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Adapted from a sermon delivered July 26, 2026 at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. (Video available below or on YouTube here.)
“We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name.” So says Kate Walker, editor of The Through Line, a recent book that looks back on two hundred years of the Berry Street Essay. This annual lecture has been given by Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist ministers, to their colleagues, as a reflection and critique on the profession. "We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name." That’s one of the through lines of my reflection today. The other comes from historian Jon Lauck, who traces the history of the Midwest throughout the 1800s. Lauck offers a largely positive picture of the region, but he also admits, “The Midwest’s greatest failing occurred in the arena of race relations.” (Jon Lauck) As I return to an occasional series on our Midwest heritage and our Unitarian ancestors here, it is to look squarely at that part of our heritage that is most challenging. This is a history that includes faithful work and major triumphs in the realm of racial justice, but also deep harm. As I draw from this history here, I invite you to consider what work remains to be done to remove from the soil of our culture – Midwestern culture and inevitably, Unitarian culture here too – all the grains of oppression that were layered in long ago. I’ll save for another time issues related to gender and sexuality, focusing here on colonization and white supremacy.
memoir – both reflected and helped create that mythos. In stories inspired by her life, growing up in frontier locations in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota, Wilder depicts lands and peoples of the region. The Little House books were the first chapter books I remember reading as a kid. Here’s my set, which my mother saved all these years. You might remember NBC’s development of the tales for television, that ran from 1974 to 1983, bringing those images of frontier families into millions of living rooms. Just this month Netflix dropped the first season of a new Little House on the Prairie show.   I don’t actually remember the books that well. When my own daughter was getting to the age where the Little House books might be age-appropriate reading, I wondered how well they had stood the test of time. I discovered, to put it mildly, that they were too problematic in their treatment of people of color. Historian John E. Miller observes that the stories “assumed that white settlement of lands previously controlled by American Indians was both inevitable and just.” Another historian, Michael Patrick Hearn, remarks on the “endemic racism of the times that is reflected in the series.” I did not share the books with my daughter. I wondered if the new Netflix series would do better. Indeed the narrative tone has shifted. Without big spoilers, I can say that the black doctor from the Little House on the Prairie book is not just a brief cameo, but a full character with his own story arc and full personhood. Another key character is a black woman who runs the general store, with whom Ma forms a friendship. Writing before the new show came out, Miller observed that the Little House world promoted “progress and equality in the region,” but also that “the central narrative that nineteenth-century midwesterners devised about themselves centered around bringing of civilization to the wilderness.” The subject of colonization is dealt with more forthrightly in the new T.V. series. An indigenous family are full characters, and their perspectives on events are conveyed. Laura becomes best friends with an Osage girl, Good Eagle. Ma has a change of heart about the Indians despite an early scare. And over the course of season one, good-hearted Pa goes from blind naiveté about the opportunity to homestead that lured them there – to realizing that he and other settlers have been deceived and manipulated by the railroad company, to gain leverage over the native Osage. In general, the mythology of the frontier leaves the impression that Native Americans disappeared along with their ways of life, when settlers like the Ingalls displaced them. When I was growing up in southeast Iowa, indigenous people were invisible except as part of a tragic history of the vanishing Indian that I learned about in school. I don’t remember actually learning about the history and culture of my own area’s indigenous peoples. (After this sermon, I was pleased to hear from an Iowa-raised congregant who is younger than me that she *did* learn about local native peoples as part of her public school curriculum.)  Replica of the original Fort Madison, built when I was a teenager. Photo courtesy of the City of Fort Madison, Iowa (https://www.fortmadison-ia.com/280/History-of-Fort-Madison). That’s ironic since my hometown, Fort Madison, grew from what originally was a fort – the first military fort built in the upper Mississippi region, established by the U.S. government to manage trade and keep in line the Native Americans of the region, e.g., help open it to settlers. The fort was built in 1809. Native forces repeatedly attacked and defeated the fort as part of the War of 1812. My hometown grew up after the fort was abandoned. If you are a settler, I wonder how visible indigenous peoples have been in your own experience. Here in the Omaha metro area, almost 20,000 indigenous Americans reside, as native peoples live in cities throughout the Midwest. We also have nine Indian reservations in Nebraska.
The Ingalls family was part of waves of migration that brought settlers to Nebraska as well as Kansas after the Civil War. These states were popular destinations not only for white settlers, but for black folks seeking opportunity, too. I draw largely from historian Jon Lauck’s book The Good Country in this next section. Midwesterners played a critical role in the movement to abolish slavery. The numerous Christian colleges located here were particularly hotbeds of activism. Abolitionist lawyers, courts and grand juries deliberately blocked southern slave-catcher efforts, and many abolitionists won popular office. While the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had banned slavery in most of the Midwest – between the Ohio River and the Missouri River – that step came later west of the Missouri. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery in the territory that would become the states of Nebraska and Kansas.
The Midwest’s early history of race relations was regressive, with the upper Midwest more liberal from the start, and the middle latitude like we are in coming along over time. States like Iowa, Illinois and Indiana had laws banning free blacks from even entering them in the 1850s. (Nebraska never had a ban.) In Iowa, those laws were repealed by 1860, through the influence of the Iowa Anti-Slavery Society. By that time, Ohio and the upper Midwest states also allowed unrestricted immigration of free blacks. Activism for black suffrage was successful in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, in the mid-1800s, at a time when other regions frequently saw defeat. Black suffrage was voted down in fourteen northern states from 1865-1870, including Connecticut and New York, for example. The successes in Iowa and Minnesota encouraged leaders to advocate for the federal Fifteenth Amendment, which was a way to get around the uneven success in state referenda. The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing voting rights to black men, was ratified in every single midwestern state. It might surprise us, today, to learn of some of the states that failed to ratify it – like California and New York. Other Midwestern advancements that you might not expect: Iowa’s was the “first successful school desegregation case in U.S. history.” School districts in Nebraska could decide for themselves how to handle race in public education; Lincoln’s schools were integrated from the start, with Omaha’s schools following suit by 1872. Ohio and Iowa led the way in adopting civil rights laws, and ensuring equal access to things like hotels, public transportation, theatres, restaurants, and more. The following year, in 1885, Jon Lauck writes, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois also passed civil rights laws. “The passage of these statutes and their enforcement across the Midwest,” he notes, “led to a period of hopefulness and racial integration in midwestern cities such as Chicago while southern states were adopting sweeping laws to impose rigid Jim Crow segregation.” Lauck is realistic in acknowledging that even as laws changed, many white people and communities resisted African American migration and legally won civil rights. Though present throughout the Midwest, resistance was especially strong in the southernmost states of the region. What’s notable and perhaps surprising, from the present vantage point, is that progress was made relatively quickly in the Midwest, compared to other parts of the country. In the grand scheme of history, Midwestern states made radical change in some areas – extending the principles of democracy and equality through work toward the abolition of slavery, and suffrage for both African Americans and women. Yet in many ways, both in their aims and their methods, the approach of these states could be characterized as one of “mild reform.” Lauck describes the Midwest after the Civil War as “a region willing to consider and adopt incremental, but not radical, reforms to make their region better.” How “Midwest nice,” in both the positive and negative senses. This pattern of internal contradictions, hard-won improvements, and setbacks, continues into the 1900s and into the 2000s. “We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name." ~ Kate Walker Let me try to name some of it, briefly. One of the most important factors to understand is the effect of redlining – housing segregation that was driven by federally drawn maps of cities, starting during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The impact of this discrimination cannot be overstated, with generational effects that reach into the present day. Racial bias, whether overt or unconscious, continues to play out in discrimination in every sector of society, including jobs, housing, education, and religion.
Your Turn: How have race and racism affected people where you have lived – and what was named, or what remained unnamed, about that? Again, you might journal or chat with a friend about this. So, where do Unitarians fit into all this? I turn once again to Charles Lyttle and his history of the (Mid)western Unitarian Conference. It chronicles a distinctive flavor of Unitarianism that was freer of social hierarchy, freer in religious thinking and sources of inspiration than its eastern counterparts. Reading Lyttle, who wrote in 1952 about the preceding hundred years of Unitarians in the Midwest, I hear an enthusiasm for westward expansion that sounds much like that found anywhere else in American culture and history. The title of the book itself is Freedom Moves West – which begs the question, freedom for whom? The first chapter of the book is titled “Settling, Civilizing, Missionizing the West.” Civilizing. Yeah. It’s a white settler’s point-of-view. This perspective takes for granted that both people and churches have a right to build a life on lands that indigenous people have called home for millennia prior to Europeans’ arrival.
I’m struck by an observation from Kate Walker, looking back over two hundred years of lectures by Unitarian ministers on the practice of ministry. She notes that until recently, these speakers rarely acknowledged their own social locations, their own identities. “Benefitting from white privilege,” Walker notes, “[Berry Street] speakers saw no need to talk about racism; benefitting from patriarchy, they saw no need to talk about sexism.” Where does Lyttle direct our attention? Because Americans have freedom of religion, Lyttle writes, “the American spirit created within seventy-five years of the pioneers’ entrance into the West the most vital and powerful segments of both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism on the face of the earth.” Whew! Sounds triumphant. By the time the Unitarians began to organize congregations in “the West,” Calvinist Congregationalists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, as well as Methodists, Universalists and Friends (Quakers), were already there (here) and well-organized. Lyttle describes a very inhospitable climate to both Unitarian churchgoers and clergy due to the cold and condemning attitudes of the more conservative Christians. From the history of this congregation comes an anecdote from Grace Holdredge, an earlier leader of the group, illustrating that, whatever advantages early settlers and church leaders may have had, it wasn’t always easy to be a Unitarian. “It took courage and many other fine qualities to start a liberal religious movement in that setting,” Holdredge wrote in her journal. “Even the children realized it. Young girls of ‘God-fearing’ parents could not play with children who did not believe in ‘the devil.’ Even as late as high school days one careful mother refused to let her son be seen on horseback in company with a ‘Unitarian girl.’” Lyttle indicates that the coming of railroads brought “more vigorous missionary activity,” as Eastern ministers and indeed, Unitarian settlers, could more easily get to points further west. The establishment of a liberal seminary closer to the frontier also helped solve the problem of not enough educated ministers ready and willing to fill (mid)western pulpits. Still, many more churches were planted on the prairie than survived. Charles Lyttle asks what motivated settlers in general to take a chance in this (mid)western terrain. He quotes an unnamed “pioneer” minister from St. Louis in answer: “The grand motive which actuates all who come here is to make money – not liberty of conscience, not intellectual improvement, not the desire to do good, but to better our own condition, to make ourselves rich and influential members of society.” The St. Louis pioneer minister then offers this warning: “… in the universality of this motive I discern our greatest danger: that religion and learning and morality and education and everything which makes a people truly prosperous shall all be forgotten, all made to bow to one god, Mammon.” Unitarians in the region have long been (and are) engaged in social justice work, everywhere along the spectrum from mild reform to meddlesome in ways that more deeply threaten power structures - including socialism and economic radicalism. Doubtless some individuals have historically remained more embedded in the status quo. In Walker’s commentary on the Berry Street essays, she traces “a long-standing tension in our faith between individualistic concerns often reflected in a more personal theology and an outward-looking theology focusing on social change.” I imagine this has been true in each of our congregations, and perhaps even within each Unitarian. In terms of racial justice, Lyttle’s chronicle of (mid)Western Unitarians is full of references to activism in the causes of abolition and the underground railroad, and later civil rights and racial integration. Not mentioned is whether or how Unitarian churches in the western conference worked to make their congregations less Euro-centric and more inclusive of many cultures. With regard to Native Americans, I find very few references to the relationships between Unitarian communities and native peoples in the Midwest. Charles Lyttle does not address it, nor does the volume chronicling this congregation’s own history. From a UU State Action Network, I learned that there are three known instances of Unitarians attempting to participate in what was then called “educational work amongst the Indians.” Today we know them as residential boarding schools that took indigenous children from their families and communities. They practiced forced assimilation, cultural genocide, and were part of the process of dispossessing indigenous communities of their homelands. One of those sites was in the Midwest, working briefly with the Chippewa in Minnesota in 1855. The other two sites were in Colorado and Montana. All were abandoned after a relatively short time, due to lack of funding. We are left to wonder what the rank and file of Unitarians thought about this – if they were aware of these “missions,” if there was shared understanding of what went on in
We are right now making the history that our descendants will look back on. What we do now will become part of their heritage in fifty or a hundred years. May the steps we take build on the best of our Midwest heritage. The Midwest heritage of democracy that includes more and more people. The Midwest heritage of education and learning that leaves less unnamed and unknown. The Midwest heritage of egalitarian social and economic norms. And the Midwest heritage of pragmatism – may we lean into that practical, can-do spirit, as we continue to build the common good. So may it be. Amen. This is the full service in which the above sermon was delivered. The Time for All Ages begins around 11:00, the sermon around 34:00. Sources
1 - “Conclusion” by Kate R. Walker in The Through Line: 200 Years of the Berry Street Essay, edited by Kate R. Walker (Skinner House Books, 2021). 2 - The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 by Jon K. Lauck (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022). 3 - “Little Myths on the Prairie” by Michael Patrick Hearn, in Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017). 4 - “Laura Ingalls Wilder as a Midwestern Pioneer Girl” by John E. Miller, in Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017). 5 - On the history of Fort Madison, Iowa: http://www.iowahild.com/indians-of-iowa.html and https://www.fortmadison-ia.com/203/History-of-Fort-Madison 6 - Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference 1852-1952 by Charles H. Lyttle (Beacon Press, 1952; revised edition 2006 by Blackstone Editions). 7 - Pillars & Dreams: A History of the First Unitarian Church of Omaha, by Dave Richardson (2018). 8 - Unitarian Indian Boarding School and WA Interfaith Response to the Burials, July 2021. 9 - First UU national Social Witness statement on Indian Rights, 1970. See also full list of denominational justice statements related to Native Americans.
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The Quandary and Why It MattersIn earlier posts in this series, I have applied innovation schema to UU worship, considering what makes for good worship, and why innovation in this arena matters; described and evaluated experiments in more participatory and sensory-rich approaches to worship; and reviewed forays into new worship formats centered on singing and meal-sharing. It should be clear that I place a high priority on quality worship. Yet I have also briefly considered how efficiently any mode of worship, once introduced, can be sustained. In this piece I turn more squarely to the question of the time required to prepare worship - and why I'm looking for ways to not only sustain quality worship, but free up capacity, to serve other vital needs. The Quandary: Worship in the Unitarian Universalist tradition is particularly intensive to prepare – at the same time that other needs press in. Let's look at what good UU worship asks of its creators, before considering competing needs. The Demands of UU Worship Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance in Worship. As a tradition emerging from the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation, Unitarian Universalist worship culture shares with a large part of Protestantism a focus on The Word. It is the sermon, not the “smells and bells” prominent in some traditions, that has long been at the center of our worship. Yet, without a strong liturgical framework or lectionary driving sermon planning – such as grounds worship in many mainline Protestant churches – Unitarian Universalist ministers are positioned for One Hit Wonder syndrome. Many a Sunday is a blank slate. That means it takes considerable discernment and creative energy to set the direction for worship.
Parameters? As the saying goes, creativity thrives on constraints. Since we don’t have the limits imposed by a lectionary in UU worship, how else can we introduce some degree of direction? Theme-based ministry programs, when adopted, can put a broad framework in place for each month. However, in my experience with one such program popular in our tradition, the themes are SO broad that this didn’t do much to improve the efficiency of worship preparation. An abundance of shared resources on the themes can even do the opposite – creating rabbit holes of research, postponing the setting of one’s own direction and the tapping into of one’s own authentic experience and preaching voice. Theme-based ministry has many up sides – and I for one am psyched about the new UUA Woven Faith program – but meaningfully constraining worship prep is not something themed resources have done, for me. Developing holistic worship series (a la Marcia McFee, described in Experiment 1) in essence means planning a set of Sundays in tandem. I did find that brought a bit of efficiency on the back end, when sermonizing and pulling the Order of Service together for a particular Sunday. However, it takes more planning at the front end, during the stages of “metaphoraging,” selecting elements that will provide continuity across a series (songs, visual installations, etc.), and engaging others in series development. So it’s a win for depth and meaning, but a wash at best in terms of efficiency. A strategy that appeals to me is one I periodically hear colleagues wishing for: a set of core stories that UU ministers and congregations come back to over and over, somewhat like a lectionary. Such a collection might draw from our roots in the Biblical tradition; Unitarian, Universalist and UU history; as well as folk tales and secular stories that are approaching canon status in UU culture. Stone Soup comes to mind as an example of the latter. If / when anyone completes such a project – and assuming we cross the hurdle of reaching relative agreement on what belongs in the collection – this could provide a double win: lending depth to UU worship and ongoing faith formation, over cycles of engagement with those stories… while reining in the open-endedness of inspirational sources that adds an extra, amorphous step to worship planning for UU religious professionals and lay worship leaders. Ritual & Liturgy The focus on reason and the word have been tempered, to a greater or lesser extent – with variability across congregations – with liturgy and ritual. These help to balance head with heart and reason / words with experience.
The celebration of Christian communion has faded considerably over the two centuries of Unitarianism/Universalism/UUism in north America – which is not to say that it has disappeared. Meanwhile, other rituals have emerged and spread organically, often given the “communion” label. The two that have become bookends to a malleable UU liturgical year are water in-gathering in late summer / early fall, and flower festival in spring / early summer – both drawing symbolic inspiration from nature, as well as from our history. In-between, a variety of other themes and observances may recur from year to year, with variation across churches in which ones are observed. Christmas and Easter are near-universal, observed in ways consistent with our theologies. Jewish High Holy Days may be brought in, notably in areas with significant Jewish UU participation. Samhain / All Souls services honoring ancestors, and other earth-sensitive celebrations, like winter solstice; fire ceremony around the New Year; thematic attention to MLK Day, Earth Day, and LGBTQ Pride Sunday; kick-off services for the start of the religious education year and for stewardship; music services; and youth/Coming of Age services, are among those I hear mentioned most frequently among colleagues. These traditions ground congregational worship with life-giving roots. While some of these involve repeating particular rituals or stories from year to year, others are much broader in their implications for worship. Having some themes automatically map onto the worship calendar provides helpful constraints to creativity, where it occurs. Yet, there is still a tremendous amount of from-scratch worship design required of UU worship leaders. Out of 52 Sundays in a year, in the congregation I serve, a substantial majority are open-ended. Sermon Prep There's no one right way to approach sermon preparation. For me, the process begins with mapping out worship topics. I like to do this during Study Leave weeks, which I spread out to once per quarter for this purpose. Many considerations come into play when setting topics and drafting blurbs, among them:
Between the time I set a topic, and when that week arrives, stories and materials have often begun to accumulate that can be drawn upon in developing the service and sermon. Still, writing an effective sermon takes dedicated time, in which the artist can enter the messy process of creation. Hence the practice many UU ministers follow of setting aside one day a week as a Writing Day. ** 1 hour of preparation for every 1 minute of sermon. ** The rule of thumb I learned in seminary is that it takes about an hour of preparation for every minute of sermon length. I believe that includes time in study / reflection / spiritual practice / life experience, not just the time writing a sermon the week of – though I suspect the actual writing takes more time than your average person on the street (or in the pew) would guess. Many Roles I’ve come to think of worship creation as akin to putting on a new play every week. Similarly, Marcia McFee puts it in terms of filmmaking.
If you’re lucky, you are also working with a music director and instrumentalist(s), may sometimes partner with a religious educator in worship, may have a paid tech person handling AV and streaming, and have a bench of volunteer talent to draw upon in the congregation. The Upshot: Preparation of quality worship requires more time, skill and care than many may realize. This is especially true for UUs, whose inspiration is wide open, and whose creativity is largely unaided by an annual cycle of texts/stories that anchor worship preparation. All the (Other) Things Other Needs. Parish ministers face many other needs that compete with worship preparation for our time and attention: pastoral care, leadership of the staff team, working with the board and various teams, teaching, developing volunteers, social action, and more. The demands for ministry have only grown in the past several decades. Still, maintaining a vibrant worship program is usually considered a high priority for ministers. Worship is how newcomers most often check out a church (well, the church’s online presence and then in person worship). It is the most visible way the minister serves the whole congregation, too. And in midsize congregations, worship is expected to be the “flagship program” of the church. Growing pressure. The demands on ministers’ time and energy are especially great for solo ministers in mid-size congregations (squeezed in the pastoral-to-program shift/plateau), or in any church that is understaffed. Note that under-staffing can be a shortage of either paid staff and/or committed volunteers, relative to the congregation’s programming & aspirations.
At the same time, many churches are experiencing a decrease in the human resources available to meet the needs. Many congregations have cut staff hours / positions to balance budgets. Concurrently, volunteer engagement, already long shifting, fell off in many congregations during the pandemic and in its aftermath. We are rebuilding our volunteer infrastructure and adapting there, too. Where might that math leave us? More needs + less human resources = CRUNCH (or missed opportunity) Radical transformation. Changing needs are not just driven by pandemic-related trends. From a balcony view of spirituality, the ministry needed to meet the spiritual present and future was already expanding beyond the usual staples of congregational life like Sunday worship and volunteer-driven religious education classes. Though it lagged mainline Protestant traditions somewhat, Unitarian Universalism too has slowly shrunk in net numbers. Still, I believe our tradition holds significant potential to meet this need voiced by the Fetzer Institute: “to address the needs of the next generation of seekers in their spiritual formation by building a bridge between the wisdom and practices of traditional religion and spiritual seekers both within and outside the traditions.” (1) We face adaptive challenges like shifting ways people participate in institutions – affecting models of membership, volunteering, and communication; changes in families’ lives; and a model of how to do church that, arguably, has been dissolving for decades. Religious educator and innovator Karen Bellavance-Grace sums up the latter issue:
 Ferdinand Pauwels' painting of Martin Luther posting his 95 theses -- what turned out to be the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (public domain, via Picryl / Wikimedia) Congregations as laboratories. At the national level, the UUA is encouraging and supporting “covenanting communities” that go beyond the walls of church buildings – and beyond the leadership of credentialed religious leaders – in their forms. However, brick-and-mortar/multiplatform congregations are still the backbone of our movement. They could be the locus of much innovation. Indeed, our congregations ARE the locus of much innovation. “Even in the presence of so much pain and profound transition at all levels of our institutions, we are in a time where many of our congregations are experiencing vitality in new and exciting ways, where our communities are emerging to meet the profound shared yearning of our times.” ~ Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt, UUA President (2) The work of making ancient wisdom accessible and relevant today is something UUs often feel we are well-suited to do. But we may need to expand beyond our usual ways of doing church in order to connect with more of the “nones,” “spiritual but not religious,” and other unchurched people out there who are looking for spiritual connection, authenticity, and depth. If we are to evolve in how we serve both our existing constituents and some of the many more spiritually hungry folks who might “be UUs but not know it,” we need to allocate time and talent for new experiments.
I can mention some that interest me, but that I have not yet had the time to pursue
Innovation takes time and creativity. How can we carve out these resources for trying new things, while maintaining quality in our flagship program, worship?
Endnotes
(1) Sharing Spiritual Heritage: Convening, Dialogue, and Field Building, by the Fetzer Institute (2022). (2) “Holding the Heart of Unitarian Universalism: Update on the Faith from UUA President,” UU World, 3-27-26. I spoke at the May Day rally in Omaha on May 1, 2026. The text of my speech - featuring notable Unitarian Henry David Thoreau - follows.
One of my Unitarian ancestors, and one of our American cultural ancestors, Henry David Thoreau, is known as much for his writing on Civil Disobedience as for his experiment at Walden Pond. Thoreau’s own most famous act of disobedience was on principle refusing to pay his taxes. He withheld his funds from the government for six years, protesting its collusion with the institution of slavery, and protesting against the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846, a war that was very much tied up in the struggle over slavery.
Thoreau penned his essay on resistance of unjust government while sitting in a jail cell for his rebellion. In Civil Disobedience, he wrote: “A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and [humans], serve the State with their consciences … and so necessarily resist it … and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.” Many have developed campaigns of strategic nonviolence, inspired by Thoreau’s concept of Civil Disobedience. Among them, people who indeed became martyrs, like Mahatma Gandhi & Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m guessing most of us do not aspire to be martyrs. Let me make the case to you for why we should all, within our own risk calculus, practice civil disobedience. Jamila Bradley advocates “a daily disobedience practice.” Jamily Bradley is a queer black writer that you can find on Substack. They draw the idea of a daily disobedience practice from another writer, James C. Scott. Bradley astutely observes that “we are currently in a revolutionary crisis, and our nervous systems are wired toward compliance.” Because for a social species like ours, they explain, “compliance is a survival strategy that gets trained into the body…. much of the time, obedience is not a moral choice… It is the body making a calculation that says, I do not want to become target shaped today.” (I want to be safe.) The upshot? Going against authorities does not happen easily and spontaneously for most of us, even if we theoretically believe in civil disobedience. Hence the value of a daily disobedience practice. “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) Bradley writes, “A daily disobedience practice is not about being reckless. It is not about collecting consequences. It is not about romanticizing deviance. It is about becoming unprogrammable.” Becoming un-programmable. Because “compliance is complicity” as Bradley puts it. And I’m guessing, if you chose to come and be here, you do not want to be complicit with all the terrible things happening. “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) One could start with small things, breaking a trivial rule like jaywalking. Anything that goes against the rule-following instincts of all of us instinctive rule-followers. Better still if the action is not merely symbolic but practical – like, say, helping neighbors who are undocumented immigrants. I think Thoreau would agree. He wrote that, “Law never made [people] a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.” In other words, you can mean well and still do harm if you mindlessly go along with unjust laws. Moreover, Thoreau wanted people to spend less effort talking and more in concrete action. “It matters not how small the beginning may seem to be,” Thoreau wrote – “what is once well done is done for ever.” “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) If you skipped work or school or shopping as part of the May Day actions, you are already getting into the spirit of noncompliance. “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) So I invite you to play around with a daily practice of disobedience, and what that might look like for you – using your own best judgment of what risks are reasonable, as you train your noncompliance muscles. “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) Thoreau urged readers to “recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.” And he wrote, “to be strictly just, [the authority of government] must have the sanction and consent of the governed.” Did you catch that? A government that does not have the sanction and consent of the people loses its legitimacy to continue governing. “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) The historian Howard Zinn, introducing Thoreau’s political writings, observes, “Thoreau’s great insight was that there is a moral emptiness in government unless it is filled by the actions of citizens on behalf of justice. That corresponds exactly to the democratic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence,” Zinn continues, “in which governments have no inherent right to exist or to rule, but deserve to do so only when they fulfill the charge given them by the people: to protect everyone’s equal right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”  facing the speakers' podium at the May Day rally (Memorial Park, Omaha) Of note on International Workers Day, Thoreau saw it as up to ordinary people, the working class, the middle class, to keep a check on how the government was used. Those who “would assert the purest right,” he wrote, “and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property…” In contrast, Thoreau wrote, “the rich man … is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.” (e.g., is always in cahoots) “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) So friends, I invite you to train your whole being, nervous system included, for resistance through daily acts of disobedience, be they substantive or playful. Because it’s up to We the People. May we stop the madness together. May we restore democracy together. May we never stop working for collective liberation, not until all of us have a fair chance at ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Amen, ameen, ah-main, sadhu, tathāstu, ashe, so may it be. One last time… “Do my bidding!” (Crowd - “No!”) Source:
The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, edited by Wendell Blick (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1973, 2004) – primarily drawing from the essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (later titled “Civil Disobedience") and the introduction by Howard Zinn. Adapted from a sermon delivered April 5, 2026 (Easter) at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. (Video available below or on YouTube here.) * * * * Comfort or conviction? That was the choice facing Jesus of Nazareth and his ragtag band of followers in Jerusalem, in the days leading up to Good Friday, and into Easter and beyond. The Roman empire and status quo religion pushed back against the dangerous inclusion of Jesus. Comfort or conviction? That was the choice facing Ephraim Nute and the Unitarian congregation he served in Lawrence, Kansas, when the territory was a hotbed of activism by both free-state and slave-state advocates. Comfort or conviction? That was the choice facing Eugene Debs and the labor movement he led, in the age of robber barons and through to the first world war. Comfort or conviction? That is the choice that faces every one of us living through times of tremendous oppression and political upheaval. * * *
Scripture tells that, after the scene at the gate, Jesus is later put to death, in a cruel and public manner on a cross. This was done at the direction of the Roman governor of the territory. He was egged on by more traditional religious leaders, who were none too pleased with the charismatic Jesus’ pull on people, and his questioning of the social order. At the cross, the followers in the poem give voice to their sense of grief and helplessness. They feel small, powerless, unable to face what is happening. It would be easy for any among us today who are paying attention to the powers and principalities to be similarly discouraged. To be frozen in fear and denial. To feel impotent against the forces taking over one after another of our institutions. But. But. A few days later, women arrive at Jesus’ tomb, prepared to anoint his body in the traditional way – only to find the tomb empty. No body. “Hope does not die so easily,” the poet relays. For the followers of Jesus, hope rises. They are not sure what to make of the empty tomb, or of the man who tells them that love lives.  The Women at Christ's empty tomb / Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens (picryl / public domain) The poem ends there. But for me, the great inspiration of Easter is what happens in the months and years that follow. The community that had grown up around Jesus does not disperse, not entirely. They do not go back to the lives they were living before, as if none of it had ever happened. They continue to live by the teachings and example of their beloved teacher. They build communities that do this in systematic ways. Those in power still do not like what Jesus stood for, but those following the way of Jesus keep going. They stick with their convictions, and with each other. The same story plays out over and over in history: sometimes groups of people, including religious ones, are coopted by the state. Sometimes, these groups, including those that claim to take their cue from Jesus, make a mockery of his teachings. Not siding with the poor but preaching the prosperity gospel, that blames people for whatever lot in life they happen to have. Not leading with empathy and inclusion, but casting stones at whoever seems different. Not criticizing those who would consolidate wealth and worldly power, but caving to them, praising them, becoming them. So to me, the story of Easter is like any good “once upon a time” story – it is a story that happens over and over in human life. The question is, what roles will we play in the Holy Week of our time? Will we choose comfort, or conviction? It’s not an easy question in practice. Sticking with one’s convictions can bring serious consequences. As illustrated by the life – and death – of Jesus of Nazareth. Now, I’m not suggesting every person should have the same appetite for risk that Jesus did. We all have our own risk calculus, based on our responsibilities to other people, our own resources and capacities. And our discernment about how we can best contribute. But if we do not actively choose some actions we will take in support of our values, we run the risk of defaulting to comfort. Of playing it safe. Of looking the other way while real people suffer. Reverend Henry Meserve, who served our liberal religious tradition, once posed this provocative question: “If you were arrested for being a Unitarian Universalist, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” * * * For Ephraim Nute, who served a Unitarian church in Lawrence, Kansas in the late 1850s, the evidence piled up. Born to a Universalist family in Boston in 1819, Nute opposed slavery from early in his career. This commitment was born out in the personal respect he demonstrated for the full humanity of blacks, and indigenous people too. After several ministries in New England Unitarian churches, Nute enthusiastically volunteered to help start a new Unitarian church in Kansas. It was 1855, just a year after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the issue of slavery up to the settlers in each territory. In addition to bringing freethinking religion to the west, the American Unitarian Association also charged Ephraim Nute to help build the community and its institutions… and to join the free-state forces battling with slave-state advocates for control of Kansas.
As for the contested issue of slavery in Kansas, while it was being built, the Unitarian church in Lawrence was used as a fort. The congregation helped hold back attacks from the pro-slavery forces who flocked to the state from Missouri and beyond. While Rev. Nute survived, members of the congregation lost their lives in this conflict. In one of his many letters sent back east to Theodore Parker and other colleagues – who would often read them from the pulpit – Nute wrote, “For a time, it seemed probable that the foundation-stones for the church would be wet by the blood of the martyrs for liberty.” Nute himself was captured and held prisoner at one point. His brother-in-law had been ambushed, murdered, and scalped by a drunken Missouri raider. Nute was nabbed in the process of trying to recover his in-law’s body. He and other captives were released through the efforts of hundreds of soldiers. After the ordeal, Nute was warned by slave-staters to leave the territory. He held to his convictions and stayed put. 1859 was a momentous year for both the Unitarian church in Lawrence and the free-state cause. The church was dedicated that year. And the free-state leaders of Lawrence successfully pressed a new legislature to write slavery out of the state constitution. (It would take a couple more years for Nebraska Territory to abolish slavery.) The church also served as a hub on the Underground Railroad, helping people escaping slavery in Missouri and beyond. Perhaps this tale comes across more like fiction than history. But the courage of Ephraim Nute – and of the members of the congregation he served in Lawrence – was very real. I was sad, though perhaps I should not have been surprised, to read that the Unitarian tradition was split over the slavery issue during this time period. We tend to remember the people who were most courageous in their time – the Ephraim Nutes, the Theodore Parkers, and others who were considered radical by many of their peers. Never overly generous toward the effort to begin with, the denomination withdrew funding for the Lawrence mission after four years. Ephraim Nute may have stayed alive, unlike some of his parishioners. But he did pay a price for acting on his convictions. His health, resources, and resilience were all severely depleted when, after four years, he left Lawrence and “Bleeding Kansas” (as it was known). Though he never preached in Kansas again – and for that matter, never served a congregation again – Nute returned to Lawrence around the time of the Civil War. He served as a chaplain, before getting involved with care for wounded soldiers. During that time he helped people fleeing north to escape enslavement. In answer to Henry Meserve’s question, if Ephraim Nute was arrested for being a Unitarian or Universalist, I believe there would have been overwhelming evidence to convict him. * * * I want to share one more story with you. Another larger than life figure in our Midwest heritage, who chose convictions even at great cost to personal comfort. We’re moving now into the late 1800s and through World War I. Does the name Eugene V. Debs ring a bell? Maybe to the history buffs among us. Eugene Debs was not a Unitarian or Universalist. As far as I can determine, he did not have any particular institutional connection to religion. I know about Debs because I lived in his home state of Indiana for twenty years, and the innovative choir I sang in did a musical and theatrical program telling his story. I thank its artistic director, Sue Swaney, for the material from which I draw today. This morning’s topic about convictions and commitment kept bringing to mind this quote from Eugene Debs: “Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’ statement evokes a spirit of Universalism. No one is left outside of the circle of love and care and community. You might call this radical solidarity.
As a union leader, Debs’ leadership in leading strikes and negotiating for workers grew. He became a national figure after a Pullman strike of 1894 became “the largest coordinated work stoppage in the nation’s history and the most significant exercise of union strength the nation had ever witnessed.” The strike was violently suppressed, with Debs barred by a federal injunction from speaking to the strikers. Attorney Clarence Darrow took Debs’ case. But even the most moving defense did not persuade the Supreme Court to block Deb’s jail sentence. It was in jail that Debs met with labor leaders and socialists who journeyed to meet him, studied history, and determined that the best way to fight for change for working people was through politics – and particularly, through a new party, a socialist party. Whatever political affiliations each of us may have, I suspect many can appreciate Debs’ audacity. He believed Senators of both parties were too much in the sway of the trusts and corporations and their lobbyists. “I am opposing a social order,” Debs declared, “in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” Debs had served in political office himself, starting as City Clerk in Terre Haute, then in the Indiana general assembly. He would go on to run for president five times on the socialist ticket, the last time from prison. Through his passion and charisma, Debs helped to grow a third party that met with increasing success – winning 6% of the vote on his fourth run for president, and fielding over a thousand candidates for public office. If you’re wondering whether religious convictions play any role, they do. In this connection, I’m drawing from an article in Sojourners magazine on Eugene Debs and Christian Socialism. While Debs criticized most churches for failing to follow the gospels, he himself found inspiration in the story of Jesus. Debs said of Jesus, “He was working class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour of his death.” He called Moses a strike leader, too. And he spoke of Christ as a role model. The political climate changed with the coming of the first world war. Congress passed laws making it a crime to speak or write publicly against our country’s involvement in the war. Debs opposed the war and continued to give speeches against the war. He wrote: “The working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; yours but to do and die. That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.” Debs knew that speeches like this would land him in prison. Like Jesus in Jerusalem, he continued anyway in working for those with the least power. “I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail,” he said, “than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.” At his trial, Debs pled his own case. He did not recant. Rather, he said, “I am not on trial here. There is an infinitely greater issue that is being tried… American institutions are on trial here before a court of American citizens.” Debs was sentenced to ten years in jail. At this time others compared him to Jesus, among them Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes. Holmes told Debs in a letter, “You are wounded for our transgressions. By your stripes we shall be healed.” While nominating Debs for president, another clergyman described Debs’ release from his earlier imprisonment as akin to emerging from a tomb to deliver a resurrection message. Despite his aversion to most organized religion, Debs’ source of inspiration was clear. Consider this scene, as described in the Sojourners piece: While serving his prison sentence for speaking against the military draft of World War I, Eugene Debs hung a single picture on the wall of his cell: the pain-wracked visage of the crucified Jesus Christ, complete with crown of thorns. To the clergy assigned to visit him, Debs explained the affinity. “He denounced the profiteers, and it was for this that they nailed his quivering body to the cross,” he said. “If Christ could go to the cross for his principles, surely I can go to prison for mine.” Debs served three years of his ten year sedition sentence. Under mounting public pressure, President Harding pardoned Debs and others on Christmas Day 1921.  Eugene V. Debs, outside federal penitentiary, Atlanta, GA (public domain) The prison warden said of Debs, “I never in my life met a kinder man. He is forever thinking of others, trying to serve them, and never thinking of himself.” Clarence Darrow wrote, “There may have lived, sometime, somewhere, a kindlier, gentler, more generous man than Eugene Debs, but I have never met him.” Though he had no formal affiliation, one can reasonably argue that Eugene Debs, the Christian Socialist and humanitarian, was convicted, precisely for his Universalist values of radical solidarity and how faithfully he lived them. * * * While I have lifted up three remarkable figures, notice than in each case, there were whole communities, whole movements buoying the work of those leaders. The people that continued to practice in their own lives, together in communities, the principles Jesus had modeled. The congregation that collaborated with Ephraim Nute in establishing a Unitarian church in Lawrence, and in fighting for Kansas to become a free state – a congregation that continued to be a force for love, long after Nute was gone from the territory. The movement of workers and voters, friends and colleagues that expanded worker rights and built political power in concert with Eugene Debs. Comfort or conviction? Each of us has that choice as we grapple with the injustices of our own day. This Easter, I invite you to find your place in the communities and movements that speak to you and your values. So that if you are asked – “If you were arrested for being a Unitarian Universalist, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” - you can firmly answer, Yes. May it be so. Amen. This is the full service in which the above sermon was delivered. The readings begin around 31:45, the sermon around 37:25. Sources:
1 - Ephraim Nute entry, UU Dictionary of Biography, accessed March 2026. 2 - "Ephrain Nute, free-state minister," UU World magazine, March 17, 2015. 3 - Eugene V. Debs: An Indiana Original, a musical and theatrical program by Sue Swaney (Artistic Director, Voces Novae). Performed at Woolery Stone Mill, Bloomington, IN, 2007. Script generously shared by Dr. Swaney. 4 - "Eugene Debs and Christian Socialism" originally published in Sojourners magazine, accessed online in April 2026 at www.religioussocialism.org/eugene_debs_and_christian_socialism Note: the Henry Meserve quote is drawn from Richard S. Gilberts' The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2000). For a deeper dive on Ephraim Nute, check out two books by Bobbie Groth, sociologist, ordained UU community minister, and great-great-granddaughter of Ephraim Nute: The Incredible Story of Ephraim Nute: Scandal, Bloodshed and Unitarianism on the American Frontier (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2011) and Liberty's Curse: Being the Deathbed Confession & Memoirs of a Pistol Packing Preacher of the Kanzas Territory ...In His Own Words (2020). Music- and Food-Centered Worship FormatsWhy try new forms of worship? To nurture spirits and build community – the raison d'être of congregations – in ways that connect today. Enhancements and new models in this area of congregational life can both serve existing constituents in powerful ways, and reach new people not already drawn into and fed by a church’s worship life. In my prior post in this Worship Innovation series, I shared some of the ways I have experimented with more participatory and multi-sensory modes of worship. Here I zero in on two specific new forms of worship I have introduced where I serve, centering song and food, respectively. Experiment 3: Soulful Songs Sundays It’s no accident that religious communities the world over sing and chant together. Singing is one of the most powerful ways to express ideas, process emotions, and find one’s spiritual center. Singing has palpable, positive physiological effects. It helps to regulate breathing and calm the nervous system. This integrating activity draws on both the left and right sides of the brain. And when we sing together with others, tapping into our social biology, it can foster a deep sense of safety and communal care. Singing together is powerful medicine.  Image: gustavorezende / Pixabay A few years ago I decided to experiment with a Sunday morning worship format that centers singing together. I happened to mention this to a local colleague, the cantor at the reform synagogue in our city. She shared that she periodically leads a song-centered service in her congregation, and invited me to visit one. The experience was inspiring and cemented my desire to play with music-centered worship. In addition, UU colleagues from all over generously shared their own song-rich worship format examples, from vespers and Taizé-style evening services, to some hymn sings and other Sunday morning services rooted in communal singing. (You can check out this Brief Guide on Taizé-style Worship in UU churches from Rev. Aaron White, shared here with his blessing.) My own spiritual experiences with chanting led me to favor simple songs that can be sung repeatedly, similar to Taizé, though broader in repertoire. I developed a template Order of Service and named the format Soulful Songs Sundays. (Current template here.) Standard worship elements like lighting the chalice, the offering, and Joys & Concerns are retained. Chants or short songs may take the place of a keyboard prelude, opening hymn, and could even be part of a Time for All Ages. Instead of a sermon, the heart of the service is a cycle of inspirational readings or reflections interspersed with songs and silence – generally three cycles of reading-song-silence. The readings and songs are curated or written, and arranged in a particular order, to create the emotional arc of the service. The tone can be soothing or energizing. It can invite calm and connection, or wonder, or commitment. While the goal is always to minister to people holistically, the form is flexible. It can be utilized to address many topics and foster varied emotional effects. Were I in a sanctuary with flexible seating, I would have the chairs arranged in a circle or semi-circle. Such an arrangement would create a communal feeling, and enhance participants’ ability to hear each others’ voices, for rounds and two-part pieces as well as unison singing. That’s not an option in the traditional, pew-filled sanctuary where I serve, but I mention it for others who might want to try that.  Image: geralt / Pixabay In preparing to pilot this type of service, I gathered up musical resources: ordering and familiarizing myself with more Mary Grigolia songbooks; reviewing chants and songs from other sources (including some of my own scribbling); and going through UU hymnals and Worship Web to build a list of songs suitable for chant-like use. (My original compilation of potential songs is here. Please do your own due diligence re: copyright/permissions/honorariums.) Happily, we now also have Sing Out Love, the UUA virtual hymnal with ever-expanding songs – many suitable for this type of service. Squeeeee! I scheduled three Soulful Songs Sundays the year that I started this, 2023-2024, introducing it to the congregation as something we were trying out that year. In 2024-2025, we used this format six times from fall through spring, with a song-centered service about every six weeks or so. This year, after returning from sabbatical, I am continuing to program a Soulful Songs service about every 6-8 weeks. Following are some examples from the past couple years of Soulful Songs Sundays.
Reflection How did it go? What was learned from this experiment? There was some tentativeness in the congregation when I first introduced the Soulful Songs Sunday format. While one side of the bell curve dug the novelty and experiential nature of this type of service right away, others took time to acclimate, as the pattern of the service became familiar. Part of the learning curve for me was how to strike a balance of familiar vs. new songs that would be about right for most. (I do include some songs with verses now.) Accompanists and music leaders likewise got more comfortable over time, following my lead in how many times to repeat a given song; I often want to be able to feel the room and follow my intuition, to achieve the desired physiological and spiritual effects. Sinking into the singing is where the magic happens. In light of the framework from Susan Beaumont that I introduced in the first post in this series, I believe this service format is serving well the core of existing constituents and needs previously met. I also sense that it is reaching the adjacent sector – needs of current people not previously met, or met as well, plus serving new people who are drawn to a contemplative, artfully woven service.  (You can check out Beaumont's take on this.) I am aware of folks who have a particular appreciation for Soulful Songs Sundays, both among our choir singers and the congregation at large – including some who were initially unsure and slow to warm up to that format. There are doubtless some for whom it is not their favorite format, as is true with any approach to worship. While there are people of all tenures in the congregation who indicate feeling ministered to by these services, my sense is that newer and younger people are especially likely to connect with Soulful Songs Sundays. On a practical level, the model feels sustainable, with an ever-growing repertoire of potential songs. I have an ample set of stand-bys, from hymnals and songs already introduced, to balance with new songs. I’m excited to continue drawing from Sing Out Love, in particular. I find much creative opportunity in how I weave together the elements of a Soulful Songs Sunday, sometimes adapting the format to connect on the particular time and topic. I had hoped that this format, once established, would take less prep time than a sermon-centered service. I’m not finding that to be the case. It’s comparable in the time needed to prepare. It does involve a different sort of energy and effort than sermon-writing, and that brings welcome variation in my creative life and pastoral ministry. All in all, Soulful Songs Sundays strike me as an effective new worship format where I serve. I anticipate continuing to program these every 6-8 weeks on our worship calendar. Experiment 4: Brunch Church Like music, food is a focal point for people coming together, including in religious community. And like singing together, breaking bread together helps create a visceral sense of safety and belonging in community. I was interested in a worship format that includes a meal, for several reasons. It holds community-building potential that felt especially needed post-pandemic, and continuing into a polarized, alienated era. It lends itself to all-ages community, in particular, with the promise of including families in congregational life, and promoting connections across generations – something people of all ages have asked for in the church I serve.
Food-centered worship also connects with the senses in a way uncommon in traditional worship – bringing in the flavors, textures, colors, and nourishment of food. I don’t remember how much this was on my mind at the beginning, but I am now mindful, as well, that food insecurity affects some of our members and visitors. Putting good food in people’s bellies meets a critical need even before you get into the community-building, aesthetic appeal and spiritual openings generated by sitting down to a meal. This was a worship type that would need a team effort. Members of our Worship Arts Team, along with some other interested folks who agreed to serve, formed a task force to pilot a Brunch Church worship format. We consulted with Nourish, a UU community ministry serving our movement, to learn what worked well in their experience doing dinner church with a variety of Unitarian Universalist communities and settings. Our team worked through logistical questions like where to hold brunch church – we do it in our Common Room (fellowship hall), with its big round tables and adjacent kitchen – and what foods to offer. Each Brunch Church service introduces a theme, and provides the opportunity for people to engage with that topic in discussion at their tables. Here’s our current template for this type of service. (I highly recommend talking with the folks at Nourish for rich conversation and resources as you get started.) Since we introduced the Brunch Church format in June 2024, the Worship Arts Team has taken to scheduling one about every other month. That pattern continues.
From worship team and congregant reports, Brunch Church appears to be a success in building community, including across children, youth, parents and elders. There seems to be some variability in how deeply people dig into the conversation prompts on the theme vs. just chatting at their tables while they eat. One surprise for me was that the Worship Arts Team likes doing this kind of service so much – and finds it easier to do than coming up with more speaker ideas or working with guests – that since the pilot, they have consistently been scheduled for Sundays when I will not be in the pulpit. I’m slightly disappointed, as I do not get to witness or participate in the goodness. On the other hand, this takes some pressure off the worship team – and that’s no small thing. We have learned that doing this potluck-style leads to lots of people bringing food to share. So much so that over time, the team stopped planning ahead to provide staple foods, like the oatmeal and egg dishes provided at the pilot. With visitors and food insecurity on my mind, I am encouraging a return to having some breakfast staples provided by the church. We learned it wasn’t worth trying to stream Brunch Church. We did it the first time, with plans for how to interact with and include folks on Zoom, and had virtually no attendance online. Nor have there been complaints about the lack of a streaming option on subsequent Brunch Church Sundays. Considering Beaumont’s categories, my sense is that Brunch Church is serving our core – existing people and needs – as well as reaching adjacent people, and needs not already well met in traditional worship. Time-wise, I do think that preparing this kind of worship would take less from me, if I were planning them periodically, than other kinds of worship. That may be true for worship associates too – part of why they have taken leadership of this form of worship.
Adapted from a sermon delivered March 1, 2026 at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. (Video available below or on YouTube here.) * * * * “The salt of the earth.” The phrase refers to a person or group of people characterized by kindness and reliability. To say “they are the salt of the earth” means they are hardworking, honorable, down-to-earth people. Another colloquial way of putting it is “them’s good people.” This morning I take back up the sermon series on Our Midwestern Heritage that I began at the end of January. Midwesterners are generally “salt of the earth” type of people. As you may recall from the intro sermon, I traced several cultural patterns that apply both to the Midwest at large, and specifically to Unitarian Universalists in this region. Those four interwoven cultural patterns include an enthusiastic embrace of democratic norms, both politically and culturally (that’s small-d democratic); a belief in education and lifelong learning for all people; a more middle class society with less economic and social hierarchy than in other regions; and pragmatic, ‘get ‘er done!’ attitudes. Salt of the earth.  Hello from the Bonneville Salt Flats (Utah, 2005) As historian Jon Lauck chronicled it, the 1800s Midwest saw many drives for reform, often led by people of faith and rooted in mainstream Christian teachings. Social uplift and community betterment were, Lauck writes, “organized via a dense network of civic institutions in the Midwest, and generally concerned with the forces that distorted the [small R] republican order they had worked so hard to build.” Lauck contrasts community in those times with today, writing of a “social system that was bolstered by a strong civic culture, a common culture of books and reading, and a spirit of idealism and reform. In our own period of decay,” he observes, “an era of callow tweets, sensationalism, celebrity worship, extreme loneliness, and mass and manufactured and purposeful distraction, all of which is unleashing rampant anxiety and depression and devouring our young – this old culture [Lauck suggests] deserves a second look and not our condescension.” Congregations were a core part of that old culture. Churches like this one were central hubs of social life, character development and civic engagement. They were engines for the rest of Midwestern civil society. A congregation like First Unitarian can continue to serve such functions today, to the extent that we invest in it with our resources and our active participation. Now as the region developed, another notable feature of the egalitarian, pragmatic Midwest was flexible roles for men and women. Lauck writes, “Midwestern agrarian life meant equal participation in many forms of work and community life.” In fact, the Midwest was the most pro-suffrage region in the country during the fight to get women the vote. Lauck writes, “[Various] advances [in the Midwest] would finally lead to women’s suffrage, a cause greatly advanced by women who were products of Midwestern coeducation and veterans of temperance campaigns.” In a moment we’ll hear from one of the most notable of those Midwestern women, Mary Safford. Mary Safford was the catalyst for the Iowa Sisterhood, a network of female ministers who served Unitarian churches in the Midwest and beyond during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Safford served numerous Unitarian congregations, including churches in Sioux City and Des Moines; she also spoke tirelessly on behalf of women’s suffrage and was much in demand as a guest preacher. In fact, at the invitation of Newton Mann, Mary Safford once delivered a sermon at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. This was in a service dedicating an addition to the church building, when it was located at 17th and Cass streets.  Rev. Mary August Safford I share here several excepts from another sermon of Safford’s. It was first delivered to the Western Unitarian Conference in Chicago in 1889. Words of Mary Safford, speaking to Midwestern Unitarians, calling them to INvest in their religious tradition and its institutions: “… so beautiful is that vision which gleams upon our sight as [people] of the liberal faith that we marvel that any are indifferent to its worth… When is one sure that all things are rooted in unchanging love? We have organized this church, but are we doing all we have the power to do to help it grow, to make it a center of light and warmth in this community? A center from which there will constantly radiate the truth that liberates and lifts, the love that strengthens and consoles? Do we realize the obligation that rests upon us to carry forward our noble enterprise to larger and yet larger results? Safford’s language may sound old-fashioned to our ears: obedience to a heavenly vision. But the sentiment underneath her biblical turns of phrase is very similar to the one you will hear from our Stewardship Team this year: there is so much we want to do to fulfill our mission and live out our values. All of us are INcluded in the joys and the learning and the bringing to life of what really matters, through this church. And all of us are INvited to INvest in its future – so that we can do that and even more going forward. Continuing “to proclaim most earnestly in words and deeds the glad gospel of eternal love.” Or in more contemporary lingo, putting love at the center as we support each other and the community around us – as we transform each other and the community around us. One of the chroniclers of Unitarian history in our region, Charles Lyttle, once served this very congregation. In describing the spread of Unitarianism westward from Massachusetts, he notes that in some areas our liberal tradition was met with some resistance. Extensive efforts to bring Unitarianism to Minnesota, including a Norwegian mission, for example, met with considerable success - but they also faced pushback. In contrast, Lyttle writes, “There was no … opposition to liberal views among the Nebraska pioneers of New England lineage who settled in Omaha.” Lyttle names the Joslyns among a number of others. Lyttle sees “an alliance of culture with religion” reflected in First Unitarian Church Omaha’s Bond of Union, which dates to 1890. Here's an excerpt:
Lytte tells of how Unitarian churches in this region took up literary, educational, and humanitarian activities. They increasingly zeroed in on “true religion” as being “primarily Jesus’ spiritual and ethical teachings.” The region embodied (quote) “a rational faith, yet intensely rapturous and lyrical; science and philosophy were fused in it with genuine religious fervor.” I learned something new about First Unitarian from Lyttle – that during a period when All Souls Unitarian, as the church in Lincoln was then called, was “limping along,” not exactly thriving, this church’s minister at the time, Newton Mann, supported them with “neighborly ministrations,” presumably some guest preaching and perhaps encouragement to lay leaders. This pattern of generous sharing and collaboration among area UU churches continues today. Being in relationship not only within this congregation, but across neighboring congregations, benefits all of us. I turn back now to Jon Lauck, historian of the Midwest in general. He writes, “Dissenting religious groups, with the exception of the Mormons, and utopian reformers found a home in the Midwest. [He observes that] one historian linked this openness to the ‘joyous pantheism of the frontier’ and noted a strain of religious skepticism …” as well. The historians seem to be pointing to characteristics of Unitarian and Universalist religion: embrace of wisdom from many sources, and welcome of rational thought and humanism as positive forces in religion. That kind of breadth of inspiration may seem unremarkable to us today, certainly in a Unitarian Universalist church, sometimes even a bit in other progressive traditions flowing out of the Jesus heritage. But it was quite new when Unitarians and Universalists began expressing such broad-minded ideas in Midwestern congregations. Let’s hear again from Mary Safford: “… We are entering upon a new era of religious thought… The old creeds are rapidly being outgrown. But there is danger that in the strong reaction from many old time beliefs, men and women may lose sight of those saving truths, those eternal principles of morality, without which life is not worth living. There is danger that in throwing aside the superstitions of the past, they may also lose that reverence and moral earnestness that are indispensable to real progress… I agree with Mary Safford. Even still today, as new people find Unitarian Universalism, and those of us already in the tradition continue to grow and develop in our faith, hanging onto the heart and soul of Unitarian Universalism is a worthy challenge. Not only high aspirations for a more just society, a greener world. But also the “reverence and moral earnestness” and commitment to shared life that enables us to live out those beautiful dreams. Our Unitarian forebears knew about this. They knew about heeding the spiritual example and ethical teachings of Jesus with continued fervor and dedication, while welcoming in the new knowledge brought by science and the arts – from Newton Mann and others arguing that “true religion” had nothing to fear from evolution, to our wrestling today with artificial intelligence and its ethical place in our society. As long as we stay clear on our purpose as a congregation, as a faith, we will have positive contributions to make to all of the challenges of our time. The salt of the earth. Midwest Unitarian Universalists, at our best, are the salt of the earth. The phrase has more than colloquial meanings. It appears in the Bible as well.  The first part of the selection, “You are the salt of the earth,” is a variation on similar language found in Mark and Luke about salt that has lost its saltiness. Only, Matthew’s twist seems to point specifically to people who are part of the Christian community as that community was then defined. But the Jesus Seminar, whose counsel I value, observes that insider/outsider discriminations were rejected by Jesus himself. So the writer of Matthew is taking editorial liberties with that part. I’ll stick with our contemporary, Midwestern understanding of “salt of the earth.” The next part appears only in Matthew: “But if the salt loses its zing, how will it be made salty? It then has no further use than to be thrown out and stomped on.” Scholars from the Jesus Seminar believed that Matthew’s version aligned, in sentiment at least, with the known teachings of the historical Jesus. This feels authentic. Another version appears in Mark (10:50a): “Salt is good (and salty) – if salt becomes bland, with what will you renew it?” With what will you renew it? What is this aphorism communicating? The saltiness, the zing, is good. If it becomes bland, it must be renewed, the zing restored. I hear in this that our sense of purpose as a religious community, our passion for making a difference in the lives of our members and the world around us – that is critical. It’s not enough to just go through the motions of being a church. We need to know why we are here. We need to be motivated by a deep and abiding love for one another and for all those around us. We need to take pragmatic actions to keep growing, and to express that love in concrete ways. Like working to preserve democracy in our society, as our social justice team gives us ways to do. Like supporting members of the congregation through illnesses and new babies and other occasions, as we do through our caring ministries. Like coming together as a bunch of households in the church are doing, to provide support for food for an immigrant family, in collaboration with Restoring Dignity. Because we recognize the inherent worth of all people, and the absolute necessity of good food in people’s bellies. Coming back here, week after week, to fill our hearts with love and amazing grace… to breathe in peace and breath out love… to rekindle our connections in community. Let’s hear one more time from Mary Safford, who knew something about how to maintain or restore the zest of this faith: “… if there are any here today who rejoice in the great truths of the liberal faith but are doing nothing to support this faith, let me urge you for your own sake as well as for the sake of others no longer to be disobedient unto the heavenly vision. If you have money to give, give it freely, give it gladly. If silver and gold you have none, give time, give thought, give work, give anything you have the power to give that will strengthen this church and help to make it a beacon light to storm tossed souls. If you can do nothing more than simply come to church, be sure to come each Sunday. Come not merely for your own sake but also for the sake of the noble cause that is strengthened by your presence and your interest. One of the noteworthy things that happened in Unitarian congregations in this part of the country, historically, was a cultural shift toward shared ministry rather than more top-down model. The “Iowa sisterhood” of women ministers on the frontier in the late 1800s contributed to that shift, bringing a different leadership style that built community and developed others’ leadership. Later, the Fellowship Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which planted more congregations, to serve more communities, continued that trend. Fellowships were originally lay led, and as such they developed lay leaders more extensively. This period again saw many women enter into leadership in UU churches, bringing with them more egalitarian and collaborative approaches. Holley Ulbrich, writing on the Fellowship Movement, notes how it “facilitated the emerging pattern of shared ministry” between lay leaders and professional religious leaders. The model of shared ministry eventually spread from fellowships to more traditional churches that had long had ministers, like this one – and is now the norm in most UU congregations. I bring forward shared ministry because it is so consistent with the can-do, pragmatic, egalitarian spirit of both the Midwest in general, and Unitarianism in this region. And our ministry – all the ways we support connection, learning, care, justice – it is shared not only in terms of talent and leadership, but also in financial support. To echo Mary Safford, this pledge season, I invite you to “Bravely stand by your convictions.” With your pledge and your participation, you can declare “I’m in!” You are included here. I hope you are regularly inspired here. And I invite you to generously invest in our shared future. As a salt of the earth people, a people of kindness, reliability, and pragmatism, let’s get ‘er done! Let’s secure our shared future, with pledges this stewardship season. May it be so. And blessed be. This is the full service in which the above sermon was delivered. The sermon begins around 38:40. Music appreciators may also wish to catch the choral anthem, "Measure Me, Sky!" It begins around 18:40 and is followed by the introduction of the annual stewardship campaign by lay leaders. Key sources:
1 - The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 by Jon K. Lauck (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022). 2 - "Obedience to the Heavenly Vision" by Mary Safford (1889) in A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism: Volume 1, from the Beginning to 1899 edited by Dan McKanan (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2017). 3 - Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference 1852-1952 by Charles H. Lyttle (Providence, RI: Blackstone Edition, 2006; first published in 1952 by Beacon Press). 4 - The Fellowship Movement: A Growth Strategy and Its Legacy by Holley Ulbrich (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2008). Adapted from a sermon delivered January 25, 2026 at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. (Video available below or on YouTube here.) * * * * “The American Midwest was the most democratic place in the world as it took shape in the nineteenth century.” So writes Jon Lauck, in his 2022 history of the Midwest in the 1800s, titled The Good Country. Again, “The American Midwest was the most democratic place in the world as it took shape in the nineteenth century.” I’m not sure if it feels ironic or prescient that I scheduled this topic for a week when our democracy is dramatically under assault in the Midwest. In recent days I have been taking in some of the news, and particularly watching the testimony of colleagues who either serve in the Twin Cities area, or who traveled there in support of the local people late this past week. One voice of testimony came from Mel Duncan. He’s co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, a major unarmed peacekeeping NGO. Duncan just returned from Gaza to his home in the Twin Cities. Nonviolence Radio interviewed him about what he is seeing in Minnesota now, and how he makes sense of it. Duncan said, “Little did I know that I would be leaving one occupied territory in Palestine and be returning to my home in the Twin Cities, to another occupied territory… Just as the settlers on the West Bank and the Israeli police backed up by the Israeli army patrol the area with impunity in the West Bank – I was in the Jordan Valley [Duncan said], where the settlers would attack at will, the shepherds and the farmers, and would take their land and beat people – that’s what’s happening on the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis right now, where they are attacking primarily people of color and taking them indiscriminately off the streets, with impunity, no accountability. Taking them to holding cells in federal buildings near the airport and taking them to points unknown.” Duncan went on to describe some of the most egregious things that have happened, like ICE using an eight-year-old child as bait to draw out his father, before capturing them both, who are here on asylum. Worse things happened yesterday, after the interview I heard with Duncan. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the administration has chosen Minnesota for this show of force. Though I doubt they anticipated how effectively the community would respond. Not only are they attacking a winter people in the winter, they are attacking Midwesterners who are caring neighbors, who are practical people, and who have been building their skills since George Floyd and before. Mel Duncan told Nonviolence Radio, “We’re not waiting for the story of nonviolence to happen here. It is happening. I’ve lived here for over fifty years, and I’ve never seen the Twin Cities so well organized on multiple levels. There are thousands of people who are acting, who are being creative and are carrying out nonviolent activities in very creative ways.” He describes taking groceries to scared neighbors, driving people to school and work, providing a protective presence in neighborhoods and outside schools – just what Duncan himself was doing in the West Bank – supporting immigrant owned businesses, mass demonstrations, and on. The past is prologue. Jon Lauck, the historian tells us, “The old Midwest could be a reservoir of idealism and hope if we knew its history… Maybe this knowledge will bolster our spirits, provide a light, and help guide us out of the current darkness and loneliness and cynicism.” It is with that hope that I share with you today on the topic of “Our Midwest Heritage” – both our heritage as Midwesterners in general, and specifically as Unitarian Universalists in this region. This is the first in an occasional sermon series on the topic, and lays the groundwork for the series. And by the way, if you’re not from the Midwest, it doesn’t matter – you’re here now, add yourself to the mix. If you are new to Unitarian Universalism, likewise, we’re so glad you’re here! Let’s start with culture. Here I turn to the work of Colin Woodard, in his 2011 book, American Nations. His thesis is that the United States consists of eleven different regions with distinct cultures that have shaped our history and continue to shape our present. Here is a map showing the locations of those eleven regions or nations.  Image: American Nations - Colin Woodward and Tufts Magazine Eastern Nebraska and most of Iowa are in the Midlands region. Its cultural roots go back to Philadelphia, and reflects the aspiration to be a model society rooted in Quaker religion and culture. It was egalitarian, rejecting hierarchy in religion, in gender relations, and suspicious of slavery. Germans from other religious sects immigrated to Pennsylvania later. They shared the Quakers’ moral and religious objection to slavery and melded into the Midlands culture. As they spread westward into the Heartland, Midlands people brought with them a pluralistic culture. Woodard writes that “the Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business.” As the map shows, southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri are part of the culture of Greater Appalachia. I’m more interested for our purposes in the region to the north of us, Yankeedom. The upper Midwest, including our friends in Minnesota, traces its cultural roots to New England, most influenced by its English heritage and Puritan roots. Woodard explains that “The Yankees represent an extreme example of Public Protestantism, a religious heritage that emphasizes collective salvation and the social gospel.” Despite continuing waves of immigration since the regional cultures of the U.S. formed, those regional cultures stuck, and continue to feed into cultural and political divides. Analysis of recent elections supports this. In later waves, immigrants favored regions most welcoming to them – one of two that, Woodard wrote, “had been explicitly multicultural since [its] foundation” was the Midlands. “The American model of cultural pluralism originates in the traditions of … two nations” – New Netherlands (what became greater New York City) and the Midlands. I saw fascinating parallels as I explored Jon Lauck’s history of the 1800s Midwest in The Good Country, and the development of Unitarianism as it moved westward in that same period. They are all intertwined, really, but those parallels involve democratic cultures, both politically and culturally; an embrace of learning throughout the lifespan as a core cultural characteristic; a flatter social class structure; and pragmatic attitudes out here on the prairie.
Lauck traces how the democratic culture of the Midwest starts with the legal charter for the region. He writes that that charter “yielded freestanding sovereign states that ensured the rights of citizens and contributed to the steady erosion of various forms of aristocratic privilege persisting elsewhere around the world.” Further, “a mixture of Christian denominations instilled a basic morality but also fostered a degree of pluralism and toleration and theological freedom not present in other polities dominated by one religious sect.” State charters were created democratically, each one including a detailed bill of rights. Lauck writes, “These democratic documents were reinforced by a culture held open by settlers from varying regions and ethnic groups who embraced egalitarian norms and eagerly sought to participate in democratic life and an economic system open to all comers.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established the region, explicitly provided for public education. Each township had to set aside land for schools. Per Lauck, “Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas saw enrollment of over 90 percent of school-age children by the end of the nineteenth century and ‘led the entire nation at that date’”; the Midwest “’produced the most literate people in the nation.’” Book culture was big in the Midwest too, and not just in schools, with major book publishers, bookstores, and print publications thriving. Libraries, Lauck notes, “were common public projects. The Midwest would later see the building of more Carnegie libraries than any other region.” There was also a lively lecture circuit – the original self-help culture, especially popular with “the young and ambitious.” Higher education also flourished in the Midwest – one historian described the region as “thickly strewn with colleges and universities.” Like the schools for younger ages, the colleges incorporated character development and vocational subjects like agriculture, as well as being co-ed from the start. Many colleges had religious affiliations and strong social agendas related to social reform. Land grant universities feature here too. The social life of Midwesterners in the 1800s included not only church programs and school activities, but book groups, literary societies, civic clubs, and improvement efforts. As its regional culture and identity was formed, the Midwest contrasted with both the South and the Northeast. It was a land of educated, civically engaged people, most of whom, as Lauck put it, “were farmers who prospered on the fertile lands of the region and lived in rough equality with their neighbors.” Scholar Jess Gilbert concluded that “late nineteenth-century rural Midwest was substantially a one-class society.” That made it different from the slave-holding South, the industrial northeast, and Europe. All of those were more aristocratic than the middle class Midwest. Lauck reports that “Over half of the Union’s troops would come from the Midwest, even though the region constituted only a quarter of the country’s population… the Midwest provided nearly all of Lincoln’s generals and most of his cabinet.” Turning back to Woodards’ groups in American Nations, the Midlands formed a bloc with Yankees and New Netherlands against a southern bloc (or Dixie bloc) in causes like the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Despite its frequent alliance with New England, though, the Midwest developed its own identity, and pushed back against “feared hegemony of the East” in culture. That included distinct Midwestern voices in arts and literature, appreciation for the natural wonders of the region, and more. Lauck explains, “Midwesterners saw their region as different from the aristocratic Northeast and the feudal South. This pride of place and sense of identity fostered a healthy desire to resist outside domination.” All of these qualities are on display in Minneapolis right now. The pragmatic ways people are helping their neighbors, across any lines of class or culture – and how Minnesotans and their allies are embracing democracy and civic spirit at the most local level, school by school and block by block.  Marchers carrying a giant constitution through Minneapolis on 1-30-26 (photo from Minnesota Cop Block) Resisting outside domination – as armed and masked ICE agents swarm through neighborhoods, that phrase is thrust into the present. Resisting outside domination. One of our Unitarian Universalist clergy who traveled to Minneapolis for a day of action described just yesterday being boxed in by ICE, crowded into a local store, unable to get out. Lucas Hergert, who serves our congregation in Deerfield, Illinois, wrote “They are sending buses to arrest us and prepping rubber bullets. Deploying tear gas. Beating us with truncheons… This is America now. It’s just the start. Choose your side.” It feels surreal to me, like I’ve been transported back to the era of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, these images of violence coming across screens, and reports of what is happening on the ground from activists working so hard to de-escalate tense situations and prevent harm. Another colleague, Oscar Sinclair, formerly serving in Lincoln and now in St. Paul, was one of the clergy arrested at the Twin Cities airport on Friday. (He was released and is okay.) Our forebears came to a point where they had to choose a side in the Civil War of their day, and again in the Civil Rights Movement of their day. Domination is on the move again, and it is time to resist.
That brings us back to the Unitarian Universalist part of this pattern in our Midwest history. I’m going to draw here from Freedom Moves West, a history of the westward movement of Unitarianism published in 1952. It was written by Charles H. Lyttle, who briefly served this very congregation, around 1920, before becoming seminary faculty. I’m going to focus on one particular Unitarian who is one of my heroes. Someone posed the question at the Ask the Minister service a few weeks about what historical Unitarians or Universalists should people know more about. Well one of them, for me, is Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Jones grew up in Wisconsin and knew he wanted to become a Unitarian minister someday. He went to Meadville theological school, then based in Meadville, Pennsylvania. (Hmm, Midlands.) Meadville would later move to Chicago, which is where it was when I attended seminary there. As I describe Jenkin Lloyd Jones’ service to our faith in the Midwest, see how many parallels you can spot with what I’ve already shared about the region.  Early in his ministry, Jones championed religious education. Per Lyttle, Jones “abandoned the catechetical question-answer memorizations, as well as the ‘preachy’ story lessons,” instead favoring a more interactive, practical, and character-development approach that paired “the best of universal secular culture with religious ideals.” He expanded adult activities too, including a Mutual Improvement Club. The model Jones advocated for religious education was well received by Unitarians, especially in the Western Conference. (The word Western in Western Conference is in relation to New England – it was mainly what we now call the Midwest, although Unitarian churches were also started in this period in Denver and on the west coast.) Tensions with the American Unitarian Association back in Boston, which was subsidizing clergy in the West – and potentially excluding those it perceived as radicals – led the Western Conference to assert its independence. By funding its own missionary work, the Conference could continue its efforts, unhindered by the Eastern establishment. Jones had championed this idea, and his peers appointed him the first leader of this work. As mission secretary, Lyttle writes, “Jones visited distressed churches, dormant churches, isolated groups of radicals, liberals that aspired to become church societies, gatherings of delegates to form state conferences.” He was frugal, resourceful, diligent, and passionate for the cause of liberal religion in the Midwest. Under Jones’ leadership, the number of active societies (churches) blossomed, debt dropped, more state conferences of Unitarian churches were formed, and the power of the Western (Midwestern) Conference in the denomination grew. To the point that the AUA in Boston declared their confidence and impartial support for the work of the Western Conference and the ministers placed there. Jones was not only a pragmatist, but a feminist as well – another reason he’s one of my UU heroes. He supported the leadership of women on church boards, denominational leadership, as speakers, and then as ministers. Known as the Iowa Sisterhood, these women ministers started in Iowa and were concentrated there, but expanded into other parts of the Midwest and beyond.  Scholar Holley Ullbrich describes them thus: “The women of the Iowa Sisterhood generally approached ministry differently from their male counterparts, with less emphasis on the intellectual Sunday sermon and more focus on pastoral care and social ministry within the community. These women clergy were also more egalitarian and more open to experimentation. In that respect, their churches reflected a frontier culture that was less anchored to tradition than congregations in the Northeast.” Champions of the freethinking Western attitude were, Lyttle writes, “like Jones, … social radical[s] in fidelity to the long Channing-Parker tradition in American Unitarianism, which antedated by decades the Social Gospel of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, [as well as] Christian Socialism.” Humanitarian work by Unitarians in the Western Conference included addressing poverty (including impoverishment of indigenous people), humane treatment of animals, temperance, women’s rights, and support for immigrants and black Americans migrating northward – like the story we heard earlier about Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago.  Jane Addams speaks to visitors to the Hull House in 1935. (Photo in public domain, accessed at picryl.com.) Beyond the Western Unitarian Conference and his role in fostering the spread of liberal religion westward, Jenkin Lloyd Jones is best known for organizing the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Open curiosity toward other faiths was developing in Western Unitarianism alongside religious humanism. Humanists focused on human worth and human capability to improve life, with particular concern for social injustice and remedies. They exhibited a quality of “spiritual democrats” who respect people regardless of atheism, agnosticism or theism. Lyttle notes that another aspect of the dawning humanism was “appreciation of truth in non-Christian religions.” I’ve slipped in a number of teasers today, for future installments of the Midwest Heritage series. More to come on the role of women in Midwest culture and Midwestern liberal religion, racial failures and advances (particularly in relation to both African Americans and indigenous peoples), other social reforms, and religious humanism, as well as the Universalist side of our UU family tree in the Midwest. The through-line I want to convey, to start with, is that the geographic expansion of Unitarianism coincided with the expansion of the tradition’s identity in theology, class and culture. Unitarianism had emerged in New England, back in the 1820s, when folks who pushed back against narrow theological thinking and rigid creeds were pushed out of what is now Congregationalism (United Church of Christ). The boundaries of liberal religion were subsequently tested by humanism, the role of women, and world religions. And the Western Conference was where this tension in Unitarianism most palpably played out – both within the Conference, but especially between these more expansive-minded, less class-bound Unitarians in the (Mid)west and the Eastern Unitarian establishment. Unitarian Universalism would not be as we know it today if not for the ways that people of pioneering spirit – people embracing Midwestern culture – stretched it. My invitation to you is to lean into these qualities that are so Midwestern – and so Midwest Unitarian – as our moment in history calls us to do.
Let us awaken both our caring Midwestern culture and our broad religious sensibilities. Let us draw upon our down-to-earth, democratic heritage as we resist outside domination. Can I get an Amen? Amen, and blessed be. This is the full service in which the above sermon was delivered. The Time for All Ages, telling the story of Dangerous Jane (Addams), begins around 11 minutes in; the sermon around 30:20. Key sources for today’s sermon:
1 - American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard (2011) 2 - The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 by Jon K. Lauck (2022) 3 - Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference 1852-1952 by Charles H. Lyttle (1952, 2006) Embracing Participatory, Multi-Sensory Modes of WorshipIn a previous post, I suggested that innovation in worship is important for congregations who are interested in (as Susan Beaumont put it) "living into your potential." For progressive congregations that want to not only survive - but thrive - into the future, transformation starts in the sanctuary. New ways of worshipping can enrich the spiritual lives of existing members. Expanding our worship repertoire also holds the promise of drawing in and serving people who are NOT already in our congregations. We can better welcome in diverse people, and meet the whole person, with sensory-rich worship experiences. In this post I reflect on two areas of worship experimentation in the church I serve. Experiment 1: Sensory-Rich Worship Series This was my attempt to adapt the framework of Marcia McFee to be workable in my setting. McFee is a worship artist and consultant who has worked for decades to help churches create more engaging, multi-sensory worship experiences. Her worship planning process, summarized most recently in Think Like A Filmmaker: Sensory-Rich Worship Design for Unforgettable Messages, was featured at the Institute for the Learning Ministry, a bi-yearly professional development offering of the UU Ministers Association. That was winter 2018. I got stalled trying to apply her involved model whole-cloth in the church I served then, and determined to try again after attending an online retreat with McFee in summer 2022. In the 2022-2023 church year, I developed three sensory-rich worship series in a modified version of the planning process McFee teaches. The process stretches over months and involves many people in the process: “metaphoraging” for core images/ideas; developing an inspiration page (capturing anchor images, quotes, a series blurb); brainstorming with interested parties; collecting sources and multi-sensory “layers,” and selecting the ones that will bring continuity across the series; coordinating with musicians, artists, and story-tellers in the development process; writing a synopsis for each Sunday in the series; creating special promotions for the series, including video invitations and postcards.  One of our worship artists, Mary Kay, created this eclipse triptych. The banners hung at the back of our chancel throughout a worship series on “The Way of Not Knowing.” For the curious, here are resources from each series:
Reflection How did it go? What was learned from this experiment? There was definitely positive feedback – and some indication, anecdotally, that these services were reaching different people and reaching people differently than the typical service. We got bumps in attendance with each series. That could be attributed to some combination of the extra promotion, interest in the topics, or coming back for more after liking initial experiences. I believe it helped re-engage more people from the congregation post-pandemic. People were drawn into participation as co-creators of worship, most notably with visual elements. Interest in participating in brainstorming was higher for the first series than by the third series; the novelty wore off over time. I ended up incorporating in some new ritual into one of the series, and overall often had more good stuff on hand than fit neatly into 60-minute worship services. Learning to curate in this new way was a learning curve. It did not require any less of me in sermon-writing, and it added new work to create the theme, the multi-sensory elements, and the co-creation of it all. I thought I might repeat this process occasionally – not turn into THE way of worship here, but do it once or twice a year. But it was hard to sustain the advance planning for these McFee-ified series, amid the planning cycle of regular services. So instead, I think the lasting effect of this experiment was to feed into Experiment 2. Experiment 2: Participatory, Multi-Sensory Culture Shift This was less a one-off experiment and more an ongoing effort, one that got a boost from experiment #1. We have increased active participation in worship services in a number of ways. One is incorporating more embodied ritual. As in many UU congregations, the liturgical year includes two touchstones that bookend the year, Water In-gathering and Flower Ceremony, with variation in how we do the rituals from year to year. The year before I arrived, our religious educator (the wonderful Christina Strong) brought a procession of gifts ritual that enacts generosity and interdependence through donations of food, winter gear for unhoused youth, and other items. We have continued it every year as part of the December holiday all-ages service. I introduced three more new rituals that now happen annually here. The Honoring Our Ancestors themed service, with ritual of remembrance for ancestors, takes place around All Souls Day; it was well-received and has become a tradition here. That was true, as well, for a December ritual with wreath and ribbons that I created in a previous congregation and introduced here. It acknowledges those that may be particularly missed around the holidays. And in collaboration with lay worship leaders, we have incorporated a Fire Ceremony ritual around the new year into our annual cycle. One-off rituals have been sprinkled in too, like dirt communion, and a procession celebrating volunteers. (Various ritual pics on this page.)  The ritual we do every Sunday – lighting the chalice – now expresses our belonging and commitment to the earth. My gift to the congregation at my installation service was a new chalice inspired by local rivers, flora and fauna. The chalice lighting we say weekly reinforces that connection to the land, as well as to each other and to the Spirit of Life. Other ways of making worship more participatory include periodic use of responsive readings, turn-to-your-neighbor invitations to share on the topic in connection to personal experience, and even interactive handouts. From conversations and resource-sharing among colleagues, it would appear many churches are doing more of these kinds of things. Colleagues shared ideas I adapted for things like a shared church bingo card – with Love at the center, of course – and UU mad libs.  In a service on "Cults, Control, and YoUU," folks were invited to assess our congregation as I went through my Top Ten list of qualities of a high control group (aka cult). People had the opportunity to discuss their results with one another, too. I then shared a key to interpreting the results: 10-20 - barely a whiff of culty-ness... 21-30 - a few warning signs, nothing irreversible... 32-40 - lots of red flags, danger danger... 41-50 - impending tragedy. First Unitarian was roundly assessed as entirely benign. (Phew!) Although leadership styles of ministers varied a good deal in the past. Hmm. One type of worship service that is almost always more participatory and multi-sensory is a story-based, theatrical service, as inter-generational services tend to be. This is a strong suit of our religious educator. It is fun for me or a worship associate to partner with her on the ones she develops and leads. I have made a foray into this myself once, with success (on Christmas Eve!) – which helped me appreciate more how much time, energy and care goes into such services. I admire clergy colleagues who have the talent to create and produce these, many of whom are generous in sharing. (People can also turn to resources like story services on Worship Web and Story, Song, and Spirit.) This movement toward waking the senses in worship has also involved visual elements, including curated installations and special banner hangings. Thematic props can also help convey ideas and feelings, evoke the feeling of being in a particular setting, and even involve people in the action – like gift boxes that were under our tree last Christmas Eve, containing readings for the evening that were read in the order in which children chose “presents” for opening.
The butterfly banner carried our stewardship theme of Becoming one year. Another banner, with a milky spiral galaxy, evoked awe and interconnection. What's in those presents under the tree? Children selected gifts to be opened next and shared on Christmas Eve.  A cornucopia installation of abundance graces our chancel every November.  Some creations in the playdough gallery, made during worship in the pews. Beauty is for the ear, as well as the eye. While much of traditional worship reaches the ear – the hymns, the spoken word throughout – there are additional, vivid ways of evoking meaning in audible language. Tapping diverse voices to deliver readings, and setting individual readings for multiple speakers – whether a few voices on the chancel, or the full gathered community delivering refrains together – can bring richness and depth to what is heard. And then there’s music. To me, music is the heart of worship. Weaving music artfully into services helps create the emotional arc and resonance of effective worship. This includes special music from the choir, staff musicians or guests, as well as congregational singing. Music can set the tone for ritual actions of attendees. It can be melded with prayers or meditations to bring comfort, voice grief, or invite joy. Let’s not forget tactile experience. Participants created playdough sculptures as part of a service on “Playing with Purpose.” More recently, folks were invited into contemplative braiding of yarns or pipe cleaners in a service on (re)building trust. Our Chalice Dancers have enlivened several services with motion and color, too. On the audio-visual front, I am particularly proud and pleased that the congregation I serve now has a modern big screen. A group of lay leaders worked with me and our techies to develop options, gather input from the congregation, and select a course that would serve our mission through multi-sensory worship, while integrating into the look of its beautiful, historic sanctuary. This change was a long time coming because it needed to be handled with care and thoughtful communication. Kudos to all the people who led the way!  Screen tastefully integrated into the sanctuary Installed in late 2023, the screen has been a boon in our worship life. Children’s stories, seasonal photos, response lines for readings, and video meditations have graced the screen. It’s been useful for business meetings, too… and enabled us to bring voices from the wider UUniverse into our sanctuary with their own faces and voices. A recent example of a visually-rich service making the most of the screen’s worship-enhancing potential is on “Beauty Before Me.” Reflection How has all this gone over? What have we learned? My sense is that with any of these ways of increasing participatory and multi-sensory worship, most people are feeling ministered to by it. Individual feedback suggests that it is both serving the core well, and expanding to serve adjacent needs (including for existing members) as well as new people. While positive feedback that I have heard comes from all demographics, it’s notably stronger among young adults and people with families. Regarding intergenerational services in particular, appreciation seems to be growing broadly over the past several years – including from older congregants who have expressed a desire for more experiences of all-ages community. That said, there are likely some individuals who don’t care for the occasional talk-to-your-neighbor invitation (it’s always optional); I doubt every last person is personally touched by more ritual opportunities; and there are probably some that could take or leave the use of banners, videos, and other enhancements. That's okay. Church is not a consumer experience, and there is something for everyone. Between the shift to multi-platform worship and more participatory and multi-sensory worship, we have become more high-tech behind the scenes over the last several years. The impact on volunteers is the main down side I see - every increase in tech can make serving as a worship associate, or AV tech volunteer, more intimidating to some folks, as it does become more involved. (It has an impact on staff too – we HAVE paid tech staff now, and a minister these days has to have a certain degree of aptitude.) All in all, this shift in worship culture has been a net positive for the church’s mission, both in serving existing constituents and the same needs as before, and expanding outward to adjacent constituents and needs.
I started writing pieces on the theme of Roots & Wings in June 2025. Here are posts, by topic and date:
Civil Disobedience: A May Day Message Drawing on Unitarian ancestor Henry David Thoreau (May Day Rally speech). 5-1-26
Our Midwest / UU Heritage (sermon series)
What kinds of new things should we try, and why? After returning from sabbatical, while gearing up for the coming months of worship, I have been reflecting on worship experiments of the past several years. This graphic helps articulate why I have been investing my time and creativity into innovation in worship. The image comes from a piece by congregational consultant Susan Beaumont, which in turn builds on a Harvard Business Review article about innovation in the for-profit sector. To congregations who want to thrive into the future, Beaumont directs attention to the process of “living into your next potential.” Beaumont suggests that core innovation initiatives modify existing programs and ministries to better serve existing constituents and the needs you’ve been addressing. Adjacent innovation efforts build on existing strengths incrementally. Thus they serve additional needs, and reach new people – not dramatically different populations, but folks who are already within reach of the groups currently being served. The most headline-grabbing experiments, transformational initiatives, are meant to serve people who are in different orbits than current constituents. These “breakthrough offerings” go well beyond tinkering and constitute fundamentally new approaches. Beaumont thinks we might learn from corporate innovators. The research indicates that the most successful organizations are those that “allocated about 70% of their innovation activity to core initiatives, 20% to adjacent ones, and 10% to transformational ones.” How might that translate to a church? For a typical progressive congregation, programs in the core include religious education, small groups, and caring ministries, along with worship. Let’s zero in on worship. Worship is how new people most often check out a church. It is the program many members participate in the most. And it is THE program that serves the church as a whole, gathered community. Every aspect of a congregation’s mission plays out in worship: building a community of care and connection, tending hearts and minds with inspiration, teaching from the roots of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, shaping commitments and courage that participants take back into their everyday lives. Worship doesn’t have to be everybody’s “thing,” individually. But it is the beating heart of religious community. So it makes sense that, if we’re trying to meet the moment, and co-create the future of our living tradition to serve all comers, a significant amount of energy in a congregational setting will go toward innovation in the flagship program, worship.
In the congregation I serve, First Unitarian Church of Omaha, I can group experimentation with worship in the past several years into five areas: sensory-rich worship series à la Marcia McFee; a broader cultural shift toward participatory, multi-sensory worship; a music-centered worship format I’ve been calling Soulful Songs Sundays; a food-and-community rich format we call here Brunch Church; and a sermon co-op I piloted with a dozen UU colleagues. The desire to engage in these experiments emerges partly from an entrepreneurial spirit and my sense of yearning for worship that feeds the spirit. I am someone who thrives on creativity and developing new systems; I don’t like to be bored, or to bore others. And I know how good worship touches and transforms me. I want everyone to have that. My penchant for experimentation also emerges from other goals I have long held for worship. Here is one articulation of those goals, as shared with worship teams:
If one is serious about serving the people who aren’t here yet, people of all ages and identities and walks of life – not to mention serving the people who *are* already in the church, but might not be in the pews, or might be under-served there – well, that calls for fresh approaches. Defaulting to “the way we’ve always done it” may not get us where we want to go.  Rev. Kenneth Patton and the Charles St. Meeting House (Universalist) in Boston were at the forefront of innovation in an earlier era of liberal religion, in the middle of the last century. This photo from UUA archives shows Beltane at this hotbed of Universalist experimentation. For more on Patton and Charles St., see "A Religion for One World: Kenneth L. Patton, the Charles Street Meeting House, and the New Universalism." To be clear, I don't regard this as an either-or choice. Just because we sometimes do story-based, theatrical services for all ages, or ritual-centered services, or introduce other alternative formats, doesn’t mean we’ll never have “traditional,” sermon-centered worship. We still do more of the latter than the former where I am, and I don’t expect that to radically change. I also believe in the power of a good sermon; I put a lot of care into my sermons accordingly. But more variety across worship services – and more ministering to the whole person in any service format – is all to the good. For newcomers and long-time congregants, alike. Similar themes seem to be bubbling up throughout our UU movement. In sessions of the UUA Meet the Moment worship cohort I participated in last spring, the conversation touched on the intentionality required to create and hold sacred space, the power of embodied experiences that make more room for more people, worship that honors both the individuality and connection of participants, the ability of good worship to leave us more whole and integrated as individuals and in community, and the human alchemy that can take place because of what happens in the sanctuary on Sunday morning.  Image: Annemarie Schaepman / Unsplash In the next two posts, I’ll describe four things we’ve tried at First Unitarian in recent years, and for each one, consider how it’s going: How has the response been to this experiment? Is it serving the core well – existing people, and the needs previously met? Is it reaching the adjacent –new people or those who haven’t been in the center of congregational life, and needs not previously met (well)? On a practical level, have we – staff and lay leaders, everyone involved in creating worship – taken in stride the changes required behind the scenes to continue to offer this kind worship ministry?
I’m also interested in whether the preparation for new modes takes the same, more, or less time and energy than for standard worship. I’ll have more to say on that in later post(s). There I’ll focus on questions of process and efficiency in the work of worship, reflecting also on the sermon co-op model. Why does efficiency matter? It is not the paramount value when it comes to worship. But effort saved in worship preparation would mean capacity freed up for other ministry beyond worship – and perhaps even for more audacious, transformational experimentation. Meanwhile, I’m curious to hear from you. Does Beaumont’s graphic, and the concepts of core vs. adjacent vs. transformational types of innovation, illuminate what’s happening in your congregation’s worship life? If so, how? How do you think UU communities might effectively “meet the moment” in worship? |
Article ListA list of all articles by title and date, grouped by topics. AuthorShari Woodbury - Wanderer, worshiper, lover of learning, longing for the evolUUtion of spiritual community. PhotoBanner photo from Asyarey / Unsplash Other VoicesDisrupt Church also future-oriented Archives
July 2026
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