The theme of Sunday’s service (9/25/11), derived from the week’s message (“Discovering Your Ministry,”[1] a sermon written by UU minister Dennis Hamilton and read by a member), was social service. Though not every aspect of the service was explicitly tied to this theme, it was emphasized several times throughout. In the middle of the service, for instance, we were asked to rise and thank those around us for their contributions to the community and to the congregation. Later, the children, before they were dismissed to receive religious education, collected non-perishable foodstuffs brought in by various congregants in plastic grocery bags; the goods were all donated to Cross-Lines, one of four charitable organizations mentioned by name in the church’s September newsletter, along with Ozarks Food Harvest, the Community Blood Center of the Ozarks, and Adopt-a-Street.[2] Finally, after the service, a small group of volunteers got together to clean the heavily trafficked (and littered) Battlefield from the intersection at Lone Pine to the intersection at National.
These details confirm what Lynn Dalton, the president of the board of trustees of First UU Springfield, wrote in the September newsletter: “First UU Springfield is active in the community and will be increasing that activity as time goes on.” I do not know about the median level of involvement on an individual basis, but what strikes me about the efforts described in the newsletter is not only that they are largely dependent upon secular and governmental social service organizations, but that charitable efforts do not even have to start within the congregation: “Please let me know,” Dalton writes, “what organizations you volunteer time or donate to so we can share the joy of knowing the work we accomplish in the world… You might inspire another member to look at an organization you care about.” Social service is seen as both an integral facet of the UU faith as well as a somewhat unspectacular aspect of everyday life. Service is to be commended because it focuses the members’ practical efforts in the world and helps to found a particular idea of religiosity toward which the church can strive.
Mark Chaves, in analyzing the data from a nationwide congregational study completed in 1998, reveals that “Congregations typically engage in social services in only a minor and peripheral way.”[3] First UU Springfield—with a collection of congregants who variously self-identify as liberal Christians, humanists, pagans, and so on—can hardly be classified as a “typical” congregation by any stretch of the imagination, but that still does not explain why social service is emphasized so heavily in a weekly religious service. Perhaps the church leaders stress social service firmly because, in the absence of a coherent belief system, congregants must look to other means to affirm their collective religious identity. This strikes me as a reasonable but improvable and certainly contestable explanation for the prevalence of social service in this congregation, but I do not wish to argue for or against any theorized causative relationship between social service and religious identity. I am satisfied to point out that the church uses the idea of social service (if not its actual practice) to articulate its desire for a particular kind of religiosity.
However, Chaves suggests that when congregations do engage in social service, they “are not especially holistic—indeed, they are not especially religious—in their approach to social services.”[4] To this statement, I would rejoin that “religion” has proven itself to be a problematic category, especially when it is used to define or describe someone’s motives. Apparently Chaves means that “religious” social service is indistinguishable from “secular” social service in practice—and he can argue this because the motivations behind social service, whether they are religious or secular or some ill-defined, liminal space between the two, will remain, as they always were, inscrutable. In the following post, I will further Chaves’ empirical observation into the realm of theory by problematizing the very notions of “religious” and “secular” as categories for understanding congregational practice. For “religious” and “secular” should be seen as ideals that are aimed at through practice as opposed to distinct states of being that shade or define practice.
NOTES
[1]
This sermon, along with several others is available for download as a PDF file via the website of the Rev. Dennis Hamilton’s congregation, Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in Carrollton, Texas (a suburb of Dallas). The sermon stresses the need for human beings to be fulfilled by useful, service-oriented work and relates this (somewhat ambiguously) to the concept of “ministry” in Christian religion. The sermon was originally titled "Spirituality for Atheists" and is accessible here: http://www.horizonuu.org/index.php/worshiping/past-sermons2.
[2]
After exploring the websites of each of the four organizations, I found that only Cross-Lines uses explicitly Christian language and symbolism. In addition to the organization’s logo, which incorporates a cross, their website (http://www.cross-lines.org) also explains that Cross-Lines was founded by a group of “ministers and concerned citizens” in 1963.
[3]
Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 46.
[4]
Ibid.; emphasis original. Chaves makes one more fascinating point about social service in congregations: congregations do not offer an “alternative to government or secular social services” (67) because congregations do not exist in an “organizational world that is separate from the world of government and secular social services,” nor do “government and secular social service providers…approach social services in a distinctive way” (67-68). Congregations practice social service in “collaboration” with government and secular organizations (68), a general rule to which First UU Springfield is not an exception.
[1]
This sermon, along with several others is available for download as a PDF file via the website of the Rev. Dennis Hamilton’s congregation, Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in Carrollton, Texas (a suburb of Dallas). The sermon stresses the need for human beings to be fulfilled by useful, service-oriented work and relates this (somewhat ambiguously) to the concept of “ministry” in Christian religion. The sermon was originally titled "Spirituality for Atheists" and is accessible here: http://www.horizonuu.org/index.php/worshiping/past-sermons2.
[2]
After exploring the websites of each of the four organizations, I found that only Cross-Lines uses explicitly Christian language and symbolism. In addition to the organization’s logo, which incorporates a cross, their website (http://www.cross-lines.org) also explains that Cross-Lines was founded by a group of “ministers and concerned citizens” in 1963.
[3]
Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 46.
[4]
Ibid.; emphasis original. Chaves makes one more fascinating point about social service in congregations: congregations do not offer an “alternative to government or secular social services” (67) because congregations do not exist in an “organizational world that is separate from the world of government and secular social services,” nor do “government and secular social service providers…approach social services in a distinctive way” (67-68). Congregations practice social service in “collaboration” with government and secular organizations (68), a general rule to which First UU Springfield is not an exception.
