Church Meetings Are Brilliant!

In the next couple of months, the Coming of Age-ers will be attending a committee meeting as part of their learning about how our church works.  Why are we doing this? You say, "Isn't it bad enough that adults have to go to committee meetings?"

We Unitarian Universalists are remarkable because we are REALLY good at having meetings.  We'll have meetings for worship, meetings for programs, meetings for money and meetings to schedule the next meetings! Well, hold on there...

Yes, Channing has a lot of meetings, but that's where the action is!  Our church is based on congregational polity, which means that we get to decide what our church will be like- no one else- not the UUA, not a bishop or a sacred text. Channing Church members decide how we worship, what social justice work we engage in or what we will teach our children. That's why each UU congregation is a little different from another. If you have ever gone to other UU churches, you likely noticed that each has a slightly (or dramaticly) different focus, energy or mission.  That's what we Unitarian Universalists are all about!

The UU historian Conrad Wright puts it this way:

"Congregational polity is so much taken for granted by Unitarian Universalists that they tend to overlook its importance, particularly its importance as one of the key elements in the consensus that holds the denomination together. When Unitarian Universalists identify the set of values they hold in common, they resort to high-level abstractions like freedom, reason, and tolerance. Yet the meaning of freedom and tolerance is revealed more clearly by the way people behave than by the generalizations they utter. So it is a fact of no small consequence that Unitarian Universalists stand in a tradition of congregational polity that is almost four centuries old; that they are much more conservative with respect to the practice of that polity than they are with respect to doctrine; that they have been congregationalist in polity much longer than they have been liberal in theology; that, indeed, their congregationalism has proved to be more durable and adaptable to changing times than any of the doctrinal formulations— whether of God, or human nature, or human destiny—that dominate accounts of the history of liberal religion."

Each youth needs to attend a meeting to see our cool process in action.  How else can they understand how we make decisions and what we value as a congregation?  Meetings are where we enact our mission and our vision.  SO if you go to a meeting in the next couple of months and see a youth visiting, smile and get energized- show how we are working for the future of Channing Church!