"To Awaken, To Excite, To Cherish"

Something exciting is happening in religious education at our church. A new spirit, awake to possibilities and open to change, is lifting hopes and expectations. Here we are, celebrating the arrival of a talented, professional, full-time Director of Religious Education. We are weeks away from our first meeting with the Santa Monica Planning Commission to present our building design, which features new space for learners of all ages. And our religious education program is alive with new ideas and confidence in the future.

The spirit is more than a wave of enthusiasm. It is emerging out of the best thinking of leaders and educators in our liberal religious community. It is starting off the twenty-first century with energy and vision. And it is grounded in two hundred years of reflection on what it means to be Unitarian Universalist.

In 1819, William Ellery Channing gave definition to a growing movement of religious liberals, by inspiring them to embrace a new identity as Unitarians. Equally momentous was Channing's radical and affirming view of human development. He placed his trust in the human capacity to grow and learn, in the dignity and equality inherent in every person. For Channing, religious education involved opening the mind, not handing over doctrine. "The great end," he wrote, "is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish spiritual life." Each generation has had its turn to interpret what that means.

A hundred years after Channing, another religious leader, Sophia Lyon Fahs, brought humanist pedagogy into the Sunday school. She too was at the cutting edge of religious education. Her aim, she wrote, was to find and call "attention to the essential interdependence of mind and heart, or reverence and inquiry." As religious liberals in her day debated the value of religious tradition in the light of scientific understanding, Fahs merged reason and faith in a body of work that included stories, curricula, and scholarly articles, as well as the minds and hearts of Unitarian Universalist adults, baby boomers mainly, who were schooled in her classrooms. We're the ones who learned that George Washington Carver and Isaac Newton were just as important as Moses and Jesus. I still think they are.

Transformational learning has looked different at different times, but at the core are the abiding values that call us and keep us in community. These values, such as our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of all persons, keep us grounded in our tradition. But they also encourage us to seek new expressions of who we are and how we hope to make a difference.

Today we see that we are entering another new era, one that promises once again to awaken and excite us and to cherish our spiritual life together. "The twenty-first century," writes Tom Owen-Towle, "will demand that Unitarian Universalists yoke together in the cooperative quest for abundant meaning, but our religious joining must extend beyond horizons of comfort and familiarity . . . ." We must enlarge our sense of identification to include the larger community, what Fahs called the "universal living unity" and we call the interdependent web.

Such an adventure is brave but it is also harrowing, not easily undertaken by people going it alone. Tom Owen-Towle makes a compelling case for religion as a communal activity, something different from a personal spiritual quest. Religion draws us into relationship with others, not only our neighbors, but the entire ecosystem and the mystery of life itself.

The new spirit in religious education applies community-based values and time-honored principles to create today's Sunday school. It urges innovation in the form of experiential learning. It encourages participation in intergenerational activities and worship. It claims - as minister and religious educator Greg Stewart claims - that the "educational ministry of the church" is the "launching pad from which vision is catapulted into reality." It is what we are learning to do here.

What the new spirit of religious education brings into Unitarian Universalism today is its commitment to meaningful change - personal, social, and institutional transformation - through the work of our faith. Ask Catherine, our Director of Religious Education, what she believes and she will tell you, as she told me when I first met her, that Unitarian Universalism can change the world. This will happen, as Greg Stewart writes, when "we put lived experience before the dissemination of information," when we bring the world to our faith and even - says Greg - bring our faith to the world.

How this excitement will play itself out here in Santa Monica, I cannot say. But what I do know is that this vision has awakened people to a new sense of what religious education can be and do. And that is very good to see.

Today we celebrate the possibilities before us: the beginning of a partnership with our own religious educator; the challenge and excitement of new ideas; the power of community to bring about positive change; and the enduring strength of our tradition. Religious education keeps possibility alive. It nurtures the capacity in each and every child, youth and adult to grow and learn throughout life, to undergo positive, healing transformations that transform and heal the world. It is the place where vision becomes reality, where open minds innovate and experiment, and where change is exciting and fun.

The new spirit of religious education today awakens and excites us. If we give it care and attention, it will show us how to cherish our spiritual lives and the community we share with one another. So we welcome this new spirit, and our new religious educator, with hope and appreciation for the possibilities they bring.

References for this sermon include "Essex Conversations:Visions for Lifespan Religious Education," edited by the Essex Conversations Coordinating Committee (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2001); "Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds," by Sophia Lyon Fahs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), and "Self-Culture," by William Ellery Channing (1838).