Rev. Ken Belden is the minister of the Wellsprings Congregation in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania (about 35 miles west-by-northwest from the center of Philadelphia). They have 185 members and rent worship space in a school auditorium (so they don't have building up-keep to worry about).
Wellsprings is a new congregation. They had their first worship service in 2007 January, nearly two years after Rev. Belden, hired by the Joseph Priestly District to lead this start-up effort, began working with focus groups of interested people. To fund this start-up almost $700,000 was given by the UUA, the Joseph Priestly District, and Main Line UU Congregation in Devon, PA. From these focus groups, a "Planting Team" of 12 committed people emerged which met weekly for seven months. The Planting Team meetings focused on their personal spiritual development and building community with each other. Out of these meetings -- and information gathered from interviews with people in the area, the Planting Team articulated the "Core Values and Beliefs" for the congregation-to-come.
With the "Core Values and Beliefs" identified and clarified, they then formed a number of small groups which met covenant-group-style for 10 sessions. These sessions aimed at providing people a chance to share fellowship, grow in their understanding of faith life, offer service to the community, and share in the vision of Wellsprings.
They were then able to hire a Director of Leadership and Spiritual Development and an Office Administrator (still several months before their first worship service!)
The Wellsprings slogan is "A Community Charged Full with the Charge of the Soul" (language swiped from Walt Whitman) -- and they emphasize and repeatedly invoke this slogan. Everything they do is oriented being charged with "the charge of the soul."
You might also be interested to take a look at the Wellsprings Congregation's web site: click here.
And you might want to see Rev. Belden's blog: click here.
Ken Belden was one of the speakers in the "Powerful Pathways to Growth" workshop at General Assembly 2011 in Charlotte. You can see the video of that workship on Youtube: click here or watch part 1:
From Rev. Belden's Minns lecture:
"UU’s often lack explicit modeling about how we live every day for, and in, our faith."QUESTIONS
- How are UUFG's members doing at living our faith -- living for, and in, our faith -- day by day?
- What would help?
Our Unitarian and Universalist forebears in the 19th-century understood "that each day is a chance to grow, shape and form our spiritual character through practices both inner and outer directed." This should still be our emphasis today.
The specific form of the spiritual practice doesn't matter so much -- as long as it truly is a spiritual practice. Belden says:
Dr. Newberg takes MRI’s, images of people’s brains who have well-developed spiritual practices. In one of his experiments, he compares the brain scans of Carmelite nuns in their theistic Centering Prayer practice with Buddhist monks and their non-theistic mindfulness meditation. Different traditions, different names for the experience of the Holy. But the brains of these Buddhist and Catholic practitioners appeared the same in the imaging. The parts of the mind that were associated with empathy, compassion, peace and self-transcendence all showed greater engagement. Activity in the parts of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, aggression, the “reptile brain,” diminished.QUESTIONS
- Is spiritual development -- that is, the work that rewires our brains toward empathy, compassion, equanimity, and self-transcendence -- what UU congregations should be all about?
- How is UUFG when it comes to encouraging and facilitating this sort of development?
"Intellectual Knowledge" and "Spiritual Wisdom"
Belden refers to an incident at a Florida UU congregation (it was the Clearwater UU congregation: In 2007 December, a man shot dead his ex-wife, the couple's two small children, the ex-wife's female partner, and then himself. All five were members of Clearwater UU). One member of the Clearwater congregation was quoted in the press as saying he didn't understand how someone so well-educated could do such a thing. This remark is testament to the UU proclivity to subsume all virtues under "well-educated" and "intellectual knowledge." (In this particular case, it seems the issue has to do with mental/emotional health more than with either cognitive fitness or spiritual fitness. See my blog series on this subject over on Lake Chalice: click here for the first entry, then follow the "Next" links at the bottom of each post.)
QUESTIONS
- Does UUFG (in the shared understandings of its members or in its overall "institutional personality") make the mistake of confusing intellectual knowledge and spiritual wisdom with each other?
- Or, if UUFG doesn't regard them as exactly identical, does UUFG regard spiritual wisdom as a subset of, or subsidiary to, intellectual knowledge?
- How do you understand the difference between intellectual knowledge and spiritual wisdom?
- How widespread would you guess your understanding of that difference is among UUFG members?
Not Static
Belden says,Rejecting both the doctrine of original sin and the notion that our inherent worth and dignity are some static entity, instead we affirm that we are inherently invested by the Universe with the capacity to develop our lives.QUESTIONS
- How is it that worth and dignity can be inherent yet not static?
- In what ways have we sometimes seemed to assume that inherent worth and dignity are static?
"Of" and "About"
To distinguish themselves from more mainstream or conservative Christian faiths, Unitarians have sometimes characterized themselves as adhering to "the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus."
QUESTIONS
- Have we become the religion about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Clara Barton, Susan B Anthony, and Bronson and Louisa May Alcott rather than the religion of these figures?
- They were serious about the practices to cultivate the spiritual virtues in themselves. Are we?
Praying Together
Beldon says:We don't all share a common understanding or experience of God, but what comes from praying aloud with and for each other is the unearthing of what we do hold in common: our aspirations for our community, our individual and collective losses, sorrows, hopes and gratitude. It is time together that we treasure. It’s like that old Ragu commercial, we find “it’s all in there” in each of us: the need for contemplation, restoration, lamentation, thanksgiving.QUESTIONS
- Do you resonate with this approach to prayer?
- What is the appropriate place for prayer in the life of UUFG and its members?
More Important Than Ever?
Unitarians and Universalists are drawn to fill a need in society. We tend to put relatively less emphasis on the areas that our culture is pretty much taking care of. We focus on the areas that wider culture neglects. For example. we teach sex ed -- our "Our Whole Lives" curriculum -- and we probably wouldn't if the schools were doing an adequate job of it.
Our culture appears to be reaching a point where it is neglecting the spiritual more than it has ever done before in the last 300 hundred years of North American history. Belden writes:
There’s a recent study by the University of Michigan about the levels of empathy exhibited by incoming college students. It finds that current students are the least empathetic, most narcissistic cohort in the more than two decades since they’ve been conducting the study. The study paints a picture of a generational slice of young people who have been raised to be overstimulated, overexcited, overexposed and over-competitive. These are the exact opposite attributes from what daily spiritual practice can help us aspire to be.We might also note that 93 percent of US drivers identify themselves as above-average drivers. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills.
"In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a 'very important person.' By the '90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were" (David Brooks, citing Jean M. Twenge, New York Times, 2011 Mar 11. Click here.)And it's no wonder, the New York Times columnist continues: our young people, more than any previous generation, have been "bathed in messages telling them how special they are."
Belddn cites sociologist Avner Offer:
“Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being.”QUESTIONS
- Has the sustained and growing wealth of the US over the last 50 years made us feel less wealthy and less happy?
- Has it undermined our well-being?
- Has it functioned to undermine our spirituality?
- Is the US now at the most arrogant and narcissistic point of its history?
- Is spiritual discipline -- the serious discipline of adopting and maintaining daily spiritual practice to cultivate patience, equanimity, humility, awareness, and deep satisfaction in just being alive -- now more neglected than ever in US culture?
- Is it, then, the calling of UU congregations to compensate for this lack?
Sounding the Retreat
Belden says:At WellSprings we have a Spiritual Retreat team. Although we’re still young we’ve had seven spiritual retreats in the last few years. The joy is that we get to do this work together, in community. We get to follow up with each other, grow small groups from our retreats, and hold each other accountable for our aspirations.QUESTIONS
- How does this sound to you?
- Is this what UUFG needs?
I look forward to your thoughts! See you Wednesday, March 7.
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