Two good very things—a spring thought for the day in advance of the Cambridge Unitarian Church's AGM
The past year has been, I think, a good one for the Cambridge Unitarian Church for two major reasons. The first reason, in two parts, has an obvious feel-good factor about it. But the second reason will not instantly feel so good to many people, but when looked at properly, I think it will also be seen to be good.
So, let’s have a look at the first . . .
Throughout the year—especially in the Future Directions group (which was open to any member of the church who wished to join)—inspired by the vision of the twentieth-century Japanese Unitarian and advocate of free-religion, Imaoka Shin’ichirō (1881-1988) [see HERE & HERE], we have continued carefully to talk together about, and then articulate, a shared set of principles that we feel truly underpins and guides us. These are now prominently displayed on our new website and noticeboards, and they read as follows:
Within this creative, inquiring, free and liberative religious gathering, we seek to:
1) Nurture ourselves — desiring to grow into the most creative, sociable, compassionate and autonomous individuals we can be.
2) Support our neighbours — and, in so doing, remember that each individual we meet deserves the same love and respect as we do ourselves.
3) Build a co-operative society — because all lives are intertwined, none of us exists in isolation. A co-operative society, in which we find solidarity, fellowship and community, lights the way for us all.
4) Find strength in community — our local gathering can be a microcosm of the co-operative society we seek to build. Here, we support one another in our journeys, sharing our joys and sorrows as we work together towards a better world.
5) Draw on insights from all creative, inquiring, free and liberative religions and philosophies — seeking to understand their essence and ideals, and finding ways to apply these to the modern world in which we live.
6) Care for the world around us — celebrating being part of nature, cherishing the beauty we witness, and seeking to repair damage and tread as lightly as we can.
7) Affirm that there is no fundamental distinction between the sacred and the secular — and that all human activities — politics, economy, education, art, labour and even domestic affairs — can also be expressions of free-religion.
The second element of the first reason, is that, following its introduction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation, Music and Conversation is now our settled way of meeting together on a Sunday morning. Before 2020 you will remember that this service was, in all essential details, our evening service, and had been for the previous ten years. Naturally, there were some members of the pre-pandemic community, who wished us to return to our old service format, and I want to note that I fully appreciate that for these people this change was not welcomed. But I also need to note that all the evidence available to us — gleaned both from ongoing, official surveys such as the British Attitudes Survey, as well as from our own personal experiences — strongly suggests that, whilst there really does now seem to be a slow increase in interest in religious and spiritual matters among the general population, our old way of doing religion is simply no longer the way we can best meet and nurture this interest and need. But what we do know is that meditation is something increasingly valued in both the religious and secular spheres, as, too, is thoughtful, careful writing and civilised conversation about the key, existential questions that human life continues to place before us. Naturally, there will be other ways of responding appropriately as a liberal, free-religious community to these needs, but our post-pandemic Sunday gathering, underpinned by our seven principles, is now our current, settled, collective offer to the city of Cambridge.
Taken together, these two things mean we can now say clearly and succinctly what our community stands for, and we can also confidently offer people a liberal and free-religious practice that is designed to help us, in a gently disciplined way, to become better, more effective, liberal, free-religious people playing our own, modest, but still important part in the life of our city.
And now to the second thing, that is less obviously good but which, if we face the challenge resting confidently drawing on the things I have just rehearsed, will, I think, in time, turn out to be good.
Through the course of this year your trustees have been able to see more and more clearly that our buildings are simply no longer suitable for our community’s small size and modest needs, or, indeed, the needs of the local neighbourhood—needs which are not the same as those which existed when our buildings were constructed between 1923 and 1927/28. Essentially, we have two buildings that are exactly the same, only one of which can be used throughout the year and rented out. Added to this basic problem, the physical condition of our buildings—now over or just under 100 years old in the case of the church and hall, and 200 years in the case of the old manse—is far from good and is getting worse; the roofs are at the end of their lives, there is rotting woodwork and stonework, damp abounds, and the heating systems and insulation of all the buildings are hopelessly insufficient and expensive to maintain and run. The cost of putting just one of our buildings, let alone three, into good order, is truly huge.
This means that this year we have to take some MAJOR decisions about how we are going to go about securing for ourselves, and for the local neighbourhood, at least one, excellent, sustainable and appropriately equipped building. The good news is that the trustees and, I think most of us here this morning, have come to understand that this is the case, and that we simply must now do something about it. Doing something brings with it, of course, risks, but doing something also offers us a positive and creative way of going forward that has some real hope of success. But given the state of the buildings, the lack of sufficient hirers, etc., doing nothing is now no longer an option, unless, of course, we want to say to ourselves we are simply entering into a period of managed decline.
Recognising this, your trustees have been working diligently over the past year so as, very shortly, to be in a position to present to you a properly costed and researched plan showing what we can genuinely do with our buildings that will serve well the kind of liberal and free-religious and spiritual community we have become, as well as the neighbourhood in which we meet. This means that sometime during this coming year, at an Extraordinary General Meeting, after having had time to see and think about those plans, it will be up to YOU as church members to decide what is to be done.
Such a major project will, inevitably, bring with it a certain amount, and perhaps a considerable amount of disruption to our former ways of doing things. But, with our principles of living now clearly in sight, and a secure Sunday morning practice in play, the strong motivating REASON for undertaking this project should also be absolutely clear to us, namely, the opportunity to gift both ourselves and our city with a modern, secure, sustainable, beautiful home for liberal, free-religion, one that is suitable for our own times and needs. In other words, we will be responsibly carrying forward the project begun in 1904 by our own local church’s founders.
I commend the project to you.
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