Growing our Care

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks has this lovely yellow wood building down on the Chena River, west of town, sitting on a little hillock in a copse of trees. I tore over there Saturday morning steaming up my car windows from a recent shower, the effect of minus 35 degrees, to continue a meeting on “care” which began Friday evening.

Unlike many conventional churches, UUFF has no paid leadership, and so there’s a fun, odd randomness about people knowing each other and being able to respond to joys and sorrows in one another’s lives. As Peg Boyle-Morgan, the facilitator who came up from West Seattle to help us work on this, pointed out this morning, UUFF has moved from a “family-centered” size, say 50 or 60 people, to a “pastor-centered” size, which is 60 to 150, and we haven’t changed anything but the size. She knew that we’re losing people simply because this is an unsustainable transformation. You can’t grow and not change, without starting to hurt people, even if unwittingly. Tellingly, she said that her fellowship is moving into the 140 range, and she can’t keep track of the names of the 60 or so children (above the 140 adults).

I found it so inspiring to hang with the people who came out for this, about a dozen women and three, four men, whose hearts are touched by the hope of a community which cares for one another. By Saturday morning, people were becoming frank. Janie talked about how hard it was to be so involved in the fellowship but have only a person or two be supportive during her birth of Allie. Julia talked about having enough people in her family here for an operation she had so it was okay that the fellowship didn’t need to know about it to support her. Terry talked about the importance of there being a guarantee of privacy for people who didn’t want their particular personal “issue” to be on a phone chain, or the object of “visits” or “casseroles” from UUFF members. I talked about feeling like I had to be more “desperate” for childcare before taking up Rebecca’s offer. Everyone laughed at what I said, because Rebecca made it sound like it was about Rebecca and not about my reticence, which in fact was a hilarious spoof.

This sort of “telling truth” and being willing to be “vulnerable” in the group makes it possible for everyone to say hard stuff, true stuff. And to grow. And to laugh, sometimes hysterically.

It’s so exciting when this happens, I think. I found myself able to speak my hopes and longings for our fellowship more than ever before. I guess it was partly because people were taking risks, and partly because Peg Boyle-Morgan was there to create the sense that what we were hoping for is inspiring, attainable, important and rich.

There was the temptation simply to set up a “system,” a means to get busy with being efficient. There also was a counter move to set up “boundaries” to keep from offending people who didn’t want to be “helped.” I guess I began pushing for us to stay with the “vision,” that is, to keep talking about our experiences and to get to know one another in a way that would preclude worrying about not being systematic enough, or running roughshod over other’s reticence.

Happens all the time in churches – the first issue that comes before an “anxious” group becomes the focus of a big fight, which take two hours. And if you have 20 minutes of “check in,” people feel better about one another, feel more trust, and all the business gets done in an hour.

In other words, it all will come out in the wash. The better we know and trust one another, the easier it will be to do this. We’ll lead from our growing sense of safety, passion, and community. But that “good feeling” may also come into being by spending time together questioning each other’s motives or wisdom or whatever. The only risk is that we get so frustrated first, in a kind of Dilbert-esque, bureaucratic dead end, that people “bail.”

I’m glad for Peg Boyle Morgan’s sure guidance through these days, and that the leaders on our end are Peg Bowers, Janie, and Rebecca.