ADULT RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
We all have an inherent inner teacher, whose wisdom will reveal itself if given the space and encouragement. My ministry strives to create a culture of adult learning that recognizes the wisdom of the inner teacher, where silence is as valued as speaking, and where compassion is as important as instruction.
Learning never ends—we are constantly unfolding. There are various types of learning that happen in religious community. There is self-learning, in which we grow our soul and expand our understanding of ourselves and our inner workings. There is factual learning, in which we learn new information about the world, about history, about our faith and our community. Then there is communal learning, that learning we do together, in which we explore questions like: who are we as a people? What is our purpose as a community? All these types of learning are important, and need to be balanced in a healthy congregation.
From 2012-2013, I led a weekly meditation group at Starr King UU Church in Hayward, California. Every Wednesday evening our small group gathered for an hour. We spent the first ten minutes connecting with one another as we arrived and put down the various pieces of our days we had carried in with us. Then for 20 minutes, we learned about the history of meditation, its various forms, benefits, and purposes. Then we put down the information, and spent 20 minutes practicing. I taught them a
Meditation Group
Soul Work
variety of different forms of meditation. We tried a new form every month, with the understanding that different forms work for different people. Over the course of those years, everyone in the group eventually found the form that worked for them. Several group members became daily practitioners, expanding their practice through even deeper learning.
Small Group Ministry
Working with my Transition Team at Third Unitarian Church, I developed a small group ministry program based on the Soul Matters Sharing Circle program from the Unitarian Universalist Association. The small groups dive deeply into the monthly worship themes, exploring their meaning through reading, reflection, and spiritual practice. Once a month, they get together and share their reflection on the themes with one another. I trained the facilitators for three of these small groups, and I am facilitating the fourth. An example of one of the packets the groups use is available here; and a sample agenda for the monthly gathering is available here.
Expanding Our Knowledge Base
Curriculum on UU History
We also learn new information in adult religious education, expanding our knowledge base about our faith tradition, its history, and the world around us.
In my work in a variety of Unitarian Universalist communities (and in the world more generally), I have noticed we sometimes forget our history, even though it continues to shape and inform our culture today. Sometimes people think history is boring, but it depends on how you approach it. In order to address this knowledge gap in a way that is fun and engaging, I created an interactive curriculum on Unitarian Universalist history.
You can click here to download a PDF of the curriculum.
Communal Learning
Beloved Conversations
In communal learning, we offer ourselves to one another as teachers and students. As a community, we ask questions like: who are we as a people? And whose are we as a people? What is our purpose as a community? What is our place in the family of things?
At Unity Church-Unitarian, in St Paul, Minnesota, I facilitated the curriculum Beloved Conversations. Beloved Conversations is a curriculum that facilitates conversations about race,
faith, and ethnicity in a way that engenders joy. Over the course of 6 weeks, we built relationships through participants’ story-sharing and learning about different experiences of race and ethnicity. We had three congregations collaborating in the sessions: Unity Church; Above Every Name, a new, young, non-traditional African American Pentecostal church; and Morningstar Baptist, a more traditional, older African American Baptist Church. I co-facilitated these conversations with Pastor Danny Givens, the minister of Above Every Name. As the conversations unfolded, Pastor Givens and I worked with the author of the curriculum, Meadville Lombard's Professor Mark Hicks, to adapt it to the particular experience of the participants: we made the sessions more multicultural, and more accessible responsive to the needs of our communities.
Racism and oppression are structural and systemic, and have patterns of effects in peoples’ lives. However, their individual effects are diverse because axes of power intersect and interact with one another, which changes the experience and effects of power. Therefore, individual experiences may not exactly match the over-arching patterns. When people are first learning about patterns of privilege and oppression, they sometimes point to these individual variations as evidence that negates the pattern. Inviting our congregants’ whole stories and whole selves as the text of the curriculum helped people see the patterns in their real, lived complexity. My ministry through the Beloved Conversations process at Unity dealt with this struggle through focusing on stories and relationships. Humans learn best through stories, and in this process we all provided ourselves and our stories to one another for a shared learning experience.
The relationships, and therefore the learning and growing, continued beyond the hours of the curriculum. People felt deeply connected to one another. One of the congregations, Above Every Name, rented space from Unity, and met in their sanctuary on Sunday afternoons. During the Conversations, the coffee hour between the two services began to change. People started greeting each other, hugging, laughing, holding each other’s babies. A few members of the two congregations started attending each other’s services. The Beloved Conversations made slow shifts in the congregations’ culture—little eddies in the cultural iceberg. By the time the Conversations were over, the congregations had strong relationships that are still alive today. Now they are doing racial justice work together in the Twin Cities, collaborating with such love and strength that they are making national headlines.
You can download a PDF of the first four sessions of the curriculum here.