Mission Peak UU Congregation

M i s s i o n P e a k U n i t a r i a n U n i v e r s a l i s t C o n g r e g a t i o n

THE FABRIC OF DIVERSITY

Back in 1965, when I first began attending a UU church, it happened to be a church that was multi-racial and multi-cultural. This was the Community Church of New York, and at that time the congregation had a substantial number of African-American member - probably at least 20%, and these folks were visible there every Sunday. Community Church also had active members who were Asian and Latino. Every year, this church celebrated in their services not just the usual Christian holidays, but the Jewish High Holy Days and Hanukkah (this was a time when most other UU churches did not regularly celebrate the Jewish holidays), and they also always celebrated the Hindu Divali festival every fall and the Buddhist Wesak festival each spring. I was new to Unitarian Universalism at the time, and I truly thought I had found the "kingdom of God," by which I mean a religious movement that was not only open to a multitude of religious ideas, but one that was truly multi-racial and multi-cultural. I was very excited to have found such a religious movement. It filled my need for a beloved community.

Little did I realize, in those early days of my involvement, how atypical the Community Church of New York was within Unitarian Universalism. When I came out to California five years later to attend seminary, it became very clear to me how mono-cultural and white our religious movement really is. I was quite disappointed. When I was on the board of Trustees at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley in the 1980s, Rosemary Bray McNatt, an African American co-member of the Starr King Board, told me that she had her early experience with Unitarian Universalism at that same church in New York City a few years after I was there. She had the same reaction I had, thinking that she had found a multi-racial religion, but the discovery that this isn't so was much more poignant for her as an African American looking to belong than it was for me. Happily, Rosemary eventually went to seminary and into our ministry, and she is now minister to another New York City congregation.

Now it should be pointed out that we are not unusual among American religious groups. It's been said that the time between 10AM and noon on Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in America. Christians of different colors for the most part divide into races on Sunday mornings to attend their respective churches: African Americans may attend Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal churches with mostly African Americans in them, many Korean Christians go to the Korean Methodist church like the one that used to meet here, Chinese Christians go to Chinese Christian churches like the one next door, and their white counterparts attend Christian churches that are mostly white in membership, and so on. And those groups that are not Christian or UU, who go to their religious services at other times of the week, also divide into races and cultural groups. The beautiful mixed salad that is America does not seem to be so mixed in our houses of worship, although there are a few exceptions to this tacit racial divide.

A multiracial congregation has been defined as one in which no more than 80% of worshippers are of one race. By this definition, only 5 to 7% of Christian congregations in the United States are multiracial. We Unitarian Universalists have just over a thousand congregations in total. How many of them, do you think, are multiracial, having no more than 80% of any one race - in our case, whites? Any guesses?

There are five! Not 5%, which would be 50, but five congregations among us that are truly multicultural. Clearly, if we want to become more like the society in which we live, more in our case like the richly diverse community of Fremont, we have a very long way to go.

There have been many programs, workshops and curricula offered by the Unitarian Universalist Association over the years to help us increase our racial and cultural diversity, and our awareness of racial issues, and yet we have grown in diversity only slightly. This is something we regularly chastise ourselves for. I've wondered over the years if it is really healthy to keep beating ourselves up for this lack of diversity.

I've come to believe that it is not very helpful to do this, and that it may be counterproductive. Recently, I received some support on this from an African-American colleague, the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, who gave a talk at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in June titled "The Perversity of Diversity." He said that we need to lighten up on ourselves a little, and celebrate the diversity we do have. He also said that we have increased our diversity a little bit over the years probably, he thought, not so much because of our various programs but because the culture is changing around us. In less than four decades, white Americans will no longer be a majority of America's racial mix.

The Rev. Morrison-Reed pointed out that in 1967, only 27 percent of Unitarian Universalists thought that race would hamper a person's ministry, while at that time a whopping 47 percent thought that gender would hamper a woman's ministry. The gender issue was a struggle that I was very conscious of having to engage in as a female minister 36 years ago, when there were fewer than a dozen of us. But that battle has been won! For quite a few years now, more than 50 percent of our ministers have been women. By contrast, we had 8 ministers of color in 1967, and now we have 56. Although that is a much smaller change, the change is happening. And studies have shown that ministers of color attract congregants of color, so increasing the number of ministers of color will help to grow our diversity. But we may need to offer extra support to our ministers of color as they start out in ministry. Whereas the average length of service of Unitarian Universalist clergy to a congregation is seven years, for Unitarian Universalist clergy of color, it is only three years.

I want to share briefly what we did with respect to diversity in the San Mateo congregation, where I served as minister for 14 years. There we created an Open Door Committee - similar to this congregation's Cultural and Racial Inclusiveness Committee. It was similar in that it too grew out of an experience a number of members had when we offered one of those UUA adult curricula on racial awareness: How Open the Door? authored by Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed. In this congregation, the current Cultural and Racial Inclusiveness Committee grew out of a new UUA curriculum, Building the World We Dream About. In fact, this was one of 45 test congregations using that curriculum as a pilot project during the 2007-2008 year.

The Open Door Committee in San Mateo came to the conclusion that even if we didn't grow in racial or cultural diversity much beyond what we already were, we wanted the door to be open both ways - inviting and welcoming to people of color when they came to us, but also going out that door to them, through cultural exchanges that I believe enriched us and contributed to inter-racial good will and connection.

Every February, we hosted an art show featuring the work of African American artists. This was a big event in the community, covered by the press. There was an opening reception for the artists to which people of all races came in significant numbers. Annually, we also helped plan and we participated in the Martin Luther King celebrations at the King center. We were the only white church to consistently do this year after year, and the African American community greatly appreciated this. Also annually, we co-sponsored with the local NAACP a fund-raising evening at a comedy club in San Francisco. We had a choir exchange with the African American Baptist church, and we offered a film series on treatment of racial issues in cinema for the San Mateo community. In short, we engaged in rich and rewarding multi-racial activities through the arts - through music, film, comedy and visual arts - and we became known as the largely white church that cared about and was involved in the racially mixed community around us. Diversity for us in San Mateo became a colorful fabric with threads from different races woven together.

Today is the annual Association Sunday - a Sunday set aside by many of our congregations to celebrate and support our denomination, and the theme this year is "Growing Our Diversity." I believe that we should continue to work on multi-culturalism and racial justice and inclusiveness. Even if we don't grow in diversity directly through these efforts, we will continue to grow in awareness of and sensitivity to racial and cultural issues as our culture changes, and efforts to educate Unitarian Universalists about diversity will help us be more welcoming when people of color do come to us seeking an open religious community where they can be accepted, and where their culture and the diversity they bring can be celebrated.

I believe that there are many people of color out there who would love to find a community like ours, a place which offers freedom from dogma and an open spiritual quest, a place where the dignity and worth of every person, of every age and background, color and sexual orientation, gender identity and economic status - the dignity of all, is upheld and affirmed, and always celebrated! Let us celebrate the diversity we do have here among us, even as we hope for and anticipate more in the future.

I close with an excerpted poem of Denise Levertov from Beginners:

...We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
-- so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors...

Not yet, not yet--
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

Benediction

For our benediction, I offer the words of Gene Roddenberry, creator of TV's Star Trek. The multiculturalism Star Trek envisions for the future is one of the reasons I have loved this series in all of its incarnations.

Intolerance in the 23rd Century? Improbable! If humans survive that long, they will have learned to take delight in the essential differences between people and between cultures. We will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear. It's a manifestation of the greatness that God, or whatever it is, gave us. This infinite variation and delight, this is part of the optimism we built into Star Trek.