Category Archive

I’ve received a steady stream of inquiries over the last few month about the availability of Bill Doherty’s 2007 Fahs Lecture at General Assembly, “Home Grown Religion,” so I was happy to find a printed copy of it when I opened up the most recent packet of materials from LREDA (the Liberal Religious Educators Association). It’s a fantastic lecture, and it may well hold the key to the future of faith development in Unitarian Universalism, and perhaps even to the future of our faith itself. Here are some of my favorite parts of “Home Grown Religion.”

Religion is caught more than taught, and it’s caught most fully in the family. Church programming can supplement but not replace the home. Most parents and religious professionals agree would agree, but we know more about running organized programs in church buildings than we know about supporting faith formation in the home.

It’s a fantasy that getting out of our children’s way or teaching them a little about all religious traditions will release them to find their own path. The reality is that we hand our children over to the gravitational pulls of a me-first mainstream consumer culture that does not satisfy their spiritual needs or help them flourish—and that sometimes leads them to turn to a more authoritarian religious community.

My point is that because our children feel strong pulls from the culture of self-absorption and the culture of authority, our ambivalence about exerting our own gravitational pull towards Unitarian Universalism leaves them religiously abandoned. We either raise our children ourselves or others will raise them for us. If we want our children to grow up spiritually alive, free, and engaged with the world, we have to offer them citizenship papers in our Unitarian Universalist tradition.

The central venue for faith development is the home linked to an intentional UU community. The key active ingredient that makes this work is not what we spend most of our time on: Sunday school classes, worship services, and youth activities. Instead, the key active ingredient is the spiritual development of parents and other adults, and their grounding in both a local church community and the Unitarian Universalist tradition.

You can find a PDF version of the entire lecture at the LREDA website, or you can download a copy: Home Grown Religion.

The last of the four Tapestry of Faith strands is probably the least understood. After all, the whole shebang is called “Faith Development,” right? Why does there need to be a specific strand with the same name? Here’s how the Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group at the UUA looks at it:

Rather than referring to a specific portion of the vision statement, the LFD Staff Group says, “Together, all of the vision statements of Tapestry of Faith describe the development of a vital, lifelong liberal faith.

“This strand–faith development–emphasizes each person’s religious journey as a participant in a faith community and faith tradition, and each person’s lifelong process of bringing head, heart, and hands to what is of ultimate meaning and value.” Makes sense? So here are the Goals:

• To participate in an evolving and deepening faith
• To experience Unitarian Universalism as a faith with lifelong value
• To be willing and able to engage with life’s challenges and transitions
• To engage in making meaning of life and finding purpose in life
• To affirm life, seeing all life as a gift
• To explore and articulate one’s own faith
• To feel a sense of belonging in a faith community and part of a tradition.

The Elements are:

• Exploring the religious Big Questions such as, Who or what is God? Why are we here and what is expected of us? What is the meaning of life and death? Why do good and bad things happen? Is the universe a friendly place?
• Integrating faith components:
  • What we know (cognitive)
  • What we trust (affective)
  • How we act (behavioral)
• Applying one’s faith to life issues
• Exploring and articulating one’s evolving beliefs and personal faith
• Understanding and utilizing religious language and concepts
• Reflecting, discerning, thinking critically
• Understanding with [Sofia] Fahs that “Life becomes religious whenever we make it so….”

So, what do I think of all these outcomes? If this is what we’re truly trying to do together as a people of faith–life, learn, and grow in the direction of the LFD Vision Statement and these specific Goals and Outcomes–then I’m proud to be part of the team!

Next, I’ll post on the time line for the release of the individual Tapestry of Faith components.

Here are the outcomes for the Unitarian Universalist Identity thread of the new Tapestry of Faith curriculum series, as presented by the Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group of the UUA at last weekends LREDA Fall Conference in San Antonio, Texas. The Goals and Elements for this strand relate to the second, fifth, and third components of the LFD Vision Statement (I’m not quite sure why they’re out of order, though).

• Affirm that they are part of a Unitarian Universalist religious heritage and community of faith that has value and provides resources for living,
• Recognize the need for community, affirming the importance of families, relationships and connections between and among the generations, and
• Accept that they are responsible for the stewardship and creative transformation of their religious heritage and community of faith.

Here are the Goals;

• To be grounded in UU history and heritage
• To understand what Unitarian Universalism is and stands for
• To confidently articulate what Unitarian Universalism is and stands for
• To identify Unitarian Universalism as one’s religious home
• To share a common UU vision, language, and identity.

The Elements include:

• UU history and heritage
• UU Worship, rituals, symbols, and traditions
• Meaning of covenant
• Principles and Sources: understand, articulate, and live
• Universalist legacy of love, faith, hope
• Unitarian legacy of freedom, reason, and tolerance
• Rites of passage
• UU identity (personal, communal)
• UU stories
• UU language
• UU polity.

In some ways, this may be the most difficult of all the strands. Unitarian Universalists are, on the whole, just not very good at talking about what it means to be a UU. That’s not too surprising given our relatively brief existence as a merged tradition, which is why I’m glad that there’s some awareness that we need to include understanding our separate Unitarian and Univeralist legacies here. After all, we didn’t arrive out of the blue as a fully formed religion in 1961.

Here’s what the UUA’s Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group offered at the LREDA Fall Conference regarding the Goals and Elements of the Spiritual Development strand of Tapestry of Faith. The outcomes for this strand are reflected in the first and the seventh elements of the LFD Vision Statement:

• Know that they are lovable beings of infinite worth, imbued with powers of the soul, and obligated to use their gifts, talents, and potentials in the service of life, and
• Appreciate the value of spiritual practice as a means of deepening faith and integrating beliefs and values with everyday life.

The Goals include:

• To nurture a deepening spiritual life and spiritual centeredness
• To cultivate individual and communal spiritual practices
• To develop an alertness to the wonder and mystery of existence
• To feel a connection to a larger reality, and
• To experience the sacred through worship, ritual, wisdom of faith traditions, and spiritual disciplines.

The Elements are:

• Spiritual awareness and centeredness
• Spiritual practices/disciplines
• Spiritual wisdom of other faith traditions
• God, ultimate, transcendence
• Sense of (being part of) something larger
• Connection, with other people, nature, universe
• Wonder, awe, mystery
• Beauty, truth, love, joy, and trust in the midst of life’s suffering, brokenness, loss
• Willingness and ability to engage with issues of ambiguity, good and evil, sin, forgiveness, redemption, atonement
• Worship, rites, rituals, sacred texts.

I have to say that I love the religious “favor” of these Goals and Elements. As persons of faith (and I believe we are), we all need to be able to use words like sin, forgiveness, redemption, and atonement if we’re are going to make our faith intelligible to those who think we’re some sort of cult or New Age group.

The Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group’s presentation at LREDA Fall Conference included a breakdown of the various outcomes for each of the “strands”: Ethical Development, Spiritual Development, Unitarian Universalist Identity, and Faith Development. While admitting that the strands are, indeed, overlapping (interwoven), there are some specific outcomes in each individual strand. For this post I’d like to share with you the Goals and Elements of the Ethical Development strand:

This particular strand is built on the fourth and third components of the LFD Staff Group’s Vision Statement, “Nurturing children, youth, and adults who…”

• Realize that they are moral agents, capable of making a difference in the lives of other people, challenging structures of social and political oppression, promoting the health and well-being of the planet, acting in the service of diversity, justice and compassion, and
• Accept that they are responsible for the stewardship and creative transformation of their religious heritage and community of faith.

The Goals are

• To live out one’s values
• To want to make the world a better place
• To be passionate seekers of justice and peace
• To be good stewards of the environment, and
• To have a moral basis for deciding right and wrong

The Elements include

• Values, ethics, character development
• Right relationship/right action
• Stewardship and citizenship
• Acceptance/affirmation/celebration of diversity
• AR/AO/MC understanding and action (anti-racism/anti-oppression/multicultural)
• UU heritage of moral agency

I’ll post more on the other outcomes in the next few days–and I’ll put together a rundown of release dates for future Tapestry of Faith curricula.

For the next few posts, I’d like to share with you some of the information the members of LREDA heard at their Fall Conference in San Antonio last weekend. The presenters were from the Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group at the UUA, and they gave us all a pretty good rundown of what to expect from the new Tapestry of Faith curricula series that’s being rolled out. Here’s something from a presentation they did on outcomes:

Through surveys, focus groups, and other feedback, Unitarian Universalists identified four desired outcomes for children, youth, and adults in religious education programs. These outcomes are four strands woven through Tapestry of Faith. Far from mutually exclusive, these outcomes are interdependent and interactive:

• Ethical Development
• Spiritual Development
• Unitarian Universalist Identity
• Faith Development

Most of the outcomes are built around the Lifespan Faith Development Vision Statement for Tapestry of Faith, so I thought I’d repost it here, then add more content from the presentation in follow up posts.

We envision children, youth, and adults who:

• Know that they are lovable beings of infinite worth, imbued with powers of the soul, and obligated to use their gifts, talents, and potentials in the service of life;
• Affirm that they are part of a Unitarian Universalist religious heritage and community of faith that has value and provides resources for living;
• Accept that they are responsible for the stewardship and creative transformation of their religious heritage and community of faith;
• Realize that they are moral agents, capable of making a difference in the lives of other people, challenging structures of social and political oppression, promoting the health and well-being of the planet, acting in the service of diversity, justice and compassion;
• Recognize the need for community, affirming the importance of families, relationships and connections between and among the generations;
• Appreciate the value of spiritual practice as a means of deepening faith and integrating beliefs and values with everyday life;
• Experience hope, joy, mystery, healing, and personal transformation in the midst of life’s challenges.

I’m skipping out of the LREDA Fall Conference a day early, but I’m bringing back lots of good information about the UUA’s new Tapestry of Faith curriculum series. I’m really excited about how adaptable this series is going to be. First off, most the the components will be free and available online (some components, like the new Coming of Age resource, will be published in book form only). You’ll be able to download individual sessions or entire curricula in RTF format, which means you’ll be able to open them and a Microsoft Word doc and make as many tweeks as you’d like. And I’m all in favor of congregations being able to tweek curricula to fit their individual needs. Adaptability is the second great thing about this series. You can use them in a Rotation Sunday School model, a graded classroom model, a Small Group Ministry model, or whatever other model that might work best for your congregation. The very best news, as far as I’m concerned, is that some of the curricula is designed to be used with multiple ages, opening the door for some genuine multigenerational faith development experiences. I’ll post much more on this once I get back home and catch my breath!