Essay: Remarks to the President's Council (edited)
April 2002
by Bill Sinkford, President
Unitarian Universalist Association
My son, Billy, is twenty now and is in the 82nd airborne division of the army, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He is a Unitarian Universalist who, on his first trip back after basic training, asked me why there was not a Unitarian Universalist minister at Fort Benning in Georgia, a place where there are tens of thousands of young people who transition through that place each year, young people who are trying to understand what it means to be young and growing into adulthood, young people who are trying to understand what it means to serve their country, young people who are trying to understand what it means to serve their country in an era when the values which our country upholds are complicated to say the least. I didn’t have an answer for my son about why there wasn’t a Unitarian Universalist minister at Fort Benning. Nor did I have an answer for him about why there wasn’t a Unitarian Universalist minister at Fort Bragg where he is stationed now, where much of the division in which he serves may be sent to war.
My daughter, who will go to American University in Washington, D.C. this fall, is pleased because there is a chaplain at American who is Unitarian Universalist-friendly, but most of the young people in our movement who go off to college go to campuses where there is no Unitarian Universalist presence. Where, like the young woman who came to me after September 11th, on one of the campuses in this country, said that it was so hard being on that campus after the terrorist attacks and not having a Unitarian Universalist minister she could go to help her figure out what it was she felt and what she was supposed to do. The young woman was in tears.
I need to tell you that we have work to do, that we have not found a way to be present to our young people in ways that support and nurture them through the complicated transitions of moving from childhood into adulthood. We need to find a way. Ninety percent of adult Unitarian Universalists come in from other faiths or come from an unchurched background. And that is good, valuable ministry for us.
The best, the very best wisdom in the religious community is that for a faith community to be successful, to thrive, one of the key elements is an effective ministry to young adults. It was demonstrated clearly in the most extensive research ever done on religion in this country, out of the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, that this is one of the four critical elements. And this is something we do quite poorly.
So I want to talk now about the importance of the leadership of persons who grew up Unitarian Universalist now exercise in our Association. Here, at the Presidents’ Council meeting and in the Pacific Central District, there are a lot: Rebecca Scott who works in the UUA’s Development Department and a dozen years ago was a Youth Program Specialist; John Marsh, co-minister at our church in San Francisco who is leading the way in shaping that congregation’s life with an attitude and a love for the importance of youth ministry; Jo Victoria, who has been the president of the Pacific Central District and has led the way toward ministry to young adults and the leadership that young adults can offer; Rob Eller-Isaacs, formerly co-minister in Oakland and now co-minister in Minneapolis, who literally “grew up” in LRY; Larry Ladd, The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Financial Advisor, chief steward of our financial resources. It’s an awesome task being president but I do not do it alone. I know that I share the job with many others who had the same experience of finding meaning in our youth and young adult movements that I had.
I want to say a few words about my own experience in this movement as I was growing up. I came into my first Unitarian Universalist church when I was forteen. I was dragged there by my mother. It was not my choice. I didn't think I needed church. I'd had bad experiences in the Episcopal Church and the Black Southern Baptist church and I didn't think that organized religion was for me. But I walked into First Church Cincinnati, which will always at some level always be my home church, and found there a place where I could bring all of myself. I didn't have to check any part of myself at the door. I could be an African American person in the presence of African Americans and whites. I could be a young man who had questions about faith. I could be a stand-up atheist in the presence of people who had deep faith in Jesus. I was able to bring everything about me into that church and have it affirmed. I didn't have to check anything at the door to come in. It was saving for me.
The religious educator in that congregation, Pauline Worfield Lewis, was an African American woman, I believe the first African American religious educator in our movement. Her presence let me know that it was okay to be a person of color in Unitarian Universalism, in the presence of a dominant white culture. But that it was okay, that she had found a way to do it. Now, Cincinnati is a border town. This was the 50's; things were still—actually, still are—complicated in that city. But the witness of that church had been important. And so there were more dark faces in that congregation than there are in most of our churches even yet, and that was important.
Pauline Worfield Lewis immediately directed me to the youth group. I was, after all, that age. I found in the youth group a group of young people who were extraordinary. I'd come to Cincinnati to go to a public college-prep school, Walnut Hills High School. And so I wasn't lacking for people who were smart. I was in the presence of people who were smart all day long. And I wasn't lacking the presence of people who took themselves seriously, because I was in the presence of people who took themselves seriously all day long. But I was lacking the presence of people who grounded their lives in a kind of honesty that I did not find in my high school. I was lacking the presence of people who grounded their lives in questioning what it meant to be a good person. And in that church, at First Cincinnati in that youth group, I found a group of people, young people, black and white, male and female, who were willing, who needed, to talk about what it meant to try to live a good life. It's a simple question. But I found it nowhere else in my life: not in the intelligence of the people that I went to school with; not in the political activism that meant so much to me. I just didn’t find it anyplace else. Not that questioning which asks: What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to live a life grounded in values?
I became very involved in the Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) and I responded to the opportunities for leadership and imagination for ministry. This was all a part of my experience of Unitarian Universalism as I was coming up. The institution needs more people who have this kind of experience. If we don't invest in our youth and young adults, we will fail. But as important as it is for us to value the leadership of youth and to support it, as important as it is for us to learn from the model that youth and young adults have provided to this movement, as important as all of that, it's not the point, really. Because Unitarian Universalism is about ministry to individual people. And so I'm going to tell you a story which I've never shared with another group, save one.
When I was the president of Liberal Religious Youth, at the continental level, in my sophomore year at Harvard, I spent a lot of time with the executive director of LRY at that time. His name is Peter Baldwin; some of you may know Peter, Reverend Peter Baldwin. He now is retired in New Hampshire and continues his ministry in many ways. Peter was the minister who ministered to the youth leaders like myself; he mentored and ministered to these bright, aggressive, self confident, arrogant (!) young people who were coming up through Unitarian Universalist ranks. Peter was a good minister to me. He wasn’t the only minister who was a good minister to me. My home church minister, James Hutchinson, a kind of a crusty old humanist, was also good and faithful. But Jim and I basically agreed that we disagreed about everything—though he managed to stay in relationship with me. But Peter and I didn't get to that place.
There was a point in my sophomore year in college when I was doing good work as the president of LRY, trying to figure out what it meant to be a young Black man in the presence of this incredible affluence and privilege at Harvard University, affluence and privilege that I didn't share. I was a poor kid, and yet intellectually able to match anyone, at least so I thought at that point in my life. So I’d spend time with Peter and we would have meetings about the important things that were going on in LRY and then we would occasionally have a glass of sherry and sit and talk. And one night Peter and I were talking and I was feeling particularly oppressed by the privilege in which I lived at Harvard and which I didn’t share. I was feeling sorry for myself and I started complaining to Peter about how unfair it was that these other people had all of these privileges and I didn't. I was raised by a single mother; I didn't have a father—he had died when I was young. I was complaining about how I was a Black man in a white universe. I was complaining about how my scholarship wasn't adequate. I was complaining about everything.
And Peter—I've told this story in his presence so I can share it with you—Peter, bless his soul, was first sympathetic. How terrible it was; how hard it must be. And then as I went on—I got fairly poetic—Peter became silent and as he became silent I stopped talking. Finally he said to me, "You know, Bill, there are some hard parts in your life, but . . . you need to get a grip. You need to understand that as hard as some parts of your life are, you are blessed by the love of your mother. You are blessed by intelligence and good health. You are blessed by so many things . . . and you need to get a grip." It's what was later described to me by an other ministerial friend as "kick ass pastoral care." The good news is that it worked. I was able to hear Peter, because I knew he was faithful to me. I knew that he was my minister. I was able to hear from him something which actually saved my life, changed my life, allowed me to shift my emotional life from one which was about how sad I was to one which focused on how much I had to give.
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
