Deeper Connections
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
February 8, 2009
Thankdeka, one of our leading Unitarian Universalist theologians, and one of my teachers during a week at Meadville/Lombard, our seminary in Chicago during the time I was preparing for ministry, recalls this incident in one of our churches:
A particularly vivid image comes to mind. Several years ago I spent an evening discussing Small Group Ministry with members of a New England church who were interested in starting a covenant group program. At the end of my formal remarks, I asked the members of the audience if they might be willing to simply get together in small groups over a meal and talk about their unmet needs in their church.
One of the most respected elder statesmen of the church stood up and slowly walked to the front of the assembly, faced his fellow congregants and said he was interested in joining a covenant group. He had wanted something like this for years, he said, because he was lonely. "I do not have any friends," he finally confessed. Waves of shock rolled through the gathering. How could he be lonely? He was a revered and beloved member of the congregation, a pillar of the church. Many people expressed disbelief.
When the group quieted down, the man spoke again, saying, "Every man in this room who is my age knows what I am talking about. Our social upbringing has taught us not to talk about our feelings. We are not supposed to be emotionally vulnerable or close to anyone except our wives."
As I listened to him, something changed. I could hear his heart beating. I could hear my heart beating. I could hear other hearts beating in the room.
At that moment, we were all one heart and thus all of one breath. One deep, long, loving breath infused each heart with new life. (Let's not forget that the Hebrew word for spirit refers to a movement of air, wind, the breath of life itself.)
And at that moment, I learned why covenant groups are transforming our Unitarian Universalist movement today. They are ministries for the heart.[1]
“Ministries for the heart!” What a curious way of putting this simple matter of getting together in a group and sharing ourselves in our churches. I mentioned in my newsletter article this month that we’re launching a small group ministries program here at Second Parish starting a week from Wednesday – we’re calling it “Connections at Second Parish” – and I think the idea deserves a more extended introduction so that you can get some sense of what it is we’re hoping to do here. It’s difficult to explain exactly what it is that small group ministry is about, in part because you have to experience it to understand it. Most basically, though, it’s about finding a place to share ourselves in a deep way; making friends to whom we can talk about anything, good or bad; creating a time when we can engage in deep listening and speaking from the heart. Ministries to the heart. So, you can regard this, if you wish, as an extended infomercial for a different way of meeting each other which I consider very important for this congregation.
For starters, let me get the terminology straight. “Small group ministry” is the generic name for what we’re talking about: small groups of 6-12 people who gather on a regular schedule – at least monthly, more commonly every other week – to share their lives with each other, to speak about mutual concerns, and to provide service of some sort to others beyond their circle. Now, we can easily get hung up on the word “ministry;” after all, that’s what ministers like me are paid to do, isn’t it? Actually, the professionalization of the clergy is one of the ways we become alienated from helping one another. An earlier standard is suggested in the First Epistle of Peter:
[NKJ 1 Peter 4:10] As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.
If we think of “minister” as a verb, we get a little closer: to help somebody or to give something. Small Group Ministry is a group in which members minister to one another – help each other, support each other, listen to and speak to one another.
Another term for what we’re proposing is Covenant Groups. One of the important elements of these groups is that at the beginning we adopt a covenant or a participant agreement to govern how we will relate to one another in the group, just as we have a church covenant which we recite together each week. Here’s an example from groups that Deedee & I helped lead in our home congregation of Ridgewood, NJ:
We value our time together as a group and therefore:
· Commit to attend the meetings whenever possible;
· Start and stop meetings on time.
We value our privacy and sense of safety within the group and therefore:
· Keep personal sharing strictly confidential;
· Share ideas outside the group only without attribution;
· Are mindful that this is not group therapy or a debate club.
We value each other's contributions to our discussions and therefore:
· Encourage and allow all to contribute equally;
· Listen to all contributions without interruption;
· Try to use only "I" statements;
· Treat each other with respect, caring, and kindness;
· Avoid offering unasked for advice;
· Keep discussion on topic.
We value face-to-face decision making and therefore:
· Discuss all matters of group process only at the meetings.
“Covenant” is a term long-honored in our New England Tradition and used widely in our churches, but one we rarely use outside of church. It means an agreement to which we commit ourselves, not by contract, but by intention. It’s an important term but, like “ministry,” it too readily calls to mind more specialized religious connotations. So here at Second Parish, we’ve agreed to use the word “Connections” to describe these groups, because connecting us to one another is one of the most important things these groups can enable us to do. As it happens, that’s the same term we used at the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood and Arlington Street Church when Deedee & I helped to lead small groups while we were members of those congregations.
So why is Connections at Second Parish important for this congregation, for the church? Two reasons come to mind at once: helping to grow the congregation and helping to process conflict when it arises.
It’s no secret that smaller and mid-sized churches are struggling in the United States, and here at Second Parish we’ve been anxious to grow for some years now. Many of the churches which are thriving are theologically conservative, so some conclude that only the threat of hellfire, for example, can keep people coming back to church. I think there are other more important reasons, though, one of which is the degree to which members experience their church as having a central role in their lives. “Oh, no,” I hear some of you saying to yourselves. “More meetings, more work; don’t we do enough around here?” When Calvin Dame, then minister of our congregation in Augusta, ME, first learned about small group ministries, he reacted the same way:
I was skeptical of the idea that people would commit to more meetings in their lives [he wrote]. It seemed to me that getting people out to committee meetings and church functions was already like pulling teeth, so I could not imagine that anyone would make an open ended commitment to come out twice a month for anything…. I was wrong because I seriously underestimated the hunger in our hearts for real community and for spiritual challenge and growth.[2]
People come to church for two things: ultimacy and intimacy. We come together on Sunday mornings to seek meaning in our lives and to consider ultimacy – what really matters in our lives, what ideals we should strive toward, and how we may direct our inner energies. On the other side, our congregation here at Second Parish has long prided itself on providing intimacy by being a very friendly congregation – a theme you’ll find if you talk to people who’ve joined over many years. The problem for a small congregation like ours, where we think of ourselves as family, is that it can be hard to break into such an intimate circle. So, friendly as we may be, it’s hard for newcomers to feel they can join us on an equal footing. Conventional church-growth wisdom holds that if a visitor doesn’t make six friends in six months they will drift away from the congregation. I was particularly struck by the effectiveness of one of our Connections groups in Ridgewood in welcoming new members. Five or six newcomers had signed up to take a class we offered on “Articulating your Unitarian Universalist Faith” and most of them were able to join one of the new Connections groups we were starting after that class ended. Now they found that they had someone to sit with in the Sunday service, someone to volunteer to host coffee hour with, someone they were coming to see as a friend. All of them ended up staying with the congregation long term in part because of that experience.
Robert Hill explains it this way in his book Small Group Ministry:
Most of our congregations get plenty of visitors. Those that keep records usually find that the number of people who visit each year equals or exceeds their total membership number. Our problem is that up until now, we have been unable to keep our visitors coming back long enough to discover in Unitarian Universalism a religious home. A well-placed leader of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints who has studied Unitarian Universalism once commented, "Relative to total membership, you Unitarian Universalists draw in a higher proportion of visitors each year than any other religious body. If you ever solve your retention problem, you'll be dangerous."
Covenant groups help us to more effectively welcome individuals who have not yet discovered that we offer the church homes they need. Why do people seek out churches? Many come to our congregations in times of personal crisis, wanting community and a bit of help with getting through the day. They need friends with whom they may recharge their souls. Other visitors come seeking connection to larger meaning and deeper feeling, to a sense of greater significance. They need their lives to matter on this earth. Actually, all of us, members and visitors alike, have these needs. Sometimes we may be focused more on the personal (give us our daily bread) and sometimes more on the global (forgive us our trespasses, or better yet, help us to trespass less against others and against nature), but we bring both kinds of needs to our churches. We are right to look to our Unitarian Universalist churches to help us save the world and get through the day. Small Group Ministry is a way of saying to visitors, "We have anticipated your coming, and we have provided ways for you to meet others in a relaxed setting that encourages conversation." Small Group Ministry gives us a way to make our visitors feel more welcomed and to serve better the thousands of religiously liberal people who need us.[3]
Different congregations have used different ways of harnessing small groups for growth. One technique is to leave an empty chair at all meetings to symbolize the newcomer who is always welcomed to come into the circle. Another is to create a group of six and invite others to join over time until the group gets to a size of twelve, and then to split in half and so on. This is a model which has led to dynamic growth in some of the more conservative churches in the country like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California. Regardless of the technique, I am convinced that Connections can be an important tool for us to welcome newcomers and integrate them into our very friendly but sometimes slightly closed circle. I believe that the extraordinary growth the Brewster congregation experienced several decades ago resulted in large part from their use of small group ministry, and the same results followed when the Augusta congregation adopted the pattern.
Another important function of small groups in congregations is that it helps us to deal with conflict within the congregation. Now, I know that Second Parish has no experience of serious conflict within the congregation in our history. Well, we have of course had occasional differences about the building, the bell tower, the minister, and so on. Deep connections made as a result of small group ministry help us to find better ways of communicating across rifts that arise over church conflicts. Hill tells the story of a small lay-led fellowship with just a single small group. A conflict arose over a perceived instance of intolerance toward Unitarian Universalist Christians in the fellowship brought on by a member believed to be under the influence of alcohol when the remarks were made. The brewing controversy had the makings of a church fight which could smolder for years but was in fact resolved in two weeks. People “talked out their differences and came to new understandings of each other.” As one of the participants reported:
Many of the covenant group members were involved, directly or indirectly, with this controversy. We used the openness, mutual respect and support we’d found within the group to embolden us to model a different way of behaving for the whole church. I do credit the covenant group model and our use of it with providing the support, the courage, and the way to move our church through what could have been a very divisive time.[4]
So there appears to be value for the congregation, but what’s in it for me, you may be asking? Church on Sunday is an important part of our lives together, but it’s a bit of a one-way street. I’m responsible for the service, along with Mark and Rev. Kim Preveza, but to a large extent you participate by listening and joining in the hymns, the covenant and the responsive reading. Our Connections Groups are very different in structure. There will be facilitators to make sure we stick to our covenants and to provide some of the materials, but the real heart of the experience is about sharing ourselves with each other. Each person has an opportunity to check in at each meeting and to report on the state of their lives; a question to open this brief sharing might be “What do you need to leave behind for a couple of hours to be fully present here?” The real heart and soul of each meeting is a time of open-hearted listening and speaking from the heart. There is no cross-talk, no debating, no arguing, no preparing to respond back to what was said – just listening to what is being said by one person, holding open a space of welcoming listening, and then speaking in turn from your own heart. In this way we create a worshipful time – in the Old English sense of “to shape worth.” What we have found is that holding open this space enables us to meet each other on a whole new level we can never reach at coffee hour or in other settings because we can create a kind of safety in sharing that even our marriages may not provide. We have had members of these groups remark that they could never have shared their real thoughts and feelings with their spouses because they would have been much more defensive about the response they would evoke. The covenant of the group guards against argument, debate, confrontation, or unsolicited advice. There is no obligation to share anything you don’t wish to share; you determine what you need to speak about in response to the topic at hand, and most people find that the more they share the more intimacy in the group is able to grow and the more everyone’s spiritual journey is nurtured. These are not T-groups or therapy groups or support groups, they are just places to bring our whole selves, body and spirit, and to share our journeys with one another. We usually start by telling a little about our lives up to now in our first session, then talk in the next session more specifically about our spiritual odyssey, then about belonging, about fear, about living and dying, about sacred places, and so on.
Deedee and I have led and participated in these small groups in many different contexts over the past five years, and everywhere we’ve gone we’ve found friends and gotten to know them deeply in the context of this kind of structured small group ministry. We look forward to the opportunity to do the same here at Second Parish. We’ve created a brochure which provides more background and details and a signup sheet with a number of options – something we’re calling “Taste of Connections” – an intensive group which will meet weekly for four weeks starting Wednesday, Feb. 18th – and then hopefully some new groups meeting every other week starting at the beginning of April. Please take a copy with you as you go; I will also be sending out a copy electronically if I have your email address.
I thought Valentine’s Day might be a good time to talk about this program because the notion of making real friends is what Valentine’s Day always brought up for me in elementary school. The romantic overlay all came later; I wanted buddies I could share fun with, I could hang out with; that’s what Connections is about.
At the end of one of the small groups I led in Ridgewood, one of the elders of the congregation, a man in his early eighties, turned to us with tears in his eyes and said “I’ve been a member of this congregation for fifty years and I’ve never gotten to know anyone as well as I’ve gotten to know all of you.” That’s the kind of power Connections can have, and I’m delighted we’re able to offer it here at Second Parish.
Amen.