Born Again and Again

Ideally, membership in a congregation should affirm us while inviting us into the process of spiritual growth that lies at the heart of conversion. To be affirmed for who we are is to have our own inherent worth acknowledged. It is to experience the reliability of the horizontal dimension of the covenant. To seek a change in the direction of our lives is to open ourselves to the essential, creative, transforming power present in the spiritual community. When conversion becomes implicit rather than explicit, we become less adept at facilitating spiritual change (or spiritual direction) than we need to be. This may be why many people come to Unitarian Universalism with great expectations only to eventually leave wondering, “Is that all there is?”

In contemporary Unitarian Universalism conversion becomes implicit when the emphasis of covenant shifts from the vertical to the horizontal dimension. Our 1985 Principles and Purposes deal mostly with horizontal relationships and obligations because this is the dimension in which we have been able to forge a consensus. Since we cannot agree on the terminus of the vertical dimension, this dimension, through our silence, has been flattened. As this has happened, we have moved in the direction of what Adams called a “kept” religion, one that has taken the transcendent into its possession as a means of domesticating (or annihilating) ultimate commitment. The function of the “kept” God was to do our bidding rather than to command our lives.

Without the vertical dimension, the transforming power necessary for conversion is gone, as is the motivation to convert. In spiritual terms, this motivation involves “the desire for more,” a felt connection with the transcendent, or a hunger for a unitive experience. Regardless of one’s theological persuasion, recovering conversion as a process of spiritual development requires a reconstruction of the vertical dimension. We do not live by bread alone, and whether we are atheist, theist, humanist, Christian, neo-pagan or agnostic, we cannot achieve authentic religious community based on a covenant reduced to only a horizontal dimension. When aspiring to the lowest common denominator effectively eliminates the vertical dimension, we must realize that we have gone too far. The pain that we avoid by ignoring our theological differences is much less than the joy we have foregone or the energy that we have misused. The six sources of our faith associated with the principles eloquently articulate the vertical dimensions that inform our faith, sources that are worthy of our loyalty. Which one or more of these sources command your loyalty?

In “resurrecting” conversion as a valid and valuable process of religious growth in our congregations, we will need to find effective ways of creating, nurturing, and honoring diverse vertical commitments. We will also need to make the process of conversion more explicit in our worship, religious education, and social action. The growing emphasis of Unitarian Universalist identity in our religious education curricula is a significant step in making the implicit explicit. A lot more work is necessary to respond effectively to the needs of those who seek a deeper and broader religious commitment.

As we work on making conversion explicit, we will find that the number of people interested and willing to “convert” will represent a minority. The New England distinction between parish and church is instructive in this regard. The membership (or constituency of members and friends) of a congregation forms its “parish” (not as a geographical designation but as an associational one). The “church” comprises those members who seek to go deeper in their faith, to enter into a gradual and continuous process of conversion. The reason for using this model is not to create two classes of membership within a congregation. It is to remind us that the religious needs of the “parish” are different than those of the “church” and that we need to be intentional about ministering to both sets of needs.