2013 Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Donald Robinson

Our Ministry Begins When We Leave This Place (We CAN do More)
193rd Ministerial
Delivered by Reverend Donald E. Robinson
Louisville, KY
June 19, 2013

Humbling Experience

Good afternoon. I want to thank the individual that offered
my name to the committee. I thank the
committee for choosing me to speak here this afternoon. I find this a humbling
experience. Hopefully, I will say something
that will aid the denomination as a religious institution and be beneficial to
us all.

With regard to the Berry Street
meetings, William Ellery Channing stated “Liberal and catholic views of
Christianity needed a bond of union, a means of intercourse, and an opportunity
of conference.” It was Channing’s view that the objective was not simply the
advancement of peculiar views, but the general diffusion of practical religion and the spirit of
Christianity.[1] In
my attempt to align what I am speaking about here today with the history of the
Berry Street Lectures, the word “practical”[2] and the
spirit of Christianity struck deep cords within me. I have concluded that Dr. Channing wanted the
liberal churches to become more actively engaged with their communities and our
country ─ and that our creed needs to be lived as well as preached.

Introduction

With this backdrop in mind, I will be
talking about practical ways to live
out the Christian message to love our neighbor. I will be sharing with you
today my experiences and practical recommendations on how to re-focus our
Unitarian Universalist (UU) ministry to fortify, support, and improve how we
approach and serve vulnerable youth and communities experiencing crisis. I believe that our objectives in helping communities and people of need must be
focused, based on long-term commitments, doggedly determined, and implemented
with respect and dignity toward those we seek to assist.

Today I will share with you some of my
personal journeys in becoming a Unitarian Universalist (UU), a UU community
minister, and the development of my vocation as evidenced by the founding of
Beacon House Community Ministry, Inc.
This is of importance because it explains why I see such an urgency to
address the problems faced by vulnerable communities, why we must forge a
unified approach to address these challenges, and how my experiences may
provide a template for others to build their Beacon House.

My presentation will continue with the
urgency of action (why it is now!), when our ministry begins, and why we have
an obligation to do more. I will then tell you about my “more” called Beacon House Community Ministry, Inc. My specific experiences and insights with
Beacon House may serve to help you
in developing your community ministry projects.
Lastly, I will present some background information on the urban ministry
experience and how our UU congregations can help people to develop their
missions, their vocations ─ the prophetic imperative (beyond the church walls).

Sources for
Commitment: My Personal Journey

My youthful experiences taught me the
highs and the lows of being vulnerable and at the mercy of circumstances. I learned survival, caring and the necessity
to help others. Unconsciously, I was
learning the core values that would eventually form the basis of my religious
beliefs. Consciously, however, I didn’t
think any organized religion was for me.

I began my life in the West Virginia
coal fields of the late 1930s. At the
time, the business of coal mining was structured around the “company town.”[3] Everything was owned by the company: the grocery store, our homes, the land under
our feet, and the coal mines. In the
eyes of the company, families were there for one reason — to produce corporate
profit. The human being was of
importance for only this purpose. Often,
this was a grinding existence for the coal miners and their families. The 1930s
were hard economic years. The great
depression started in 1929. For these
years and many more, opportunities for THE POOR, ESPECIALLY PEOPLE of color
were not in abundance. Around 1950, our
coal mine closed; then families were put on notice that they had to leave the
hollow. As a result, my father became unemployed. Our family had to relocate.

When we left this company town, my family moved to an area only a little
larger than this hotel. I was puzzled as
to why, in such a small town, we had to have two Baptist churches ─ one black
and one white serving the same God. I
tried to connect to various churches as a child, a teenager, and later as an
adult, but I found Sunday school boring.
As an adult, I found the ministers to be too other worldly and not
enough of the here and now (this worldly). If this was religion, I reasoned, it
wasn’t for me. It was boring, it was
segregated, and it was isolated from day-to-day life.

I changed my mind when the Holy
Spirits (both male and female[4])
led Meredith Higgins, my classmate in graduate school and a member of All Souls
Unitarian Universalist Church[5]
in Washington, DC, to introduce me to the Unitarian Universalist denomination
and I thank them and her. While I was in
graduate school working on a degree in Counseling Psychology, Meredith asked me
if I would come to her church, All Souls, to help her with the high school
Religious Education Program. Although I
knew nothing of the Unitarian Universalist denomination, I said yes. I became hooked that first Sunday.

What hooked me was that the church was
well integrated in terms of both ethnicity and sexual orientation. As I have
heard Rev. Robert M. Hardies, current All Souls UU minister say, “we’re about all souls not some souls.”
People of different ethnic groups were in administrative and leadership
positions. The sermon was short and
dealt with problems of the here and now. The music was outstanding and the
fellowship wonderful. I thought “this must be what heaven will be like.” I admit, I was impressed by the ministry of
All Souls, but over time, I learned not all our UU congregations were so well
integrated or as involved in the wider community surrounding their churches (as
All Souls did back then).

As a denomination, we have plenty of
room to grow. We CAN reach out more
effectively. We CAN become more involved, and today I am going to share with
you my thoughts about how we best can do that.

First, let me tell you what I did. From
my growing UU involvement, my life’s mission emerged. I decided to attend divinity school because I
was determined to begin a community ministry program in an inner-city
neighborhood in the District of Columbia; I believed an ordained minister would
be better received by the community than a layperson beginning such a program. Someone asked me once what would stop me from
following my dream. I said, “Death, me
dying!”

Becoming an ordained Unitarian
Universalist minister, with the intention of serving a community rather than a
congregation, was not easy. To become
ordained, I had to complete a successful internship. Securing the internship with a UU church
proved more difficult than I had expected.
I met some resistance within the Unitarian Universalist churches. The
opposition appeared to take the form of resistance to the community ministry
concept. I eventually received the help
of Sarah Campbell (now Sarah York and the Moderator here this afternoon); at
the time, Rev. Campbell was the Senior Minister of the Unitarian Universalist
Congregation of Rockville, Maryland. She
and her congregation welcomed me with open arms. I secured an internship there, and after
completion, I became ordained at All Souls church in June 1990. I have the distinction of being the first
Unitarian Universalist Minister who was ordained into community ministry.

Later, when I opened Beacon House, the
Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville would prove even more helpful with
my community ministry. They believed in my undertaking. They went with me to
the people who were facing severe hardships.
They volunteered, helped with Saturday programs, and provided financial
support. Other Unitarian Universalist churches around the Washington, DC,
beltway also began to share my vision, to assist, and to become involved in the
mission.

As I now stand here today speaking at
the Berry Street lecture, perhaps you can understand why it is so difficult for
me to find the right words of gratitude.
In the more than twenty years since I first had my vision of a community
ministry, I’ve come a very long way to the point where I can share my own story
as what, I hope, will be an inspiration
and possibly a road map for others. I
believe my journey was guided by the hands of higher beings for a purpose, as this voyage of mine
has filled me with a particular viewpoint about how to be of support to those
facing the greatest deprivations in our country today.

An Analysis: The Urgency of Action

It has struck me that we don’t have
Unitarian Universalist congregations, at all, in some of the areas in this
country with the greatest needs, and
my thoughts on this matter were further heightened, last July, when I listened
to Bill Moyer’s interview with Chris Hedges about the graphic novel “Days of
Destruction, Days of Revolt” that Hedges published with Joe Sacco on capitalism’s
“sacrifice zones.” Chris Hedges has
defined sacrifice zones as areas in this country where Americans are trapped in
endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of
corporate greed. And although our
inner-city communities are some the worst examples, sacrifice zones are not
restricted to urban locations. Rural America also suffers. My childhood-coal-producing company town was
a sacrifice zone, and much of West Virginia still is.

While my earlier upbringing and
experiences had already sensitized me to the needs of people who live in our
country’s “sacrifice zones,” my work as a Washington, DC, teacher and
counselor, prior to my becoming a community minister and beginning Beacon
House, further raised my awareness of poverty and need.

I
saw some sad things as I worked with the children of DC. One of the sights that touched me most was
when I saw two children, about four years of age, sitting on the curb one morning eating
someone else’s discarded French Fries from the gutter. I suspect the rats had shared them earlier
that morning. I’ve seen children buy a
twenty-five cent bag of chips and then share that small bag with four or five
of their friends. Each may have gotten
only one chip. No matter how small a
thing they had, they shared what they had today because tomorrow was
unknown. They knew that later on, one or
another of the group would have something to share. Sharing meant more chances to have something
in one’s belly.

The first victims are the children. Youth are at the top of the list FOR BEING AT
THE BOTTOM. Child poverty[6]
has increased even as the amount of food we throw away (as a nation) has
reached embarrassing levels. We have
unsupervised youngsters while parents work multiple jobs. We have hungry and homeless children. We have uneducated, sick and neglected
children.

In living out our creeds, the central
issue goes beyond the evils of slavery, bigotry, Jim Crow laws, and
segregation. While these various evils
have been part of our American society and accepted and often promoted by
federal, state, and local governments, the underlying game plan is the
orchestrated war against the weakest by the most powerful. Why? For
Greed, for Power, and for Dominion (GPD)! It’s not Gross National Product (GNP),[7]
it is Greed, Power, Dominion! Methods of
exploitation have been refined, aggregated, aggressively funded and pursued;
and, more importantly, the targets of
manipulation no longer consist of just the usual cast of characters,
i.e. the poor black, the poor Hispanic, the poor white. It has expanded to the middle class; we all
need to understand that we are ALL in peril.

I tell you, there is much for
Unitarian Universalists to do. There are
numerous ways we can serve communities in crisis. We must be sharp; we have to be relentless;
it is essential to show a loving spirit in our approaches; and necessary to be
in the actual communities we seek to assist.
The denomination requires a presence working in cities, the suburbs, and the rural areas where there are
great hardships.

As Chris Hedges notes, corporations
are in these “sacrifice zones” using the people in these areas and then
abandoning them. Unitarian Universalists
need to be in these zones helping people to lift themselves up and out of that
corporate abuse or abandonment. Hedges
said, “Greed. It’s greed over human life.
And it’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal
enrichment to destroy human beings.
That’s a common thread. We, in that biblical term, forgot our neighbor.”[8] Unitarian Universalists must to be in
these areas showing that we have not forgotten; that we are neighbors.

In my opinion, often we UUs don’t see
ourselves as having much in common with many of the people who live in our
country’s sacrifice zones. But, these
people are our neighbors, and we need to find our commonalities with them for
our own sake as well as for theirs. When
we view others as different from us, it makes it easier to ignore their
problems. Their trials and tribulations, however, eventually become our
problems. Finding the commonalties ties
into the concept that we are our brothers and sisters’ keepers and that our
survival rests upon love of one another.
Finding this love starts with finding our commonalities. Doing so would enable us to live out our
Unitarian Universalist principles and our American ideals. As Rosemary Bray McNatt wrote and I quote:

“The truth is this: If there is no justice, there will be no peace. We can read Thoreau and
Emerson to one another, quote Rilke and Alice Walker and Howard Thurman, and
think good things about ourselves. But if we cannot bring justice into the
small circle of our own individual lives, we cannot bring justice to the world.
And if we do not bring justice to the world, none of us is safe and none will
survive. Nothing that Unitarian Universalists need to do is more important than
making justice real—-here, where we are. Hard as diversity is, it is our most
important task.”
[9]

Martin Luther King, Jr., also warned us
about injustices and said we must live together as brothers and sisters or
perish as fools.[10]

We don’t all have to pack our bags and
travel to the sacrifice zones of the
inner city, the hollows of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Indian reservation — the poor or
nearly poor are all around and among us.
Sacrifice zones may have the greatest challenges, but the struggle we
are talking about is increasingly going on within communities that appear well
off.

In 2008, after seeing a television
news clip about Beacon House, a woman from the District of Columbia suburbs who
was working in a school system in Maryland wrote to me saying, “Our community needs a place like Beacon
House to help our students after school…I really want to explore the
possibility of setting up an afterschool program for our students so they can
have a safe and stable place to be
.”
Many of the children in her school were very young latchkey
children. Many were not from well-to-do families.
These are youngsters living in one of the richest DC suburbs, Montgomery
County, Maryland; too often, their poverty and needs go unseen. However, this teacher recognized that county
riches aside, these children needed an after-school program just as much as my
urban kids. There are places of great
destitution in this nation. To find
these areas of need, we must leave the pew and go out into the community. We have to be in the community to see, feel, and understand what we can do and
how.

Then Our Ministry
Begins

When
we leave our worship services and come in contact with those that require our
support outside the doors of our edifices, when we go out into the communities
and volunteer in a school, at a recreation center, etc., where there are great
challenges, and we do something about those challenges ─then our ministry begins.

Now,
I have seen how much we UUs do for those who seek assistance, face major
issues, fall within the cracks of society, and are the victims of oppressive
practices. We have prison ministries; we
work with homeless shelters and soup kitchens; we form committees to tackle
social justice issues; we form legislative ministries, global justice
initiatives, mentoring and environmental projects; we partner with other
organizations with similar objectives; we educate ourselves about the problems
we face; we provide meeting space for unpopular causes; and we donate
money. These are all good. While we do a lot, I am saying that we can
still do more by reaching out directly to at-risk communities, youth, and
families.

My focus is about us, going to
the people (where they live, work, love and raise their families) and investing
residents with the tools, information, and resources to help themselves. In collaborating with at-risk residents and
communities, our goals should be to create an ongoing domino effect of
generational self-empowerment and improvement.
The way to implement this is through committed, on-the-ground service to
challenged people. The prerequisite is
the establishment of programs that require us to be there all day and evenings, getting to know the people and them getting
to know and TRUST us. Trust is so
important because people in the sacrifice zones have been exploited and
abandoned too many times. Their first
thought about a new program coming into their community is how long will this
last ‒ this time?

We cannot, in good conscience, limit ourselves
to simply educating ourselves about the significant struggles of others. Being aware of the problems and doing
little-to-nothing is unacceptable. We
must serve those at-risk and in crisis; we must witness to others about
victimization; we must determine how we can serve others so their needs can be
addressed; and establish how we can provide support for the poor and others in
challenged communities and circumstances.

It is critical that we add our
influences to the voices of communities of the poor as they organize to protect
themselves. The devices and methods used
to keep poor people disadvantaged are complex, tangled, organized,
orchestrated, and unrelenting. Our
ministry cannot be solely on Sunday; far from it, the ministry actually must
begin as soon as we leave our gathering places.

We cannot wall our congregations off
from the oppression and ill-treatment of the people around us and truly be
spiritual communities. Parishioners in
Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia were not afraid to be with the people in the killing field
where Beacon House was founded; nor should you be afraid! Help a child in a school near your
church. Start athletic programs and
science and math projects, etc. Be
collaborative, leverage resources, and work in partnership with each other and
the community. Decide you are going to
help, decide you will not be deterred, and it will occur.

This
outreach should not be, as it so often has been, a ministry of only individuals
or even of congregations working each one by itself. Reaching beyond our sanctuary walls should be
a ministry of our congregations working regionally with one another in ever
expanding areas as well as the
denomination enabling our association of congregations to work together as a whole so that feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, welcoming strangers, visiting the elderly, helping a child with homework, reading to
young children, etc., is not just what individual Unitarian Universalists do on
their own or what this congregation
or that congregation does but what
we all do together.

An Example: Establishing Beacon House Community Ministry,
Inc.

Let me tell you how the congregations around
the D.C. beltway came together to serve children at Beacon House Community
Ministry. Since its inception, Beacon
House has been supported by the UU congregations and their members in the DC
metropolitan area. I hope its
establishment and successes serve as an example and that similar affiliations
for community ministry will grow all over the country.

The number one thing to remember is that launching and achieving an
operational program requires a lot of help, a lot of buy-in, a lot of commitment,
a lot of understanding. Effectiveness
involves partnerships, coalitions, networks, and organized work teams. It’s not a one-person or a one-group
initiative. Community ministry cannot be
successful without the collaboration and empowerment of the community
residents.

In addition, specific knowledge is
helpful. I was at an advantage in
knowing the community I was serving. I
had experiences working as a fifth grade teacher for the District of Columbia
school system, working as a teacher/counselor at the Receiving Home for
Children (a juvenile jail facility), and working in a community setting
providing onsite social work services to families in their direct
neighborhood. In these positions, I
witnessed firsthand the terrible impact of poverty and despair on children,
their families, and neighborhoods at large.

My work as a Community Youth Counselor
gave me knowledge about some of the worst neighborhoods in the District, all of
which were low income, public-housing communities. All were havens that served as open-air drug
markets and magnets for crime. All the
social ills of our society could be found in these neighborhoods. I
often thought why these conditions had to exist in the wealthiest nation on
earth. Why! Why! Was it Greed, Power, Dominion! Was this the only reason? And why must these environments persist?

Scores of residents had little
expectation that their lives would improve.
Despair and lack of hope killed ambition and fostered the drug trade as
well as other criminal activities. As
you might suspect, many residents unsuccessfully struggled to secure
sustainable employment. Nonetheless,
even in the middle of such horrendous conditions, there were residents who
wanted to make their communities better places to live. These residents of Edgewood Terrace, the
Unitarian Universalist churches (UUCs), and I found each other and we formed a
partnership to confront the community evils and to help the most innocent
victims – the children.

Specifically, with the assistance of
several of the older residents known as the Resident’s One Tenant Association
(ROTA), the Edgewood neighborhood was put on a path of renewal. This effort took a long time, and it does
take the whole village. As a result,
the ROTA members, the Unitarian Universalist churches (UUCs), and I began
Beacon House in the early 1990s as a Unitarian Universalist program. At the same time, I started visiting the area
Unitarian Universalists churches, getting speaking engagements whenever I
could. Through these appearances at the
suburban UU churches, I was able to attract a group of volunteers who served as
tutors, board members, and eventually financial donors. Bob Johnsen, a member of River Road UU Church
and a Community Organizer, pointed the way that we should go, and we did. These volunteers helped to get us
incorporated as a tax exempt non-for-profit corporation eligible to receive
grants and donations. All Souls UUC
became our fiscal agent. I never
accepted cash, only checks and money orders after speaking in a church.

Please note that Beacon House does not
promote any form of religious dogma.
Even though Beacon House Community Ministry has “ministry” in its title, it is not a faith-based organization. Ministry
as used in the organization’s title refers to the work that we do; namely, we
minister to families and children in the community. Ministry,
in this sense, means providing service. Ministry here is being a servant to the people.

Since its inception, Beacon House has
been supported by the UU congregations and their members in the D.C.
metropolitan area and beyond. Church
members from the suburbs physically walked into the community reaching out to
children and adults. There have been
several significant accomplishments: one
has been to support children academically and the other has been to break the
myths that each held about the other.
Suburban white people began to review and challenge their thoughts about
black children and young adults. They
came to understand that all black children and young adults were not bad. Blacks learned that all white people were not
negative toward them, and if given an opportunity, genuinely wanted to
help. This, to me, was monumental and influential. It eradicated racial, stereotypical-type
thinking which is needed in our communities and the country.

As the months progressed, more and more volunteers and more donations
found their way through our doors.
Church members helped to write grant applications to foundations, so that
we were able to hire a director to take over the task of continued grant
seeking. Little-by-little, we were able
to grow our funding base. By tutoring
more and more children, doing outreach to the community, and adding athletic
programs – the community increasingly came to recognize, TRUST, and appreciate
Beacon House. Even the drug dealers
respected Beacon House and never hassled any of the volunteers, including the
white Unitarian Universalists, as they made their way onto the property and to
our doors.

Today, the Beacon House Community
Ministry, Inc. has increased its youth activities. We developed athletic programs in football,
basketball, baseball, and tee-ball that attracts more than 300 children each
year. We partner each year with the
city’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP); we have expanded our food
initiative and work with the Office of State Education to offer healthy meals
and to fight childhood obesity. We still
have volunteers who mentor and tutor children; we follow their school progress;
and assist in resolving family issues impacting the youngsters. We have computers available for the children
to help with homework assignments. Community residents use the computers during
the day while the children are in school.
We collaborate with the College Bound program and work with a number of
school organizations in the city. The
goal of collaborating with educational institutions is to help children receive
educational opportunities that they would not ordinarily receive without such
connections.

Beacon House has helped children to be
educationally successful. Each child
represents a family of the future. When
Beacon House first began, many children were dropping out of school at the
elementary level. Many would attend
school only sixty to seventy days a year to eat breakfast, lunch and then leave
at noon during recess. During our
evening snacks, it was not unusual to see children sneaking food into their
pockets. Some might have thought these
children were stealing; we learned that these kids were taking food to brothers
or sisters who were too young to be at Beacon House. They were getting food for their siblings who
otherwise would have nothing to eat.

In President Obama’s second-term
inaugural address, he said, “We are true
to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she
has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American, she
is free and she is equal not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

When the Interim Executive Director of Beacon
House, heard the President say this on January 21, 2013, he told me he thought
about the accomplishments of Beacon House.
Beacon House, he stated, is about equality for all, it’s about giving
children born into difficult circumstances a fighting chance to get a good
education and make something of their lives.

Urban Ministry Thoughts

One of my forebears in the Unitarian Universalist community ministry, Joseph Tuckerman, understood the need for this collaborative form of community ministry. He said of the poor immigrant Irish community of nineteenth century Boston, “…they were born, and have been reared as if they were a recognized Pariah caste. They have been debased and corrupted by circumstances within the control of those in more favored conditions, but not within their own control, or that of their parents.”[11] The Irish were replaced by people of color as the citizens debased and corrupted by circumstances. The Irish eventually made their way into acceptance and success. Blacks are slowly making their way out too. But, there are still too many people of all colors being left behind. Those driven by greed, power, and dominion are equal opportunity predators.

I encourage each parish minister in this room to work with your own congregation and your neighboring congregations to serve those at-risk and in crisis within your community or in a community of need you choose. I encourage each community minister in this room to connect the programs you serve to our congregations, but please remember that it is important to include the people in the neighborhood when creating your ministry.

Being in ministry can make our congregations more attractive to those who expect religious communities to have some mission, some calling outside their own walls. In 2002, Henry Brinton had an article in the Washington Post entitled, “Churches Need to Get Out of Themselves.”[12] Brinton is Presbyterian, but we Unitarian Universalists can also learn from what he wrote. He says, “I’ve experienced many occasions when the American church has concentrated more on itself than on the world around it, when it has put more energy into maintenance than into mission…People are naturally going to be attracted by a missionary church—one that works from the walls of the church outward…..the good life is found in enthusiastic service to the community.” The church is the church only when it exists for others…”[13]

In his book Urban Churches Vital Signs: Beyond Charity Toward Justice, Nile Harper features Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell and the Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston Texas which Caldwell serves. “From a theological point of view,” says Caldwell, “we believe God is just as concerned about the salvation of the whole community as about the salvation of the individual. Anyone who seeks to separate the two has failed to understand the ethos of the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Members of the Windsor Church are nurtured in a community that embodies the expectation that they can and will make a positive difference in the larger society. The church believes that it is called to be a living incarnation of the gospel active in the world.” We UUs may use different language than Caldwell does, but we also need to be nurturing members within our congregations to assure that they are communities that embody the expectation that they can and will make a positive difference in the larger society.

We are proud of the democratic nature of our Unitarian Universalist congregations, but we need to remember what A. Philip Randolph, a leader in the twentieth century African American civil rights movement and the American labor movement, said, “A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess…No power on earth can cause [the poor] to abandon their fight to wipe out every vestige of second-class citizenship and the dual standards that plague them.”

A few of the Unitarian Universalist ministers who have come before us provide examples of the required commitment, sensitivity, and devotion. They put themselves in communities of the poor and the sacrifice zones. Duncan Howlett says of one of these, our forebear, James Reeb, “He not only understood (the poor), he found it a joy to help them. The world’s castoffs whose only virtue was meekness responded to him in a way that was almost unique. They had sought to solve the problems of life by submission because no other solution seemed possible, those who had made their way into the refuge of alcoholic insularity, those who had wound up in the neuropsychological wards of an urban hospital, found in James Reeb an unexpected and unbelievable friend.” Rev. James Reeb gave his life so the “humblest and weakest person” could “enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights…”[14]

I have pleaded with you today to do more. I have presented to you why we must do more, and what this “more” can be. There is an urgency to this. With this as the mission, we can take our cues for how to proceed from a number of our forebears, ministers and laity; James Reeb, Whitney Young, Dorothea Dix, Dorothy Day, and Clara Barton. Our job as Unitarian Universalists (UU) is to engage, assist, inform, and guide those amongst us who are disadvantaged, poor, deprived, and destitute. The best way to do this is by building relationships at the community level. Engage on the ground, so to speak! To truly help people, we must go among those we seek to help, enlighten, inform, and guide. I urge prioritizing community-level goals and objectives; then to proceed with dogged determination.

The Prophetic Imperative (Beyond Church Walls)

One among us, Richard S. Gilbert, author of “Confessions of a Militant Mystic: Spirituality and Social Action – A Seamless Garment,”[15] quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson as saying that “everything of God has a crack in it.” In response, Gilbert states that “Ministry is about trying to fix those cracks, about repairing the world and creating the Beloved Community of Love and Justice. The inner urge to work in the service of this vision I call the prophetic imperative.”

Sometimes we refer to our ministries, our vocations, as our “callings.” Theodore Roosevelt defined “vocation” as “the work that most needs to be done in the world.” I believe that my ministry to the children and families of Beacon House is a vocation. For me, the concept of “work that most needs doing” came together with my knowledge of the sufferings of the children and the community. This knowledge brought me to my present ministry. It is a calling, and it needs to be done.

The impetus of my commitment was sensitized by my experiences in the coal-mining company towns of West Virginia; by working in the inner city; by seeing the living conditions of the poor in the cities and rural areas of our country; and it was triggered, among other things, by seeing those children eating French Fries from the gutter that I suspect had been shared by rats.

I propose that our service to others must be done through the community ministry structure, working side-by-side with the poor, the elderly, and the children. We can teach our flocks how to serve communities and people in need, and this assistance must be as sophisticated as are the methods used to suppress and take advantage of the uninformed, the poor, and the new victims[16] of our economic downturn. Are there any of you here? Do you know any of the new victims?

I say, we CAN do more; it is our duty to do more. Our commitment must be focused, strategic, long term and visionary in scope. It isn’t a job for the faint of heart. But it is a job for those with a vocation, a calling; it’s work that must be done.

Our Ministry Begins When We Leave This Place.

Thank you,

Shalom

Bibliography

Ahlstrom , Sydney and Carey, Jonathan S., eds., An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters & Papers from Prison.

Channing, William Ellery, “How Far is Reason to be used in Explaining Revelation?” Read before the First Ministerial Conference in Berry Street, at the formation of the Conference May 31, 1820, https://uuma.org/berry-street-essay/1820-berry-street-essay-the-reverend-william-ellery-channing/

Genesis 1:27

Gilbert, Richard “Confessional of a Militant Mystic: Spirituality and Social Action-A Seamless Garment,” 1996 Berry Street Essay, June 20, 1996, https://uuma.org/berry-street-essay/1996-berry-street-essay-the-reverend-richard-s-gilbert/

Harper, Nile, Urban Churches Vital Signs: Beyond Charity Toward Justice, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998.

Hedges, Chris and Sacco, Joe, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

Howlett, Duncan, No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story.

Merriam-Webster.com and Dictionary.com, practical

Poor Kids – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/poor-kids/

Footnotes

1. Channing, William Ellery, “How Far is Reason to be used in Explaining Revelation?” Read before the First Ministerial Conference in Berry Street, at the formation of the Conference May 31, 1820, https://uuma.org/berry-street-essay/1820-berry-street-essay-the-reverend-william-ellery-channing/

2. of, relating to, or manifested in practice or action : not theoretical or ideal <a practical question> <for all practical purposes>. Practical suggests the ability to adopt means to an end or to turn what is at hand to account: to adopt practical measures for settling problems. Source: Merriam-Webster .com and Dictionary.com

3. A company town (typically located in remote areas and involving an established monopoly franchise) is a place where practically all stores and buildings are owned by the one company that provides employment. At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population. [Source: Wikipedia]

4. Genesis 1: 27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

5. http://www.all-souls.org/

6. Poor Kids – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/poor-kids/

7. Gross National Product (GNP) measures the output generated by a country’s enterprises (whether physically located domestically or abroad) vs. GPD = greed, power and dominion.

8. Hedges, Chris, “Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”, July 20, 2012, http://billmoyers.com/segment/chris-hedges-on-capitalism%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98sacrifice-zones%E2%80%99/

9. McNatt, Rosemary Bray, “It’s Hard Work,” page 15, from “Been in the Storm So Long: A Meditation Manual “edited by Mark Morrison-Reed & Jacqui Ames.

10. King, Jr, Martin Luther, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish as fools,” Speech in St. Louis, Missouri, March 22, 1964.

11. Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Jonathan S. Carey Middletown, eds., An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985, p. 343.

12. The Washington Post, April 21, 2001, Page B5.

13. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters & Papers from Prison

14. Howlett, Duncan, No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story, Boston, MA: Skinner House, 1993.

15. Gilbert, Richard “Confessional of a Militant Mystic: Spirituality and Social Action-A Seamless Garment,” 1996 Berry Street Essay, June 20, 1996

16. Those in the declining middle class.