The current buzz at Coffee Hour (started by yours truly) starts with the assumption that UUism is stuck in Apple’s pre-iPod business strategy: cater to an elite niche market. It asks, “What should UUism’s iPod strategy be?”
Just to underline the importance of this discussion: I happened to have Easter lunch today with a neuropsychologist. She mentioned that 1% of the US population has some form of psychosis. That means there are ten times more psychotics than UUs.
In the Coffee Hour discussion thread, Jason Pitzl-Waters asks what our common discipline is: “What are we all working for/toward? In ten words or less. If we can’t know this we will never be able to spread our “gospel” to anyone outside of our small over-educated clique.” All too true.
Peacebang suggests our discipline might be something like “I will, with all my heart and all my mind and all my soul, truly strive to see the common soul in all living beings…” Send this to the liturgist for poeticizing; I think it’s a great start. I particularly like the nod to Emerson. I’m not a big fan of the whole “Oversoul” idea, but here I think it works rather well.
These questions underline a more fundamental issue: UUism doesn’t do theology. I mean this to be different than saying we don’t have a theology. (Edward Frost of UUCA recently preached on this problem, and a possible solution, and I will post about it when the sermon text goes up.) I’m not saying we need a creed or doctrines. I’m saying we need to know how to do practical, on-the-ground theology. And then do it. (Sounds like Smijer might agree.) Or as Pitzel-Waters says elsewhere, “Q. How do you drive a UU out of town? A. Burn a question mark on their lawn. …the previous joke must become irrelevant.”
But top-down, theology-for-theology’s-sake won’t work (no matter how much I enjoy that sort of thing). The discipline of “practical theology” suggests we build our theology by reflecting on our practices. But then that gets back to the problem of not having a discipline. So where do we go from there?
SA asks where we start this thing—locally or nationally? Indeed. To abuse a metaphor, why don’t we just burn the candle at both ends? Those of us with influence at the national association can start working there. Those of us with influence in local congregations can start working there. A successful movement works on several fronts at once.
And finally, I want to challenge UU ministers to do something that likely rubs them the wrong way. Quite simply, cut your sermon times in half. Why? One, it addresses the “college lecture” problem that Smijer brings up. Two, you’ll have ten or fifteen empty minutes to fill every Sunday.
What will you do with that time? Who knows? That empty time is a place for creative experimentation. We won’t know what works until we’ve already tried it. And without the time (and pressure) to do that, odds are we won’t get around to it. Or we’ll just let it just be another interesting mental exercise. And until we outnumber diagnoses of psychosis (or whoever else is at 1% of the population), we need to do better than that.
Rebecca Parker talked about our theology existing as “implicit theology” at a LREDA conference a few years back.
UU congregations have a shared theology and a shared culture that is distictive enough that we hear jokes like “you may be a UU if …” or “what do you get if you cross a UU with … ” and so on.
The hard thing to do here is to take this implicit theology that we have and articulate it so we then have a shared explicit theology.
My practical theology prof in seminary had us to a series of projects with our internship churches to uncover precisely their implicit theology. It involved looking at their written materials (service bulletins, newsletters, annual reports), what they hung on the wall, favorite hymns, and the stories they told.
But she suggested a second step then: Is this a theology worth having? Or better, it this implicit theology good news or bad news? The task of religious education, as she saw it, was to then lead them into an awareness of how their implicit theology’s bad news could become good news.