Monday, May 18, 2009

Elected to the Vestry

This past Sunday, I was elected to serve on the Vestry (the governing body) of the Unitarian Church in Charleston (SC). Because we just moved to Charleston in late August of last year, I'm a quite new member. I expect my experience serving on the Board of Governors of United First Parish in Quincy, MA was one of the reasons I was honored with the nomination.

On the previous Sunday, there was a Forum to discuss the issues that were going to be voted on at the annual meeting. When the subject of the 3 nominations for new members of the Vestry came up, someone asked the meeting's moderator if any of those nominated had a "vision" regarding the Vestry and the church itself. The moderator replied that the question hadn't come up, and he didn't know the answer to the question.

I've never been a "vision" sort of person, so at first I ignored the question. But I got to thinking about it, and came up with two ideas which, if they're not "visions", are things I'd like to see any UU church think about.

The first one comes from two sources:

  1. When my wife and I were thinking about moving to Charleston, I knew that if the city had no UU church, I didn't want to be there (in spite of how beautiful I think the city is). Luckily, we already knew that UCC existed and had visited it a few times. Being in a church with like-minded people was especially important to me if we were going to move to an area where we knew no one.
  2. It has been very important to my previous church, United First Parish, that the church and its minister be seen as a voice in the community for the values that UUs hold. UFPC, for example, had a gigantic banner supporting gay marriage hanging from the front of the church when the issue of legalizing gay marriage in Massachusetts came up 5 years ago.
So here's the first of my thoughts: I'd like to see UU churches deliberately be out front to communicate their values in their communities. Ideally, if the minister is up for it, I'd like to see the minister being an active spokesperson in the community. That doesn't appeal to some ministers, of course.

The second thought has to do with membership. The UU churches I've been associated with seem to be a lot better getting new people in the door, and even getting them to sign the membership book, than they are at keeping them as long-term members. When people stop coming, very often no one follows up to find out why, or even to call and say they're missed. So my second thought is to get Membership Committees to look at both sides of the membership equation: the input side and the output side. If we kept more of the members we add to the roles, UU growth would be considerably larger than its anemic numbers have been for quite a while.

There's a "2a" part of the membership issue, too. It would be better if we could do what is necessary to keep members coming than to try to get them to come back once they've stopped coming. We need to think more about why people are leaving. What needs aren't we meeting? What opportunities to serve haven't we been providing? Why didn't they want to be part of our community any more?

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