Reigniting Our Free-Religious Tradition: From Being to Buildings and Back Again
As many of you will all be aware, on the Sunday mornings of 18 and 25 January we will begin in earnest to talk together about the poor state of our buildings in relation to our lack of rental income, our overall finances, and our lack of volunteers. Rather than fantasising about what we MIGHT DO in an ideal world, we will meet to work out what we CAN ACTUALLY DO in this one. These are big questions that every church community with buildings is having to ask.
However, important as these questions are, they are not the most important. The deepest questions concern ourselves: who we are and what, today, is our primary purpose as a liberative, free-religious gathering. Once we see this more clearly, we will be closer to knowing what kind of buildings we need in the coming years if we are to continue to serve, effectively and sustainably, both ourselves and the wider local community
Something similar happens at different stages of everyone’s life: a single person, a young family, or an older couple downsizing all need different kinds of homes. The buildings we need are shaped by who we are now, and by the stage we have reached in our own life, and in our culture’s life. Until we face this honestly, our questions about buildings cannot really be answered.
In the twenty-five years I’ve been your minister, I have seen that, just like our physical buildings, our inherited liberative and free-religious way of being in the world has become less and less fit for purpose, and more and more unattractive. This is not merely my opinion. When I became your minister in 2000, national Unitarian membership was estimated at roughly 5–6,000 people, already very small. But, today, it is thought to be “around 2,000 people” (GA 2024 Annual Report). This is a stark decline of about two-thirds over a single ministry.
Now, for many years, loyal to the Unitarian tradition as I had inherited it, I did my best to continue within it in the hope that if I kept travelling this “known way”, our fortunes would somehow, and eventually, turn around. But as the years have passed — and our national culture has become significantly less conventionally religious, and more illiberal and rightward-leaning — the Unitarian known way has come to seem ever more dangerous to me. And, during the pandemic — when we were closed for 534 days and I had a horribly tangible glimpse of our own potential demise — I realised that unless I could find for us a liberative, free-religious path safer than the known way, it was really all over bar the proverbial shouting.
In those very lonely days I saw that, if our tradition were going to survive, I would have to dig deeply into parts of it that British and American Unitarian ministers, historians, and theologians had largely overlooked, and see whether I could bring to the surface alternative ways of being religiously liberal and free that might genuinely connect with contemporary needs, and so offer practices and resources strong enough to keep the spark of liberative, free-religion alive in what I am certain will be a time of significant challenge.
I was fortunate to discover that the two non-British and American Unitarian traditions I knew best — namely the the Czech and the Japanese — had some key things in common. In the last century both developed practices and resources that helped them resist and outlast highly partisan, right- and left-wing, religious and ethno-nationalist politics analogous to those we are facing today. They did this by providing their members with clear, concise sets of practical “Principles of Living” and “Advices”, alongside simple but nonetheless extremely effective practices of meditation, critical thinking, and open, free conversation.
As most of you know, I have spent the last five years studying, translating, and making those “Principles of Living” and “Advices” available to you and to wider international liberal and free-religious communities. They are now printed in our order of service and on our website, but I remain concerned that, as a community, we have not yet fully understood how vital and central they are. They are not secondary, optional decorations you may or may not choose to add to the cake — they are the cake. I firmly believe they offer us a path to follow that is assuredly safer than the known way into terminal decline along which most British and American Unitarians have been walking for decades. If you truly think I’m wrong about that, then now is time to voice your dissent — a freedom, I should add, upheld by these very “Principles of Living” and “Advices”.
Secondly, meditation has been of central importance to the Czech and Japanese Unitarians because it helps clear the mind, so that people can notice and pay attention to what is actually going on within and around them, and then mindfully, compassionately, and self-compassionately, begin to act in a difficult world. To use the Japanese Yuniterian Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s way of putting it, meditation is “not just a health practice”, but the very “source of the autonomous creative vitality” for both our bodies and our spirits. Meditation is, therefore, a powerful way to reconnect directly with the divine and sacred, without the need for mediator or veil. Please be aware that if we cannot find a way for ourselves as individuals, and as a tradition — to be reignited and burst into flame once again, then we are truly lost and gone.
Thirdly, in an increasingly intolerant, post-truth world, critical thinking is vital, and both the Czech and Japanese Unitarians fully realised this in their own contexts. The thoughtful, well-researched weekly talk by the minister or a member of the congregation — rooted in the outlook expressed by the “Principles of Living” and “Advices” — followed by constructive and compassionate open conversation, is as central a part of our offering to the world as is meditation. Such critical thinking and conversation is, of course, also a method of spiritual and religious ignition, and a way of reconnecting with the divine and the sacred.
And now let me return to the buildings, about which we will be talking in a couple of weeks’ time. The buildings need to serve the kind of community we actually are in the national culture that actually exists, and not as we were, and our culture was, in the 1920s when our buildings were constructed.
Obviously, I passionately hope that we are, or are at least actively becoming, the kind of congregation I have just outlined — one completely committed to its “Principles of Living” and “Advices”, and also to its disciplined, igniting practices of meditation, critical thinking, and open and free conversation. But if we are not ignited and aflame, and we do not clearly know who we are, what we stand for, and what our religious practices are, then, frankly, we do not need any buildings at all. We might as well sell up and disperse. However, I find have been reignited by my deep encounter with the Czech and Japanese Unitarian traditions. I have found in them a powerful, disciplined, liberative, free-religious path that is safer than the known Unitarian way I first inherited when I became your minister, and I believe that a reimagined and renewed set of buildings is needed. But we must start with our own being, and only then move to our buildings.
So, in conclusion, I commend this liberative, free-religious path to you — but, of course, I do not, nor can I, demand that you join me on it. That is entirely up to you. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and criticisms.
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