but we also have ways of being connected. UU congregations band together as members of the Unitarian Universalist Association, or UUA, for short. The UUA doesn’t tell the congregations how they have to do things, but they do help churches with things that are hard for each church to do by themselves. For instance, the UUA produces curricula with lesson plans for people to use in their Sunday school programs and they help ministers match up with congregations and they help congregations to work for fairness and justice and a whole lot of other stuff. In the same way that people pay taxes so that governments can provide things like police and fire protection and roads and bridges and big things that no one person could pay for all by themselves, individual congregations give money to the UUA so that we can have big stuff that no one church can pay for by itself. The CLF, even though we have members in different places all over the world, is a member congregation of the UUA. We even have an office right in the UUA’s building at 25 Beacon Street in Boston. (Yes, you’re more than welcome to come visit us there.)

Like a church, the UUA has a board of trustees that makes a lot of decisions about how to run the organization. And, like a church, there are some big decisions that representatives of the churches get to make. Each June we have a big gathering/meeting/celebration/conference called General Assembly. Each church gets to send a certain number of delegates, who have a vote in the decision making process. Lots more people come to attend worship services and workshops and to see friends who live far away, but the heart of General Assembly is the plenary sessions where delegates discuss and debate and decide issues ranging from changes to the by-laws (rules) of our organization to how we should take a stand on important social issues, like how to make peace.

There’s a lot more you could know about our polity as Unitarian Universalists, like how the United States is divided into regions, called Districts,  which each have programs and people to help out UU congregations in their area. But the most important part is this: as Unitarian Universalists we are independent, with each church getting to make decisions for itself. But we are also interdependent: connected together, caring about many of the same things and working together for a more fair, peaceful and healthy world. We decide for ourselves, but we aren’t all by ourselves. Sort of like our UU principles, which start with the importance of every individual person, and end with “the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.” Independence and connection. That’s the UU way. That’s our polity.