©Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 4, 2014
© Dr. Chris Schriner 2014. All Rights Reserved.
© Rev. Jeremy D. Nickel 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Listen to Audio Version of Whole Service (mp3)
Listen to Audio Version of Both Sermons (mp3)
Good morning everyone. In celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Mission Peak's Charter Sunday, I think of a comment by the poet Muriel Rukeyser: "the universe is made of stories, not of atoms." Actually I think the universe is made of atoms, but our inner universe, our human world of the mind and heart, is made of stories - our personal stories and the legends of living communities such as this one.
A communal story often involves a journey, and spiritual communities tell and retell the sagas of their own challenging odysseys. For example, Jews symbolically relive the Exodus. Today I will reflect on the first 10 years of our journey and Jeremy will talk about our second decade. And I'll start by warning you not to believe the story I will tell you! Listen to it, respond to it, learn from it, but do not believe it in any literal way. When we tell the tale of a community such as this one, we are myth-making, interweaving truths and half-truths and probably some outright balderdash as well. Memory is a creative reconstruction, not a videotape. In fact when I preached at Mission Peak's tenth anniversary I suggested that some of the legends which were then being told about this community might be mostly malarky. We can take our own mythology seriously and know it well, without being literalists or fundamentalists about our own communal legends.
Barbara has already told you of Mission Peak's creation myth. We were born out of The Play Group, young parents whose little ones laughed and played together. This play group story reminds me of a story told by the parents of author Frances Moore Lappe. When Frances was a child, she visited a fundamentalist church with a friend. Later that day, she asked her mother, "What's hellfire and damnation?"
"Her father heard Frances ask the question and he said, 'It means it's time to gather a Unitarian fellowship'" (Gwen Foss, The Church Where People Laugh, p. 17).
So our story starts with families and a concern for children. This is a good myth - and it's probably even true! Our family-focused beginnings remind us to regularly evaluate whether our programs for children and youth provide them with a loving, empowering, liberating environment for ethical and spiritual development.
Another important part of our Mission Peak story was The Season of Ben. The Rev. Ben Meyers was with you prior to Charter Sunday, and for five years after that till May of 1999. This was a time of extraordinary membership growth, partly because of his amazing charisma and partly because our enthusiastic members brought their friends. Unfortunately, Ben's great energy was followed by great exhaustion. He saw that he had worked too hard for too long and he was "burned out." Ben's resignation provoked a crisis of confidence. Should we continue our journey, people asked, or should we call it quits? But they realized that Mission Peak was more than just the personal magnetism of a ministerial dynamo. They pulled together and went to work. This part of the journey involved transition, anxiety, some membership losses, and enormous labor on the part of congregational leaders and the ministerial search committee. Fortunately an interim minister, Howard Dana, served you well, guiding you forward over rough and stony ground.
Down in Southern California in 1999 I was enjoying my ministry at the UU Fellowship of Laguna Beach but I was ready for a change, and my fiancee Jo Ann and I were drawn to the Bay Area. One day I got an email from someone named "gunnmoll." Gunnmoll sounded like porno-spam, so I hit "delete" without opening it! A couple of weeks later your ministerial search committee called to see if I had received Becky Gunn's email requesting my ministerial packet. Fourteen years ago this month I was your ministerial candidate and I began work in September, 2000.
Having seen a minister go from enthusiasm to exhaustion, burnout was one of your great congregational anxieties. People would come 'round and check my temperature periodically: "Well, Chris, are you burnt out yet?" And I was told that our volunteer leaders were thoroughly exhausted. Some were, but after I arrived I was amazed to see abundant creative energy flowing into both old and new projects. If we are truly committed to our congregation it's amazing what we can do. But we need to pace ourselves so we don't shoot up and crash down like a Fourth of July rocket.
On the tenth anniversary of Charter Sunday we were hitting a few bumps in the road, including The Kidango Crisis. We were meeting at a preschool called Kidango, and on March 25, 2004, we received this certified letter saying that Kidango planned to double our rent in just a few months. So we were feeling apprehensive as we celebrated our tenth anniversary.
In a moment Jeremy will pick up where this talk leaves off, but I do want to say one thing about Mission Peak today. I stayed away for a long time after my retirement, and that helped people get out of the habit of discussing congregational matters with me and with Jo Ann. Today we just love being able to come here as members, partly because we are virtually never asked to discuss church politics or other topics that would be awkward for us as Minister Emeritus and spouse. Thank you so much for helping us feel comfortable in this way.
No long journey is easy. Sometimes we must toil across rocky terrain. But our steps are lighter when we're moving toward our goals. And at Mission Peak, our goals involve simple yet profound spiritual values:
To treat all people kindly, because they are our brothers and sisters; To take good care of the Earth, because it is our home; To live lives full of goodness and love, because that is how we will become the best people we can be. And to do these things in a community of shared values where we learn from many religions and philosophies, and from science, art, literature, and any other source of genuine wisdom.
So Happy Birthday, Mission Peak. May your lovely chalice be kindled week after week, burning brightly with the flame of freedom, the fire of commitment, the light of new truth, and the warmth of community.
© Rev. Jeremy D. Nickel 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Listen to Audio Version of Whole Service (mp3)
Listen to Audio Version of Both Sermons (mp3) - Jeremy's starts 10 minutes into the recording
Picking up from where Chris left off, Mission Peak UU's eleventh year brought a very exciting and important development when you voted to endorse one of your own, a founding member of Mission Peak UU, as your first affiliated community minister. Obviously Barbara's mental health ministry has thrived here at Mission Peak UU, and grown to serve our movement and the needs of many people she will never even know. This vital ministry continues to be one of the things this congregation is best known for, and for good reason.
Then, just as everything seemed to be progressing smoothly, drama fell upon this fine community from above, as the landlords of our first congregational home, Kidango, decided it was time to part ways. At the time this was the cause for much distress and concern, as coming by a decent space to hold services, due to zoning restrictions and there being many faith communities in Fremont, is not an easy thing. An extensive search was commenced, and at the eleventh hour, prospects appeared bleak. Nothing, not even a bad option, had emerged. But just then, at what I am sure felt like the last possible moment, a miracle occurred. A member of First United Methodist of Fremont learned of the search and happened to have this very space opening up in the summer of 2007. Deep sighs of relief were exhaled, and with much excitement we moved into our first permanent congregational home!
About a year after seeing the congregation through this transition, Rev. Schriner announced his retirement, and later that year the congregation voted unanimously to make him the Minister Emeritus of Mission Peak UU.
The next two years were spent preparing for a new ministry. Interim Minister Rev. Joy Atkinson helped the congregation explore new ideas in worship and helped prepare the congregation for a new minister. A search committee was formed, and a national search commenced, and in the spring of 2010 (spoiler alert) you all chose to call me as your next minister!
We are now coming to the end of our first four years together, and what an exciting time it has been. This is of course the part of the story I know best. Since I have been here I have walked with you as we have continued to add more members, but more significantly we have grown deeper together and begun to leap out of these very walls into the larger community. Last year we were invited into the Leap of Faith mentoring program and have benefited hugely from this support and the resources it provided. In this year alone we have voted to spend $50,000 of our treasured "Special Fund" to start a community garden and hire an outreach coordinator, which led us to find Deanna Kosaraju and begin work with LEAF at the Stone Garden site where we spent all of yesterday. We also have begun a new era with our Children's Religious education program when our longtime beloved DRE Sally Ahnger retired and we found Laine Young to come and bring new energy and ideas to us. We also have found our first Ministerial intern, Dawn Fortune, who will spend next congregational year learning and growing with us.
I know there is so much more to come. This is the story of our first twenty years, but just like the path that led us from a bunch of brave and excited individuals coming together to make Mission Peak UU a reality, our path forward from here will be just as amazing.
As I prepared for this message, I wanted to get a better sense for our story in the context of other UU congregations. How is where we are at twenty years comparable to other congregations we may hope to emulate? What lessons can we learn from other older congregations as we move into our third decade? So I called up the Rev. Tandi Rogers, who is the main growth consultant at the UUA and who runs the popular blog called "Growing Unitarian Universalism" to see what she could tell me.
The first thing she said was, "Congratulations on surviving the seven year itch!" Apparently, as in love, so in church growth. If you can get over that first seven-year hump, you may actually have something real. And we did and do.
Further, she reminded me how lucky we are to still be at an age when we have many, in fact most, of our founding members still with us. As she put it "You need to keep rallying around that core purpose that they so well identified all those years ago, and they can help keep you connected to it."
She also added a note of caution, sharing that almost every congregation in our movement that is growing was started less than twenty-five years ago. So she strongly recommended that in the coming years we make sure to think about not losing that start-up mentality. Keep believing in trying new things and taking risks together, while we find new ways to articulate and bring life to that initial purpose. And resist that urge to fall into the "that's the way we have always done it" mentality that begins to calcify communities of faith.
Of course, it is all in how we tell our story. I believe many good stories find a way to come back around to where they started, so let me repeat the words that Rev. Schriner got us started with today: "Every community has a story. And every communal story is the story of a journey, because whatever is alive is constantly changing, sometimes moving ahead, sometimes sliding backward. And so a spiritual community needs to tell and retell the saga of its own challenging journey."
I would add to that: every spiritual community gets to decide which story to tell. For the last several months I have made our stories a large part of the focus of our time together on Sundays in anticipation of this moment. Because what is true for the individual is also true for the collective. Just as it matters deeply to us how we tell our story, it is a matter of great importance how we choose to tell the story of Mission Peak UU.
It is a story that began in a sandbox, and from the start has had at its core the goal of helping families raise incredible children. We have had challenging times together which we overcame, and we have had many successes to celebrate joyfully. What story do you tell? What moments mean the most to you? And how will that story change over the next twenty years? I can't wait to find out!
May it be so, amen.
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