Sermon Archives : Earlier Sermons
Getting it Right: Unitarian Universalist Religious Education in the 21st Century
Benjamin Papa and Rev. Bill Metzger
May 22, 2005 – Religious Education Sunday
Ben: This morning we celebrate our children and youth religious education program here at First UU. And we have much to celebrate – we have an active RE Committee that is deeply engaged in the creation of a Learning Objectives Guidebook that will likely chart the course for our programming for years to come. We have an extraordinary number of teachers who have gone above and beyond to create meaningful experiences for our kids in the RE classroom. We can celebrate the fact that our kids are demanding quality content from us. They are not content to simply “hang out.” They want to know what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist in the world. Parents are increasingly interested in what we do in religious education, committing themselves at a new level to insure that they bring their kids to church and to try to integrate what we do in church with what happens at home. Indeed, we do have much to celebrate about our RE program.
There is an interesting underlying question that begs to be answered nonetheless. How do we know we are getting it right in our religious education program anyway? What can we look to in order to assess whether or not our religious education program – indeed how we think about religious education from the ground up – is working for our kids? What does it look like when it is done well? What are the observable outcomes?
Bill: Let’s identify four major objectives of Unitarian Universalist religious education. First of all we come together to celebrate… We celebrate our relationships with each other, and we celebrate that we have this wonderful church community. We also celebrate the meaningful events in our lives, including days like this one in which we honor the RE program and all the children and adults who are part of it. We celebrate that we are together here, and that we can learn from each other. That is the ground on which we come together and make ourselves available to learn together.
Of course the RE program also is aimed at helping us to understand our religious heritage. But what makes us different from so many other churches is that we seek to understand more religious traditions than our own. We are just a small part of the religious world, and while we want to learn about our own Unitarian and Universalist religious roots, and we want to treasure those roots, we also want to know about the larger traditions that we grew from and other religious traditions as well. That means we want to know about Jewish traditions and Christian traditions and Buddhist traditions and Islamic traditions. That is what might be called the content of the religious education program.
As we learn about our religious heritage and others, we become increasingly aware of the diversity of this world and we develop our values. We want to help each other to discover what is important in life. We want to learn how to value each other’s unique contributions to the world, and to develop a commitment to work with others to make the world better. We seek to learn about the importance of being kind and helpful to each other and doing good works in the world.
As we grow in our knowledge and values, we are also developing a sense of self-worth. We know that despite our differences, and perhaps we could say because of our differences, we come to know that each of us is a valuable human being. We discover through being together and becoming more aware of how people are different, that those differences can sometimes divide us from each other, but that through our differences we can also enrich each other. We learn, in other words, that we belong together. We learn how we belong to the universe and to life itself, and how differences can actually make the world better.
As we go along through life we discover that it can be a lot of fun, but we also discover that it can be difficult and challenging, too. And we learn to see that this is okay, too. Challenges make life interesting, and if we develop our sense of self-worth, and develop values through our relationships with each other, and we learn about different ways that other people may think about religion and values, and we keep remembering to celebrate, we can have a very good life.
Ben: Like all institutions, Unitarian Universalist religious education has its strong and weak points. It seems to me that we have two important things going for us here at First UU in terms of our RE program. First, we do a great job helping our kids understand that how we are together as religious people – the way we treat each other, the way we care for one another, is indispensable to a healthy religious identity. From this recognition flows a strong emphasis in nearly all UU RE curricula on community-building and social justice. We’re getting that part right.
Second, we have inherited a pretty amazing idea for a religious identity. What we offer our kids is an open-minded religion that is based on a set of ethical and theological principles that are firmly grounded in the Jewish and Christian traditions, but that also draw from all of the world religions as well as the tenets of religious humanism. When we are at our best, we are free from the prejudice that too often masquerades as religion, focusing instead on how to make the world a better place for everyone. We allow for religious questioning and for finding a wide variety of answers to those questions. We have an idea that has true potential to transform lives. We need to continue to build on these strong points and insure that we don’t lose ground in these areas.
My three years as a professional religious educator in this congregation has led me to offer three very concrete suggestions of things we can do to make our religious education program even better. First, we need to bring our kids to church every Sunday that it is possible to do so. The fact is that it doesn’t matter what curriculum we use, how well prepared our teachers are, how fun or intellectually stimulating the lesson. If the kids are not here – and I don’t mean only occasionally – then nothing we do in RE class is going to make a difference in their lives. They simply have to be here. I am willing to go out on a limb and say that means that parents may need to help make that happen rather than letting the kids choose if they want to come. This may be an instance where father (or mother) knows best. We certainly don’t let our kids decide if they want to go to school for 35 or 40 hours a week because we know it is in their best interest to have an education. Maybe it is also in their best interest to be at church for an hour or so every week in order to build a spiritual and religious foundation from which they will build for the rest of their lives.
My second suggestion is that our children, and especially our junior and senior high youth, need to attend the Sunday morning worship on a regular basis. It is no mystery to me why so many of our kids graduate from UU RE programs and never become involved in Unitarian Universalist congregations as adults. They have little more context for being a UU adult than they do an adult member of any other tradition because we do not encourage them to experience the community at large. Lindsay Bennett-Jacobs, our Youth Ministry Coordinator, and I have been working with parents, teachers, and youth for the last couple of years to find a balance between the need for our youth to develop relationships with each other, and the need to develop UU identity from participating in worship, singing our hymns, hearing the sermons, listening to the community’s joys & concerns. We need to realize that part of our work in RE includes preparing our kids to create a religious home in the larger congregation after they graduate from high school.
Last, but certainly not least, as parents we need to talk about theology, spirituality, and religion at home with our kids. When we take the time to sort the recycling, we need to make sure our kids know that we are doing so, at least in part, because of our belief in the interdependent web of all existence. When we pledge to church at a level that means that we give up other things in our lives, our kids need to know that we are doing so because we believe in the transcendent power of this community and its work. As parents, we need to make it our business to find out what is happening in the RE classroom and to find ways to reinforce those lessons at home. That is how our kids are going to feel like UU’s. That is how they are going to graduate from our RE programs to construct lives that are built on Unitarian Universalist principles. And that, my friends, is how we are going to save the world.
Although I will be working as DRE through the end of June, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the opportunity to have served you as Director of Religious Education for the last three years. You have been a blessing and your kids have been a blessing. I am proud of the work we have done together and I look forward to watching this program continue to flourish in the years to come.
Blessed Be.