From Rev. Karen Gustafson: October 16, 2020

For as long as I can remember, I have had a curiosity about the complexity of things. Not just exotic things like works of art or airplanes or chocolate eclair and bone china, but ordinary, everyday things like screws and pencils and traffic signs. When my children were just into their double digit ages, we used to play a game in the car on road trips. We would pick something, like the knobs on the car radio (this was in the days of knobs – look it up) and we would try to name everything that went into the creation and production of that particular object. It started with a perceived need. Cars need radios. There needs to be a way to turn them on, etc. Then we might turn to that particular knob and all of the processes and decisions, designers and workers and decision makers that went into making it and getting it into our particular car. A designer, a design; decisions about color and size and materials and how it fit into the dashboard design. Someone designed and made a machine that would produce that very knob and install it in a factory where workers were employed etc., etc., etc.

I think about that game whenever I hear someone say something akin to, “I HATE the radio knobs on my car dash…” Where, I wonder, did the piece of the process that made that knob become the source of someone’s dissatisfaction? How is it that the outcome of a process so complex and in some way so miraculous become the object of judgment and critical reaction? What complex process has led any of us to the impression that our judgments and our dissatisfaction should somehow become the rallying point for how something is understood?

My interest in such things extends into how I understand my ministry at UCE. For the past year, I have been engaged in looking at the complex and often miraculous processes by which the staff, the elected leadership, the lay leadership and all of the other kinds of stake holders at UCE engage in the process of “making church”. Unlike the production of a radio knob, there is no concrete and single outcome. The moving parts are not, in fact, made of metal and plastic but of hopes and dreams and mission and hundreds and hundreds of human connections and isolated and shared decisions. My job has been to look with you at the ways you organize those parts to fill the needs for which they were intended; to hold up a mirror and to provide and encourage constructive feedback that might make the systems more accessible and inviting and the perceived outcomes more understandable.

In a few weeks, I will be meeting with the Ministerial Search Committee to share my observations. By next week, there will be an updated interim report available on the UCE website detailing the “progress” we have made together in addressing some of the observed challenges and the Interim Tasks and what we will be inviting you to do in the coming months.

In the meantime, I would invite you into the “car game” as you consider your dissatisfactions and judgments as well as your joys and appreciations of anything you perceive as an outcome at UCE…the time of the service, the color of the new tile in the foyer or the choice of hymns or the budget or the process for selection of your next settled minister. If you have not been a designer or a machinist or a line worker in these decisions, try to follow the process back and engage in some real curiosity about the complexity and the miracle of this dynamic and life giving entity that is UCE. Consider the hours and hours of meetings and research and the daily choices, large and small. Miracle, indeed.

I would love to hear from you!

In love and gratitude,

Karen