Faith Curriculum Library: Curricula and Resources for Co-creating Lifespan Faith Engagement

Workshop 2: Assessing Your Congregation’s Approach to Military Service

Part of Military Ministry

Introduction

In this workshop, participants explore the congregation’s approach to military service and attitudes toward military veterans and currently serving military personnel. They will examine how military service is treated in worship, in large congregational events, in social justice and religious education statements and programs, in informal conversation, in the ways leaders speak with young adults or those bridging to young adulthood, and in the ways pastoral care is offered to military personnel, veterans, and their immediate and extended families. The workshop will also explore similarities in the experiences of those in the military from generation to generation and ways in which those experiences can differ depending on cultural and political circumstances.

In assessing your congregation’s response to military personnel, veterans, and their families, participants may discover that some Unitarian Universalists hold values or assumptions that conflict with some closely held principles or assumptions of military people and/or veterans. Point this out early in the session. Use the emergence of differing values, principles, and assumptions as an opportunity to think deeply about how people with different perspectives can remain in healthy religious community with one another.

Opening (10 minutes)

Materials

  • Chalice, candle, and lighter or LED/battery-operated candle
  • Covenant from Workshop 1
  • Chalice lighting words familiar to your congregation

Description

Light the chalice and offer words familiar to the congregation. Invite participants to listen to two different passages written by two different Unitarian Universalist soldiers many years apart.

Introduce the preface written by Jenkin Lloyd Jones to introduce the 1913 publication of his Civil War diary. In his lifetime, Jones was a moving force in the Unitarian Western Conference and later a peace activist. This passage shares his feelings and thoughts when he left home to join the Union Army at the age of 19:

… On the way to Camp Randall, the tears, which had scarcely dried from the heart-break that followed a mother's last embrace, started afresh at the sight of the dome of the old University building at Madison. For the months preceding the enlistment, the struggle had been not choosing between home and camp. No! not even between danger and safety, life and death, but what seemed the final choice between a country to save and an education to acquire. For in the dim haze of the farmer boy's horoscope, the University outline was shaping itself. In choosing his country's cause it seemed to him that he was relinquishing forever the hope of the education of which he dreamed…A great thing was done for humanity in America, between 1861 and 1865. If it could not have been done otherwise, it was worth all it cost. And if this same dire predicament were to come again, I would do my past all over again. But Oh! it was such a wrong way of doing the right thing!...

Now introduce the second passage. Here, military chaplain Rev. George Tyger shares a message with soldiers under his pastoral care in Afghanistan in 2011:

We in the military have dedicated our lives to many high ideals. Freedom, honor, loyalty, and duty define the American way of life. We place ourselves in harm’s way to defend those ideals so that those at home can sleep safe each night. When we lose friends, an emptiness remains that even the highest ideals cannot fill. The cost of those ideals is the struggle to find meaning in these losses.

Invite responses to the two passages: What is similar? What is different?
Explain that this workshop will look at ways this congregation responds both to the idea of military service and to people who have or are serving in the nation’s military. Say that, for this workshop, we will focus on the experience of veterans, currently serving military personnel, and their families. Say that philosophical, ethical, and political questions regarding war and peace will be the subject of Workshop 3.
Review the covenant from Workshop 1.

Activity 1: Military Service and Our Congregation (20 minutes)

Materials

  • Newsprint, markers, and tape

Preparation

  • Find out how your congregation approaches, welcomes, and includes military personnel and veterans by talking with veterans, personnel currently in military service, the congregation’s minister and/or religious educator, members of the social justice committee, and/or others.
  • Anticipate that individuals or the group may experience discomfort when veterans, active duty personnel, military family members, or other participants share personal stories. To prepare, review the section “The Facilitator’s Pastoral Role” in the Facilitator Information part of this program.
  • Post blank newsprint.

Description

Invite participants to consider in silence:

  • A military visitor must walk past the Peace and Democracy Task Force Table in order to get to the sanctuary. On the table are bumper stickers for sale, saying, “War is not the Answer” and “Support the Troops; Bring them Home.”
  • A military visitor in worship hears a litany of names of those killed in war during the last week.
  • During coffee hour, a military visitor is asked difficult ethical questions about particular events in war (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo).

Say:

These scenarios reveal aspects of a congregation’s attitude and approach to members of the military, veterans, and their families. The exercise that follows will help us learn more about our congregation’s current approach to military service.

Explain that personal stories and experiences are likely to emerge. Remind the group that they have covenanted to speak from their own experience and to honor the experiences of others by listening deeply and not challenging another’s perspective.

After each question, gather participant responses before adding information you have gathered in preparation.

  • What traditions or rituals in your congregation relate to military service? Is military service acknowledged on or near Veterans’ Day and/or Memorial Day? How?
  • What visible art, posters, plaques, announcements, flyers, and so on relate to military service and/or to war? How are military service and war depicted?
  • What annual or recurring events, rituals, or parts of worship acknowledge present wars and military deployments? What form do these take? Are they spiritual, political, or both? Are they pastoral? Are they protests?
  • How is our congregation’s prophetic voice raised around issues of military service?
  • How do our traditions, rituals, programs, and events serve to strengthen the Unitarian Universalist faith of the people who participate in them? Are there people who do not participate in some traditions, rituals, programs, and events for stated reasons?

Activity 2: Generational Military Experiences (15 minutes)

Materials

Preparation

  • Copy the handout for participants.

Description

Distribute Handout 1 and invite participants to read it. Lead a discussion, asking:

  • How does this handout match any experiences you might have of the different cultural and political contexts facing veterans in different generations? What differences do you see among the cultural and political contexts of those who served before, during, and after the Vietnam War era?
  • From your experience, what have been religious or faith community responses to different wars? Are your experiences with a Unitarian Universalist congregation or with another faith community?

Activity 3: What Might Be Changed or Added? (10 minutes)

Materials

  • Newsprint, markers, and tape

Description

When you have gathered information about our congregation’s rituals, traditions, programs, and events, and considered the cultural, political, and religious contexts for each generational cohort, say:

How might we do things differently? We are going to make space for veterans, currently serving military personnel, and families to respond first.

Engage participants who have experience in or family ties to the military with these questions:

  • As a veteran/military person/family member, how do you respond to our congregation’s approach?
  • What new or different approaches would you like to see added?
  • Is there anything you would like to change? What needs to happen for such changes to take place?

Invite those who have no personal experience with military service to add their thoughts and ideas about changes and additions.

Closing (5 minutes)

Materials

  • Chalice and candle or LED/battery-operated candle

Description

Light the chalice and share this excerpt from the sermon, “Red, White, and UU,” delivered by Rev. Cynthia Kane in March 2009:

Returning from… war are people—especially young people—with a crisis of faith, hurting and wounded to the core. For many of the service members, all they thought they believed about God and goodness is destroyed; they are looking for a way to make sense of their experiences and their lives.

The question for UU congregations is this: will we be the communities that can open our arms to these hurting people? Can we model how to move beyond assumptions about military members and their reasons for serving, and reach out to souls searching for another way of thinking, another way of being in the world?

I believe we can.

I believe we have the sensitivity; sensitivity and open-mindedness—especially to people with differing views and practices. After all, is this not the essence of Unitarian Universalism?

Freedom, reason, and tolerance…

I believe we have the awareness; awareness of our own struggles and our own biases. Most of all, I believe we have the understanding; understanding that we who have made the choice to serve in the military have done so for our own particular reasons. Though initially my call to Navy Chaplaincy did not make sense to me, it does now. Since conflict and fighting have been a part of human history since the beginning of time, then for me to do the work of peace is more than just practicing peace, I must understand the making of war.

…We—you and I—we are a part of our nations’ souls. We, too, are patriots who cherish the rights and privileges of our countries. And we, too, support and defend our countries’ ideals through the very practice of our faith. Our countries need us. And we, in the military, need you.

Extinguish the chalice.