Trusting Religious Community ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 16, 2025
It’s a story that never seems to end. This week, along with the daily headlines that just seem to go from bad to worse, a news story popped up about a megachurch pastor who was indicted by an Oklahoma grand jury on five counts of indecent acts with a child.
What struck me as I set out yesterday to double-check the details was that this case was just one in a list. I had some trouble making sure I was checking the correct story. I kept scrolling through similar headlines. And scrolling. And scrolling. And I shook my head at the irony of wanting to talk to you all about trust in religious communities, when there is overwhelming evidence at our fingertips that religious communities and their leaders breach that trust far more frequently than we could ever imagine.
Some religious traditions seem to grab these headlines more than others, but please don’t ever think that Unitarian Universalists are immune. There will always be people who seek to exert power over others, regardless of their theological beliefs. There will always be people who will not only breach our trust but then work to cover it up and to blame the victims, and divide a church. So given the extent of misconduct I uncovered yesterday, is it any wonder that trust in religious institutions has so diminished in the past few decades? The thought of people preying on those with less power, on those more vulnerable, flies in the face of all that we try to create here together. We use words like ‘sanctuary’, ‘safety’, ‘sacred space’. And far too often the power-hungry can make a mockery of those words.
Misconduct by a religious leader, or any church member, really, will have profound impacts on the heart, the soul, and the life of a congregation. There will be instant division: who do you believe? How does a congregation find its way through the accusations, the denials, the taking sides? And so a congregation watches, feeling helpless, as the trust built up over years begins to evaporate.
Last week I mentioned the elusive nature of trust, how fragile it can be; how slow to develop and how quick to fade away. Trust needs to be nurtured, to be protected. How can congregations protect themselves and their relationships, and the trust that holds us together?
Trust, in fact, is a key ingredient in the grout that Pat read about a few minutes ago; that hard, gritty substance that holds all of our different shapes and sizes and colors together. The reading talks about the components of the grout that holds a congregation together: the worship, the work of management, the social events, the programs. When we mix all of those things together into a thick slurry they form the basis of all our relationships, and the essential trust that underlies those relationships and helps them to flourish.
We’re in a time now when church attendance and membership has become less important to many people. There are many reasons for this, and one reason, I’m convinced, is the erosion of trust in religious institutions. It’s painful to see.
At the same time, people’s religious inclinations never really go away; we humans have strong needs to seek answers to important questions about religious belief, about the afterlife, about how we create meaning, especially in a world that seems driven to emphasize the more shallow aspects of life. And so, as trust in institutions erodes, people seek their own spiritual paths, their own practices. Our culture encourages this; we Americans have a strong sense of individuality and independence, after all. Why not go it alone religiously as well? Ironically enough for we Unitarian Universalists, this cultural trait of individualism is often associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, himself a Unitarian minister, wrote an essay titled “Self-Reliance” and declared that people could be their own religious authority – that we did not need the structure or authority of a church in order to worship. Emerson might have been the first person we could call spiritual, but not religious.
And yet, we humans are meant to live in community, to be in relationship with all those around us. After all, we are created out of love, out of connection, and we live out our lives within a wide variety of relationships. We identify ourselves mostly by who we are to someone else: a parent or child, a spouse or partner, a friend. We are managers, or colleagues. We are fellow citizens, neighbors, and church members. When we use these labels for ourselves, and often we have many such labels, we are defining ourselves according to our relationships to other people.
We are so much more together, participating in community life, participating in relationships, than we can ever be by ourselves. The Reverend Rebecca Parker reminds us, “There is no life apart from life together.” (A House for Hope, p. 33.)
We know this, don’t we? Here’s just one example: since January 20, we have seen this demonstrated almost weekly here in Gloucester, with people coming together with signs to advocate for our democracy, for the needs of the vulnerable among us. One day I drove through Grant Circle and there was one lone sign holder standing there in the cold. As much as I admired her resolve and courage, I almost didn’t notice. But put 40 or 50 people out there and the impact is much greater.
And so congregations have formed over the centuries, in response to the need to belong, and to seek answers to life’s biggest questions, and they continue to form. There are a few ways in which religious communities bind themselves together. More traditional religious communities are bound by creed, by statements of belief that everyone is expected to ascribe to. These creeds, it is believed, hold the members accountable to the Word of God. Creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed are the grout that holds the community together. It is the source of authority.
Since the 1600’s, the Puritans in Massachusetts took a very different approach to the question of how to create and sustain their communities. This is probably because they would never have thought to question each other’s theological beliefs, which they assumed were quite uniform. Instead, the Puritans took the approach of creating communities that made promises to each other about how they would function. The Puritans defined churches as groups of people who have “covenanted to ‘walk together’… in the spirit of mutual love.” They traced the authority to covenant together in this way all the way back through the earliest Christian history, and the Hebrew Bible. They cited the second commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, as well as the example of the early house churches first gathered by Jesus’ disciples. Seventeenth-century church members agreed to gather together regularly for mutual education and teaching, by creating a church that was intended to support and to guide them. They freely gave up their individual needs in support of a community based on mutual love. They sought structure and authority. They sought the ties that bind.
The word used for the promises made by the early colonial members was ‘covenant’. Hundreds of years later, we Unitarian Universalists still say that we are not bound by creed, but by covenant; by the promises we make to one another to offer our support for one another in sharing our community life. Here is a Unitarian Universalist definition of covenant: “A covenant is a mutual sacred promise between individuals or groups, to stay in relationship, care about one another, and work together in good faith. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we seek to raise the ‘we’ above the ‘I’ – the community above the individual.” (“Unlocking the Power of Covenant,” Report of the UUA Commission on Appraisal, June 2021, p. xiii.)
“To raise the ‘we’ above the ‘I’.”
There are many excellent examples of UU covenants. We here offer our own affirmation each Sunday at the beginning of worship. It serves to center us, to bring us together in our shared aspirations. I wanted to share two other examples that I’m fond of. First, is the covenant of First Parish in Waltham:
“Love is the spirit of this church,
And service its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another.”
But possibly my favorite covenant was written by our own former minister, the Reverend Walter Royal Jones. You can read along as it’s #458 in the back of the gray hymnal:
“Mindful of truth ever exceeding our knowledge,
And community ever exceeding our practice,
Reverently we covenant together, beginning with ourselves as we are,
To share the strength of integrity and the heritage of the spirit,
In the unending quest for wisdom and love.”
Without covenant, either implied or written down and recited, we will struggle to sustain ourselves in community. As Royal Jones stated, we may aspire to stay in covenant, and often we can fail. We can forget that the needs of the group, the community, are at least as important as our individual needs and desires. There is inevitably a tension between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. Covenant helps to hold that tension. It creates a North Star to help us navigate. It helps us to remember, when something happens that threatens to divide the community, in which direction to turn; the direction that strengthens the community. It can help us to trust the community, and one another.
There’s another kind of tension inherent in covenants. People are often surprised when I hold the Puritans up as an example of creating loving community, as we remember them as harsh, judgmental and often unforgiving. The covenant they created focused exclusively on creating a closed community, entirely for themselves. The grout of trust and promises was used to exclude; to build walls between themselves and the others, especially indigenous people. Covenants can be relied upon to prevent relationships instead of fostering them.
But grout is not just used to build walls; it is also used to connect and hold together the materials to make a floor. In creating covenants we should use the grout to construct a foundation first, a floor that can support us all, and anyone who wants to join us. A floor, a foundation, that can be expanded, and leaves no one outside of the covenant.
In discussing creeds a moment ago I mentioned that they are used to hold people accountable. It’s easy to forget that aspect of community life; that of being accountable to one another. In a community based on a covenant and not on a creed, to what should we be accountable?
In Unitarian Universalist communities, we see ourselves as accountable to one another, always. But that implies that our accountability only extends to those within the walls of the community. To what else are we accountable? How about Love? Our historic focus on social justice, on trying to widen our circles of relationship and care, help us to broaden our sense of accountability to those we don’t know, those who need our support in attaining true equality and justice. Rebecca Parker likes to say that such communities, built on trust and accountability to those around them, can become ‘communities of resistance’. (A House for Hope, p. 37.)
To raise the ‘we’ above the ‘I’. To keep Love at the center of all we do.
My friends, strong, healthy, trustworthy religious communities, ‘communities of resistance’, are needed today more than ever here in the United States. My hope for us is that we will continue to strengthen our bonds, continue to build trusting relationships, and then, bolstered by our strength and held by our grout, we can take our place outside these walls, accountable to Love and Justice for all.
Together, as a community, we are so much more than we are alone.
Amen.
