Upcoming Sunday Worship Services
Youth and Young Adult Sunday
Welcome to Mind the Gap: Youth and Young Adult Sunday. Today might seem a little different in that I will be talking about an issue that relates to our denomination.
From Sunday to Sunday we go about our worship and the life of the church without too much awareness that we are part of a larger denomination. For those of you who are new to us - a short lesson: the Unitarian Universalist Association consists of over 1000 congregations in the United States and Canada and overseas that are democratic in polity and govern themselves. We unite in the Association to provide services that individual congregations cannot provide for ourselves. Each congregation is associated with one of the UUA's 23 Districts. Ours is the Ballou Channing District covering Southern Mass and RI. The UUA national headquarters are located at 25 Beacon Street in Boston.
What our denominational leaders are currently telling us is that they are concerned that our youth and young adults are woefully underserved. Our worship services, even in college areas, aren't designed to attract younger adults. They want us to know that few college campuses have an established relationship with any UU clergy, let alone a Unitarian Universalist chaplain. Because our youth are underserved, college age students and their working same-age peers are pretty much expected to go on a religious hiatus for awhile. We tend to hope they will return when they are settling down and having a family. That is a shame. This is why they have invited all our churches across the country to hold a special Sunday. So we can make you aware of this gap in our ministry and to ask for your financial support to begin to correct the situation.
Many of our UU youth express great appreciation for the religious training they have received here. Just a week ago Dan Powers, a Junior at Norfolk Aggie, attended our Parish Committee meeting in order to request to use this church for a Norfolk Aggie function - you'll probably hear about this from him. That night Dan spoke enthusiastically about this church. So, given our topic today, I asked if he'd be willing to share his feelings with you here this morning and he said, "Absolutely", without even a pause.
Dan Powers……….
Thank you Dan. Dan is a great ambassador for this church and for Unitarian Universalism. Now let me give you a frightening statistic. Some surveys have indicated that up to 90% of Unitarian Universalist youth leave our faith after high school. I can assure you, it is not because we have served our young people poorly up to that time. It's because of THE GAP.
Many young people that have come up through this church are very much like Dan, grateful to have been raised here, feeling they have learned a lot, and been given a strong, liberal value system that makes sense to them. They feel they have been nurtured well by the adult community - that is you - and, as individuals, they have been taken seriously and heard. In fact, we have done very well up through high school. But there is very simply a gap - this is where our resources for our young people tend to end.
I have had a number of our college students come back and tell me, with surprise, what a high percentage of their new college friends have turned out to be UU. Those of you who have parented college age or older children may remember hearing this from your child. Yet have any of them reported finding a student fellowship to belong to, or a UU community? I haven't heard of one yet; and that is because so few exist at this moment in time. Larry and I have given subscriptions to UU World and Church of the Larger Fellowship to our daughter Annie and a number of our graduates when they went on to college. These publications weren't designed for college students yet I thought there was a chance that receiving these might help them keep their UU identity. But a magazine is so little. It isn't enough.
Psychologist Terri Apter says "One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve identity - not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals."
How valuable a Unitarian Universalist campus community would be for this age group! It would offer a religious anchor, and help them as they develop their identity by providing religious community - a safe space - a place of acceptance, tolerance, trust and forgiveness and love. This age span is such a key developmental time in every person's life.
I went to undergraduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In one of my first weekends on campus, at 10 at night I witnessed the suicide of a graduate student who jumped from the 22nd floor of a dorm. He landed not far from where I was standing. For days after that I could not get the noise or the visuals of that experience out of my mind. Although I hadn't been raised in a church going family, under this stress I sought out religious comfort. This was somewhat embarrassing for me. Alone, on Sunday morning I sought out the only church that I knew of on campus; the Newman Center. Of course the priest at that mass didn't know that I was there and couldn't have known my need. The service was not able to touch me and I left before it was over.
Our children all hit some bumps in the road. Some, we as parents won't even hear about. The availability of a Unitarian Universalist community would be invaluable at those times.
The Reverend Bill Sinkford tells a story of his undergraduate days at Harvard. He had become a Unitarian Universalist at age 14. While at college he was President of Liberal Religious Youth, a continent-wide Unitarian Association for our young people that existed in the 60's. As president, Bill spent a lot of time with the Reverend Peter Baldwin, LRY's Executive Director. He remembers one day as being particularly significant. He says he felt awkward and out of place as a poor, black student at Harvard which, at that time, was very white and very affluent. One day, when Bill was feeling particularly oppressed and sorry for himself he poured all this out to Peter. As Bill tells the story, he went on and on……he was a black man in a white universe, his scholarship wasn't adequate, others enjoyed privileges all around him that weren't open to him. At first Peter was sympathetic. How terrible it was. How hard it must be. Then, as he went on, waxing ever more poetic about the injustices he was suffering, Peter became silent. When he grew silent Bill grew silent. Finally Peter said, "You know Bill, there are some hard parts to your life, but…you need to get a grip. You need to understand that as hard as some parts are, you are blessed by the love of your mother and by intelligence and good health - you need to get a grip." A ministerial friend later described this to Bill as "kick ass" pastoral care. Bill says he was able to hear this from Peter, and really get it, because he was his minister - and what he meant by that was he knew Peter's faithfulness. As hard as Peter's words were for Bill to hear, he believed that Peter cared about him and had his bests interests in mind. Bill feels that what he heard that day, in some ways saved his life because it allowed him to shift his emotional life from one which was about how sad he was, to one that focused on how much he had to give.
Our children are often able to hear from others what they can't hear from us. Campus ministries can change lives. Liberal Religious Youth was at its zenith in the 60's. It spawned a generation of leaders, many of whom went on to be ministers or active in other social justice roles. The organization died out in the intervening years.
Today Unitarian Universalism has on-site campus ministries at a small but growing number of college campuses. A new Office of Young Adult and Campus Ministry has a plan for developing resources and structures for the support of campus and young adult ministries around the continent. They hope to raise two million dollars to support this endeavor this year. I've left some informational packets that detail more specifically the goals of the fundraising drive and how the money will be put to use on the parlor table for your perusal.
In preparation for this drive a number of UU young adults were asked to respond in writing to a number of questions last spring. One young person wrote the following -
It's anonymous and entitled:
Born UU
I was born into my Unitarian Universalist community.
I did not seek it out.
I did not ask for it.
It came to me as a gift.
One of many I did not appreciate back then.
I grew up very involved in my community.
I went to church school.
I went to services.
I went to youth group.
I opened up as a person.
I became a leader.
Then I graduated and left it all behind.
College was huge. A sea of people and activity.
I did not find what I had at home.
I did not find community.
I did not feel connected.
So I left. I went away.
And not back home…
Then the magic happened.
I met someone my own age.
Someone connected to our faith.
Someone who attended a college with
A campus ministry and young adult group.
With a little support from our local congregation
We thrived and grew as a group.
Thank God.
This is what I thought.
Thank God I was caught.
That I didn't just float with that lost feeling.
Born and raised UU I NEED to be connected.
I need to be part of this faith to feel whole.
I need a spiritual community to thrive.
I just happened to go to a really great college
That didn't have any of this for me.
In the book the Lorax, it says, IF ONLY".
That is what I think.
If only each congregation reached out to its local campuses.
If only congregations supported the campus
and young adult ministry of our Association so we can
build groups where there are NOT congregations.
If only every one of us born UU's could grow up and go to college
Or work where there is a strong campus or young adult group.
Just imagine what we would be!
Our young people across the continent deserve our support. We are not a college town the way Bridgewater is, and we don't have large numbers of our young people choosing to return to Middleboro after graduation. But that doesn't mean this problem is not our problem. When Katherina, Emily and Lexi, Ariana, Dylan, Tom Putney, Simon, little Cameron, Molly and Nathan, go off to college - wouldn't it give you some piece of mind to know that there is the possibility of a continuation of their religious life without a gap? As a parent, I mind the gap. It shouldn't be there. Our children deserve our support. Let's not let them down.
Offertory for Youth and Young Adult Ministry
It is an honor to invite your contribution this morning to the service of youth and young adults in our Unitarian Universalist religious movement. The money we give today will support programs for UIIJ young people in our community and programs made possible through the Unitarian Universalist Association. If you don't have your checkbook today I will be glad to accept your donation at any time.
We are the inheritors of a great tradition, and we acknowledge what we owe to those who have gone before us. Now it is time for us to enrich the possibilities for those who will come along after us.
As it says on dining room wall at one of our UU conference centers, ‘We are warmed by fires we did not build; we are shaded by trees we did not plant; we drink from wells we did not dig.” Let us be generous in our giving to the future of our faith. AMEN