"Inflows and Outflows"

I've been preoccupied by two things this week. The first is that you all are coming to our home this afternoon for an open house. We've been cleaning and cooking and weeding and planting all week. Now a lot of people have said to me, "You ought to wait to clean until after everyone goes home." However, in our family we use parties as incentives. We like to clean and cook and weed and plant if we have company coming. Otherwise, we have other things to do, like read! Or go to the beach! Or a movie!

If you don't know already know how to get to our open house, there are some directions in the back on yellow paper. We look forward to seeing you after one o'clock. Pat is there now, doing last minute preparations. If you get there before me, she'll be happy to greet you.

The other thing that's been a distraction this week is the release of the Kenneth Starr report. There is no question in my mind that President Bill Clinton has abused his power and authority. If he were a Unitarian Universalist minister we would not be making light of his sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky. We would be doing as the United States Congress will do over the next weeks, probably months. We would be examining the evidence and deciding what the appropriate response is.

I don't want to spend my entire time with you this morning talking about the Starr Report and Clinton's behavior. I do want to let you know my opinion. I believe that whenever a person is in a position of power and authority, a sexual encounter with someone of lesser power and authority is an abuse of power and authority - not simply a sexual indiscretion.

If it is to be safe for women to staff ships, then it must also be safe for women to staff the White House and serve the Commander in Chief.

For at least the last 15 years this country has been holding a tribunal on what is and is not proper use of power and authority when it comes to sexual encounters. The jury is already in. A president should no more allow a sexual liaison with a White House intern than a minister should allow a sexual liaison with a member of her congregation - especially if that member is a child or youth or if either one or both of them is married.

Those of you who have been around awhile know that some of our most dynamic Unitarian Universalist ministers have been guilty of inappropriate sexual conduct. Some of them have been wanderers. Some of them have been predators. On a case by case basis the authorities - whether it be an individual congregation, or a chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, or the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Association - have acted to decide their response to the minister's behavior.

The same will happen to Bill Clinton. Much as we all wish the entire situation would disappear from TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, conversations at work, home, and the grocery store - and the web - it's not going to. We are challenged not to let our senses dull, not to zone out because the process is too painful, but to stay connected and whole within our own selves and to each other.

This morning we have created a symbol of our gathered community - this pond of water. What a wonderful symbol of healing and wholeness. Water, to cure our thirst. Water, to wash our wounds. Water, to cleanse our sins. Water, a symbol of hospitality. Water, a sign of forgiveness. Water, from many, many different places, yet from one place. As a poet once said, "The same sea is in all of us." This water is both other - a fluid I can dip and pour - and me, my body.

This morning I want to talk about us - Community Unitarian Universalist Church. Us, the congregation for which this pond is a symbol. Just as this water, has been collected from us, and could be shared among us and those beyond us were we to purify and filter it, our religious community is a healthy, living system that we all contribute to and take from.

Donella Meadows is a Systems Analyst who studies huge systems, like global trade systems. She wrote an article for Whole Earth magazine explaining what a system is and what interventions work best if you want to improve a system.

She reminds us that all systems have inflows and outflows. Our pond received inflows of vacation water and will outflow to our ritual of child dedication and infant naming.

The usual inflow for a bathtub is the faucet, and the drain is the outflow. Our church is like a bathtub filling. We have said we want 250 members by the end of 2003, because with that number of people we could carry the expense of a full service church without assistance from the Unitarian Universalist Association. How shall we intervene in this system we call Community Unitarian Universalist Church to help it grow in spiritual depth, in community service, in organizational competence, as well as in number of adults and children.

Meadows presents a list of interventions in increasing order of effectiveness. First she said, is tweaking a system to affect the numbers. Now, we just bought 20 new chairs because one Sunday earlier this year we had 100 people in attendance and only 96 chairs. While it's good to have places for people to sit, it isn't the most effective place to tweak, Meadows says.

Next on her list is the materials system - the bathtub itself or the plumbing attached. For us, it's our space here. We had hoped this fiscal year to expand our space - take over a little bit more of Nova Village for our church school. Meadows says that understanding and working within limitations is better than tweaking the material system.

Third on her list is paying attention to feedback loops. She carefully explains the difference between a negative and a positive feedback loop. If I understand her correctly, and taking chairs as an example, a negative feedback loop would be one where we count how many people are here each Sunday and the next Sunday put out only as many chairs as there were people the Sunday before. In case this Sunday's attendance exceeds last Sunday's, we could have a store of folding chairs. As the regular chairs filled up, the ushers could open and install the folding chairs so everyone would have a seat.

A positive feedback loop would be to figure that good programs and lots of people in attendance create more interest in what we're doing here and, hence, more people in attendance. Having good programs, noticing the response and acting accordingly is a more positive feedback loop than counting chairs.

Her fourth intervention is information flows. She tells the story of a neighborhood where 100 identical houses were built. On fifty of them the electrical meter was installed outside; on another fifty it was installed in the front hallway, where everyone in the family could see it. Seeing the little gizmos inside whirl around fast when the family was using LOTS of electricity and slow when the family was conserving electricity created a new information loop. Simply by having this extra information, families with meters in their hallways used 30% less electricity than the other families.

Applying this principle to a church, it's important that everyone here have information about what’s going on. So we have orientation sessions, like the Path to Membership, which will be offered six times this year - the first one will be two weeks from today. An orientation session is a good one-time dissemination of information. A better way to improve the system, according to Meadows, is to provide new information loops that function continually. Therefore, we will also have twelve Souper Sunday lunches a year, during which we will have informal question and answer sessions for visitors after church. These will be held the third Sunday of each month beginning in October. Joan Dinser has picked this program as her ministry. She may be contacting you to ask you to host one of these Souper Sundays, by providing soup and bread for our guests.

The rules of a system, says Meadows, constitute a fifth and even more powerful way of adjusting the system. Rules change behavior. If you ever doubt that, I could bring my garbage and pour it out on the floor here, and you would know what to put in recycling and what to put in the garbage garbage. You wouldn't have known that ten or twenty years ago because we didn't have rules about recycling then.

When rules change, behaviors change. While we didn't have a rule against having snacks during our fellowship time, until recently there was no predictability about whether there would be snacks or not. Snacks are important because people really like having goodies after church, so we've provided a new ministry - bringing snacks for the grownups. There's a sign-up sheet on the bulletin board in the fellowship area. Treats are a sign of welcome. We probably also need to put out sodas for the folks in their twenties and thirties who prefer sodas to punch, water, coffee, and tea. It's a way of letting them know they're welcome, too.

The sixth way to change a system is to allow for more diversity. Systems survive by changing - call it evolution, call it technical advances, call it social revolution, call it self organization. A diverse system has more creative potential, more resources for change.

Community Church is going to learn to be more welcoming to people who are bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender by working our way through a program called the Welcoming Congregation. If you're interested in being a change agent, you may meet after church with the Welcoming Congregation steering committee to learn more about this exciting program. The principles you learn about how to welcome this "invisible" minority will be helpful in welcoming others who are different from the common variety of Unitarian Universalist - generally white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-aged, well educated, and affluent. By increasing the variety of Unitarian Universalists we strengthen and grow our community.

There are three more ways to intervene. The sixth way is to change the goals of the system because goals grow out of a vision, and a vision keeps all the parts of a system moving in the same direction. It has been over eighteen months since Community Church has reviewed it goals, and one thing this brand new toddler community has yet to do is write a mission statement. On September 26th the board will retreat to decide its goals for the coming year. Perhaps generating a process for creating a mission statement and congregational goals for the next few years will be one of the Board's goals.

The next to last, and therefore the next to most important method of intervening in our system is to identify with a healthy paradigm. For us that means identifying with an image of ourselves as a healthy church. Meadows has words for the wise here, which she borrows from Thomas Kuhn. To promote the paradigm of a healthy church we should do five things:

1. Point to anomalies and failures of old paradigms. For instance, an old paradigm identifies a church as a family. While this is a comforting paradigm for some people, for others it's not comfortable. They may be left wondering how one gets into the family. Or they may not yet have put to rest feelings of discomfort about the family they grew up in and anxious about becoming part of a family they don't even know. Finally, yet another problem with the family paradigm is that it suggests a small sized congregation - after all, how big are families these days! In our movement, during the sixties we started lots of new congregations that we called fellowships. Today, almost forty years later, most of these fellowships have had limited growth because they struggle with problems related to smallness - not enough people to create the programs a healthy church demands; too few children for a thriving church school; and budgets too tight to permit the staffing a growing church needs.

2. Kuhn's second recommendation is to talk loudly and with assurance from the new paradigm. A natural paradigm for Community Church is - you guessed it, a community - of many families, diverse families, some of them families of one, some of them families of five, some of them multi-generational families. And like a community, we have different activities going on - weekly yoga classes, monthly full circle gatherings, a camping trip in November.

3. Choose people who embody and who can speak clearly about the new paradigm for roles with high visibility and power. This is Kuhn's third direction. We have GREAT leadership here at Community Unitarian Universalist Church. One reason why we are doing so well is that our trustees and committee chairs are focused on creating a healthy church. Gretchen Bremer-Hosken is such a powerful speaker for the new paradigm that she is now co-chair of the district Extension Committee, working with new congregations all over the state of Florida. Our movement is growing so fast there are two new congregations that have recently started working with New Congregation Ministers and two more that are organizing.

4. Kuhn's fourth suggestion is one of the most difficult:

Resist the temptation to waste time with reactionaries. Churches are concerned about people - all people - and sometimes people who are rigid, resistant and regressive get the most attention. Yet, directing energy toward trying to change their diehard attitudes diverts energy, dragging the community into the past when it wants to soar into the future. There will always be nay-sayers.

5. Kuhn's final recommendation is to work with change agents like Tom Tyre and open-minded middle ground people, like those of you who will participate in the Welcoming Congregation program. Or Donna and Dan Ferry, who are planning our November camping trip and those of you who will join them. Or all of our Church School teachers who this year are pioneering a multi-cultural religious education program under Terry Duncan's direction. My own impression is that we have more than our quotient of change agents and less than our share of reactionaries - blessed be!

Meadows suggests one more intervention - the most powerful of them all. Remember that no paradigm is "true". Our world view is limited and doesn't even come close to imagining the immense and amazing universe that is available to us. That's often why we cling to paradigms. Let me use her words:

People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the experience that there is no certainty in any world view. But everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it a basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you
can choose one that will help achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe (or put in the name of your favorite deity here) and do his, her, its will, which is a lot better informed than your will. It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

In our church that would mean walking through the fear of speaking directly to someone when you have a concern, rather than complaining covertly. In our church that would mean walking through the discomfort of societal-induced homophobia when you notice a same sex couple hold hands, instead of averting your eyes and pretending it isn't happening. In our church that would mean telling co-workers about your terrific religious community, rather than keeping your liberal leaning secret to avoid potential condemnation.

Donella Meadows ends her Whole Earth article by saying, there are no cheap tickets to system change.

You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

Let us close this time of exploring today's message with a prayer, set to music, hymn number one, "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door."

Invocation

Water.

Lakes and rivers.

Oceans and streams.

Springs, pools and gullies.

Arroyos, creeks, watersheds.

Pacific. Atlantic. Mediterranean.

Indian. Caribbean. China Sea.

(Lying. Dreaming on shallow shores.)

Arctic. Antarctic. Baltic.

Mississippi. Amazon. Columbia. Nile.

Thames. Sacramento. Snake. (Undulant woman river.)

Seine. Rio Grande. Willamette. McKenzie. Ohio.

Hudson. Po. Rhine. Rhone.

St. John's. Kissimmee. Halifax. Suwannee.

Rain. After a lifetime of drought.

That finally cleanses the air.

The soot from our eyes.

The dingy windows of our home.

The rooftops and branches. The wings of birds.

The new light on a slant. Pouring. Making everything new.

Prayer - written by Joan Metzner, modified

Here we are, God - a planet at prayer. Attune our spirits that we may hear your harmonies and bow before your creative power that we may face our violent discords and join with your Energy to make heard in every heart your hymn of peace.

Here we are, God - a militarized planet. Transform our fears that we may transform our war fields into wheat fields, arms into handshakes, missiles into messengers of peace.

Here we are, God - a polluted planet. Purify our vision that we may perceive ways to purify our beloved lands, cleanse our precious water, de-smog our life-giving air.

Here we are, God - an exploited planet. Heal our heart, that we may respect our resources, hold priceless our people, and provide for our starving children an abundance of daily bread.

Here we are, God - hear our silent prayers for love, for joy, for forgiveness.

Blessed be. So be it. Yes.