'Serving with Grace' - Rev. Adam Slate

Imagine if the practical and administrative work of the church–
meetings, planning, teaching, etc.–was understood not as a necessary evil 
but as an integral part of the mission of the church to spiritually nurture us.
What if lay leadership was not a means to an end but an end in itself? 

Could you experience the meeting room as a [Buddhist] zendo 
and the deliberations of a task force as a form of group prayer? 

Imagine church not as a place led by a few overly taxed people 
but one where leadership is a broadly shared ministry 
that members of the community undertake for the deep joy of it.

–Erik Wikstrom, from ‘Serving with Grace’

Introduction

A few years ago, some good friends of mine gave me a gift, a… garment. It was worn over the shoulders, like a stole, but at each end was sewn a tea towel. The idea was that you would wear it in the kitchen and when you needed a towel you would have it handy because it was hanging around your neck.

They knew I loved being in the kitchen, and that I was training for ministry, so they thought that this thing—I have since learned that it is called a kitchen scarf or kitchen boa—would be fun to give me; part minister’s stole and part kitchen tool.

My first experience with New Unity was back in 2018 when I was preparing for my first message here, watching your Sunday gatherings on the internet. I’d get up at 6am on Sunday and watch the gathering while I was cleaning my kitchen from the night before. I would purposely not clean up on Saturday night, tell my kids they were off the hook for their kitchen chores, so there would be something to do while I was watching the service. So I guess for me, New Unity and kitchen work have always had an odd connection.

When I finished my ministry training, I wanted to affirm that connection I felt between ministry and daily chores. So I kept the kitchen boa, had the tea towels removed, and then added some fabric to one end to make it the right length, and now it is my go-to ministerial stole… this one.

It reminds me that service is the most important part of ministry. That the work I do—whether it is up here in the pulpit, leading a group, meeting with a congregant, or working with the trustees—is all part of ministry. It is all part of my religious life, and what feeds me spiritually.

This is the idea behind the Rev Erik Wikstrom’s book Serving with Grace. ‘What if the practical… work of the [congregation],’ he asks, ‘was understood not as a necessary evil, but [rather] an integral part of the mission of the church to spiritually nurture us? What if leadership was a broadly shared ministry that members of the community undertook for the deep joy of it?’

What if?

The Problem

Wikstrom names that the way we think of volunteering within our congregation is often unsatisfying, can feel like an obligation, and burns us out if we are not careful. He wonders why it sometimes does not feel good to offer our service. How is it some of us come most Sundays and love the experience, meet other people, and even stay for events afterwards, yet we can be reluctant to engage in other ways to sustain the community?

There are some systemic explanations.

We Westerners have a complicated relationship with work. We are informed by a Christian tradition that is rooted in the idea of ‘sacrificial redemption’—that we make sacrifices for which we are later rewarded. This notion may rub us the wrong way even on a subconscious level because of bad religious messages we have gotten over the years. While we may have rejected the religious messages themselves, we have retained the aversion to ‘sacrificing’ time to our congregation as something inherently uncomfortable.

There is also research on church size dynamics that shows different-sized congregations adhere to different behavioural models that impact the way people do or don’t volunteer. A church of our size tends to follow a ‘family’ model. Personal relationships are prioritised. Everyone tends to know everyone else, or rather the people who know each other are considered to be ‘the congregation.’

You can see how this model might impact people’s willingness to get involved. A family-sized church tends to have a smaller number of people doing a lot of the jobs, and newer attendees who do not have as many relationships can feel like it is hard to find interesting roles… even as those on the inside lament the difficulty recruiting volunteers.

I am curious to see a show of hands: How many of you would volunteer a bit more if you knew more about what New Unity needed, what opportunities were available?

How many would volunteer a bit more if you saw jobs that looked enjoyable? 

What if you thought you had control over when put in the work, or where? Like from home, or a convenient time of day for you?

Who’s avoided volunteer work because you haven’t been excited to work with a difficult group or person?

So all of these questions resonate with a good portion of you!

Serving with Grace

Rev Wikstrom invites us to stop thinking of church volunteering as an obligation and instead see it as a chance to live our values; to tie everything you do here to the reason you decided to become part of this community: to transform and be transformed.

Show of hands again: how many people started coming to New Unity because you wanted to make coffee, sit on a committee, or set up Zoom breakout rooms?

But how many of us are here because we want this to be a place where people walk in and say, ‘I did not know that a community like this existed’? Because we want to show up for a broken world and the people in it? Because we thrive when we live among differences, can ask questions, express doubts and disagreements, and still be affirmed for who we are?

Wikstrom wants us to use this as our starting point: to realise that, if we are really living Unitarian values, it does not make sense to walk out of this building at noon on Sunday and not think about it for the other 167 hours of the week. Serving with Grace makes the case that being part of a faith community is not a weekly event or a Sunday destination. It is an ongoing practice where we nurture our spiritual values.

The key, he says, is to stop thinking about getting involved based on the congregation’s needs, and start thinking of it in terms of our own needs. To change our relationship with this place from being consumers of services to being stakeholders. To infuse our spiritual home with our values. To ‘tell the truth about who we are,’ and give voice to our presence in the world. To be held accountable for our service. And to learn more about ourselves.

Making It Real

Wikstrom offers some ideas for how to reframe congregational work as spiritual development. He emphasises that how we do things is at least as important as what we do, and he calls us to keep coming back to our spirituality rather than corporate measures of success such as efficiency.

He encourages us to focus on self-discovery. As we engage, think mindfully about whether we are committee people or doers. Whether we like working in collaborative groups or on our own, maybe even from home or at a computer. Whether we want a regular job or to sign up for one event at a time. I can assure you there is something going on at New Unity that suits any preference you can come up with.

He highlights people on committees who we can count on to say ‘let’s stop talking and do something,’ and people on projects who are frequently stopping to re-think things. We tend to view these people as difficult, but Wikstrom suggests they may just be in the wrong job. Congregational projects like throwing a party, hosting a workshop, or organising our annual meeting involve both planning and doing… and often the same people who do the planning for something stay on to do the work to lead it. But that does not have to be the case. We have grown so used to seeing church leaders doing everything that might need to remind ourselves it is okay to do one thing and then walk away. As we get to know ourselves better we can say, ‘I’m better at this so I’m going to let other people do that. 

Which leads us to another idea from the book: what Wikstrom calls the ‘sacred No.’ One of the biggest obstacles he sees to viewing volunteer work as a spiritual practice is not knowing how to say ‘no,’ and ending up doing too many things, and then resenting it.

Everyone is busy and there is always too much to do… and yet all the important things eventually get done. Let that committee job stay vacant for a while if you would rather help at events than sit in meetings. There are several groups and committees here at New Unity that have decided not to have a formal leader because nobody has wanted to carry that label, and they are working well.

When we learn to say ‘no’—to treat our time and well-being as valuable resources to be allocated carefully and with discernment—we may find that we feel better about those times when we say ‘yes.’

The Spirituality of Meetings

The book talks a lot about meetings, because this is a place where being part of a congregation can feel the least spiritual. Some may say meetings are where spirituality goes to die. But there are things we do in Sunday worship that Wikstrom suggests we could incorporate into meetings to make them feel more worshipful, like lighting a chalice, having an opening or closing reading, or a check-in similar to joys and sorrows. In the 1960s, much of the U.S. civil rights movement was led by Black churches, and when they met to plan or strategise, they would also sing, and pray. Martin Luther King might tell us that the work was not volunteer activism but rather a sacred calling.

Incorporating worship elements into a meeting may seem like a waste of time. Especially if we look at meetings through the Eurocentric, white-dominant lens that drives Western life; that prioritises efficiency over process and shared purpose; individualism over collaboration and relationship; a mentality of scarcity, where there’s never enough time or resources; and either/or thinking that tells us a meeting cannot also be spiritual. But these are all changes that can make a meeting into something transformative.

And things can be different. I have told you about a minister I know who is a member of a native American tribe who told me once that when they meet for a full tribal meeting, they advertise a starting time such as ‘Tuesday afternoon.’ And people arrive after lunch and catch up with each other until everyone gets there. Some Western church communities are also learning to devote extra time to bring their work more in line with their values: trustees having a second meeting a month for personal sharing and relationship-building; or committees going out for lunch together after the Sunday gathering, including with their partners, so they can connect in a way that goes beyond the work they are doing. 

What if all of our work here took longer because we have incorporated practices like this? What if it took longer, but people felt more energised and connected rather than burned out, and more people got involved? Would that be worth it?

Conclusion

As your minister, I definitely want you all to do a volunteer job or two, for all sorts of reasons. It makes my work easier. It helps distribute leadership more evenly in the congregation, which will help us as we grow from a ‘family-sized’ church to a ‘programme-sized’ church. And congregations with more people serving as volunteers reach up to four times as many new people as congregations run by a smaller core group.

But as pastor of this community, I want you to be involved because I have seen over and over how this kind of engagement becomes part of one’s spiritual transformation.

I’ve said a few times this morning that most of us join a faith community to be transformed. When we hear calls for volunteers to do this or that, it is hard to see how a busy person signing up for one more thing can lead to a transformed life. But after reading Erik Wikstrom’s book we might reach another conclusion: how can being part of a community like this and not volunteering for anything lead to one?

No holy place is ever given to us holy. It is made holy by what happens there. And New Unity is no exception. It is where our dissenting forebears wrestled with large and difficult human questions. Where freedom and tolerance were nurtured. Where modern feminism took form and where marriage rights were championed before they were rights. And during all those times, coffee needed to be made, bills needed to be paid, and buildings needed to be maintained.

It is a false distinction to try to separate the spiritual from the mundane. This is a spiritual community… intentionally. It always has been. Coming here and being involved in this congregation is at its core a spiritual commitment. This gathering, our social time afterwards, and the planning session and women’s potluck happening later are not separate. They all connect back to our mission and our values.

When we appreciate this, we are better able to claim our relationship with this community on our own terms. The trustee, the minister, the greeter at the front door… we are all contributing in ways that fit us.

I hope you find your place and that you are enriched and nurtured by your service here.

May it be so.