"Free for All"

You don't have to look very hard to find the great individualists of our tradition. Their reputations, burnished by years of claiming them proudly as our own, have lent character and originality to our faith. We understand our history by their presence in it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who abandoned his career as a Unitarian minister, still managed to influence us with exhortations about self-reliance and individualism. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string," he declared." I will not live out of me, I will not see with others' eyes . . . I would be free."

Once Emerson was finished with ministry, he had little use for churches. He found the Unitarian church of his time to be stuffy and irrelevant. And we love him for it. Emerson's critique of conventional religion spurred explorations that took our faith into new and exciting places. His version of spirituality made a lasting imprint on all of our churches, whether he intended to or not.

Emerson's contemporary, Henry Whitney Bellows, was equally talented in his chosen work. A highly successful minister, he built a prominent New York City congregation and an important humanitarian relief agency during the Civil War. Yet outside of historians, members of his church, and students for the ministry, few Unitarian Universalists remember him.

Church historian Conrad Wright once compared Emerson and Bellows. Clearly he felt that Bellows got a raw deal, with so little recognition of his work. "We have not named churches for Bellows, who believed that churches are important," mused Conrad Wright, "we name them for Emerson, who thought them superfluous."

At least Emerson was a Unitarian. Thomas Jefferson, another one whose name has added status to our movement, may or may not have been. Yes, he did once predict - with stunning inaccuracy, "I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."

He praised the English Unitarian preacher and scientist Joseph Priestley, and occasionally attended his services and lectures. But Jefferson was not a believer in religious institutions. "He thought of religion," wrote Conrad Wright, "as a set of opinions about God," not as a community to join.

Thomas Jefferson's view of religion as a private and individual concern has served our society well. The values of the separation of church and state, tolerance, and religious freedom all stem from the conviction that one's beliefs are private and unassailable. Yet "there is nothing in his understanding of [religion]," Conrad Wright noted, "that suggests that religious fellowship has any value, or that there is anything in human nature that needs religious community." That makes it difficult for us to recognize him as one of our own.

Ever since our earliest beginnings, our loyalties have swung between our passion for individualism and our yearning for community. It's a tension we still feel today. How many of you have come into this fellowship ambivalent about joining, and tentative about the commitment we ask each other to make? It doesn't come naturally to most of us. We do it only because something has told us that we no longer want to go it alone. And we take reassurance from the message we hear: that this is a community that values individuals and champions our dignity and freedom.

At the same time, the need for affiliation is part of human nature. We do not thrive on isolation, whether it is social or spiritual. Community confers benefits. Our lives are longer and healthier with companionship; our dispositions stay supple and our hearts stay open.

So we live with the tension between the staunch individualist spirit and the expectations and rewards of religious fellowship. We try, but it is often difficult to nurture both at the same time. We see how our icons of individualism could manage only a marginal relationship, at best, with our faith community. Yet it goes against our very nature to belong to any group that does not hold high the values they taught us. It helps that our vision of religious fellowship is democratic, pluralistic, and inclusive. We hope we have a place where we appreciate our differences, rather than demand conformity. Yet we are mindful of the challenges involved in honoring those differences and striving for consensus as a group.

"I call that church free, that brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship, that protects and nourishes their integrity and spiritual freedom; that yearns to belong to the church universal," wrote theologian James Luther Adams. His words address the dynamic at work when people like us gather for fellowship. We cannot do it without care and trust, without protecting and nourishing each other's individuality.

To keep such a community strong, however, we must experience ourselves not only as a collection of individuals. We must also have a collectivesense of who we are and why we gather together. Sometimes that means our individuality must give way to a larger identity and a common purpose. Such yielding does not compromise us; on the contrary, it gives us something we cannot find on our own.

Higgins, the "drop with a dream" in our story for the morning, gives us some instruction on what it means for us to gather in community. Out there, on our own, we are dreamers, susceptible to discouragement and even ridicule. It is not easy to be an individualist, even harder to be a visionary. But in here, with a little patience and hope, we find others who will join us. And when they do, we become much more powerful than we ever could have been all alone.

It's a simple lesson. Less simple is the way in which groups like ours band together and find common cause. Historian Conrad Wright observed, "Congregational polity" - the form of democratic self-governance that we use in our church - "allows and encourages people of varied perspectives to come together; but it also requires them to find some essential basis for agreement if they are to stay together. There is no assurance that that will happen," he added.

The players in building consensus alter slightly every time a new member joins the church. Over time, balance shifts and generations change. There is both vulnerability and strength in this dynamic, which is why James Luther Adams called attention to the need for care and trust. We cannot do anything together without them.

In the coming months and years, our congregation will need to make many decisions. We will discuss and determine what steps to take towards developing the property we have recently acquired. A growing interest in governance and in organizing our church to meet the needs of our congregation today, also requires our consideration. Building plans, budgets, and bylaws are not everyone's idea of why they join a church, but how we reach consensus about these matters has everything to do with who we are as a religious community.

Conrad Wright offers us three reminders about how to do this work in the spirit of our tradition. "Avoid making trivial matters a part of the binding consensus," he advises. "This is not as simple as it may sound, since one person's trivia may be another's fundamentals." But if we look for the deeper agreements beneath the disagreements, we find there is much to hold us together. It takes self-discipline, but se should "ask ourselves whether what we are insisting on is really as important as, for the moment, we may think."

The second reminder: "part of our consensus is, paradoxically, what we have agreed to disagree about." We understand that our diversity challenges us "to widen our vision, to reexamine our unexamined prejudices, perhaps even to learn from others." This takes care and trust, the unifying values that make such learning possible.

And the last reminder is this. "The consensus we share," Conrad Wright notes, "is created, sustained, and developed by persons who have chosen to walk together." We have chosen this way of life together. Each of us, has freely made this commitment to community. It is this choice that gives us the power to enter into its life, and the responsibility to help shape its future.

If we use this power wisely and meet our responsibility with care, this fellowship will never be the same. It will flourish and grow strong because each of us made ourselves a part of it. The common ground on which we stand will welcome others, who need the message of care and trust our faith proclaims. "That is where we belong," adds Conrad Wright, "seeking a . . . way for ourselves, our children, and our children's children." This is where we grow, in the delicate but vital work of building community together. So be it.

This sermon is based on the essays of Conrad Wright in "Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches" (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1989).