Means to Our Ends
As I’ve found to be the case elsewhere, in speaking with UCEvians
during my time so far here, I’ve 
learned that familiarity with core congregational documents varies widely. I’m a good example: while it is actually my job to know about policies and protocols, I have been by necessity learning about them over time – where to find them, what exactly they say, and how to implement them. As we engage in our pledge drive this month, I thought it might be appropriate to share here some of what I’ve been coming to understand about our Ends Statements (https://ucevanston.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/endstatements.pdf; for general information about principles of policy governance, under which UCE operates, I recommend this UUA site: https://www.uua.org/leadership/learning-center/governance/policybased/articles/63172.shtml).
Specifically, I’ve thinking deeply about the part of our ends statement laid to the charge of our Lifespan Learning Council:
In our multigenerational community . . . We foster intellectual excitement, lifelong learning, truth seeking, and respect for our traditions of reason and faith.
As staff lead for this council, it falls to me to write an annual monitoring report on our congregation’s compliance with this particular end. As I’ve been urged by Jeanne Kerl, our beloved board president, to write three newsletter contributions drawing on my most recent Ends Monitoring Report for End 2, I think it makes sense to begin with my interpretation of this assigned end – a required component of my annual report. I’ve run this past our coordinator for the Learning Associates who put together our Tuesday Night Adult RE Series, Dan Solomon, and our chair for the Children & Youth Program Team, Sue Larson, and they have both reassured me that this is indeed what we intend to be about in our work together:
When we say we are a multigenerational community, it means we seek to be in relationship and build community across the lifespan. It means we seek connection and belonging in a community where people of every age are in conversation with one another, in respectful, age-appropriate ways, about our diverse life and spiritual journeys. And it means that our congregation offers events and other opportunities specifically designed to foster such multigenerational conversations. Multigenerational community is about more than lifelong learning – i.e., an individual’s serial learning from birth through death. It is also about lifespan learning, or collaborative learning across generations.
When we say we foster intellectual excitement, it means we seek to nurture eagerness for understanding. Understanding is about far more than information or content delivery; it involves integration of new knowledge with prior learning, even sometimes re-learning what we have misunderstood or understood incompletely. In order to foster excitement, or eagerness to learn, we seek to help learners retain or rediscover their sense of awe and wonder in the everyday, imminent miracles of the world and universe, as well as their joy in discovery.
When we say we foster lifelong learning, it means we seek to nurture and sustain development of spiritual practices and habits of mind that will support the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom throughout the lifespan.
When we say we foster truth seeking, it means we seek to nurture and sustain community members of every age in habits of both perspective-taking and critical thinking that will help them weigh varying viewpoints and come to complex truths that resonate in mind, body, and spirit.
When we say we foster respect for our traditions of reason and faith, it means we seek to offer members of every age opportunities to encounter bodies of knowledge about our denominational principles and sources, the history of our prophetic thinkers, and the covenants and traditions of our congregational community. It also means we seek to honor logical truth, the truth of our observations, and the truth of our inward experiences and convictions, making room for all of these facets in individual and congregational life.
With regard to how our ends statements are mapped in our bylaws onto our congregational councils and their respective staff leads, let us be thoughtful about how our religious education curricula and practices are holistically understood across the span of our ends statements. Let us take care that our religious education programs are creating joy and wonder through music and the arts; that they are building beloved community through inclusive welcome, compassion, care, generosity, and forgiveness; that they are developing relationships that open us to our congregation, community, and world; and that they support us in acting for peace and justice through study, advocacy, and outreach. Let us foster thoroughgoing collaboration across councils, and among staff leads, in order for excellence in religious education to be fostered in multigenerational community. Let us bring one another into greater understanding that the whole community is necessary to fostering lifespan religious education, and that our truest curriculum resides in everything we do here.
I hope it’s helpful for folks to see my articulated understanding of the work of religious education and what it entails here at UCE. My thought is that this interpretation should function sort of like a congregational philosophy of teaching. In the last paragraph directly above, I am trying to caution us against a pitfall that I have seen too clearly in my former profession as a an academic: turfiness. I think of the issue of turf as being highly relevant not only to our pledge drive, but also to covenantal relationships within our beloved community. It is so important that we learn not to defend our turf, but to share it, and share it, and share it, until it becomes unrecognizable as turf at all, and becomes something more like the shared ground of our being. Religious Education cannot succeed if Worship does not, if Social Justice does not, if Stewardship and Membership do not. I would also venture to say that none of these can succeed without Lifespan Learning. We are all in this together, beloveds. Moreover, our young people are watching us. They are learning all the time about what it means to be a UU in how we treat one another. They are never not learning this from us. Indeed, we are all of us always learning this from one another. Let us take care, dear ones. Let us, most of all – whatever our worries or disagreements – show one another loving kindness. When we forget, let us begin again. This is how we nurture the human spirit for a world made whole. Let it begin with me.