Rant Alert! This is mostly for my Unitarian Universalist (UU) Friends wherever you may live. Feel free to join in the discussion and please feel free to disagree with me. All that I ask is that you keep the conversation respectful and civil. If you are not a UU, please feel free to comment. You may have experienced similar things in your church life. This is a long rant so if you need to get a drink or go to the bathroom, you should go now. You have been warned. On Mondays in Raleigh many UUs are participating in the Moral Mondays Protest and Demonstration outside and within the Legislative Buildings started by the NAACP. In a Thoreau-esk move of civil disobedience many UUs, including Ministers, have gotten themselves arrested for trespassing and failure to disburse. According to a June 12th LA Times article, the Rev. Deborah Cayer, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Durham, had “come prepared to spend the night in jail.” This is widely seen as a noble undertaking within our faith. I don’t agree. This is hypocritical and in my opinion here’s why. Two of the major issues with the Republican Governor and Legislature that sparked the protests are a severe reduction in unemployment benefits and cuts in public education favoring vouchers for private and faith based schools. I agree that those are harmful to people, especially poor people and people of color. Here’s my problem. Our UU Churches do in essence the same thing. Point one: Churches are exempt from paying unemployment insurance. When my wife Liz left her last church job, she was ineligible to draw unemployment insurance. The reason she left is not important to this debate because whether she quit or was fired, there was no money available to draw. She was fortunate enough to be a member of a professional association that helped her negotiate a severance package but that was considerably less than unemployment would have been and was ½ of what professional guidelines called for. This may sound like sour grapes because it’s Liz but I know of at least two other Directors of Religious Education (DREs) that have suffered similar fates. Churches can provide unemployment insurance if they choose, but most do not. As an Association of congregations, UUs have fallen in love with the Carver Model of Policy Governance for Non Profits. In churches that makes the Minister the Chief of Staff usually with hire and fire authority. While I think our seminaries and fellowshipping process adequately prepares UU Ministers for ministry, it does little to insure that they are good supervisors. I have seen this more than once in my own church. Point two: Many UU Churches tend to balance their budgets on the backs of their children’s programming. I have watched this pattern repeated year after year in the Greensboro Church and Liz assures me that it is not uncommon among her colleague’s churches. If a staff position is slated to be cut or hours reduced, in my experience it is the Director of Religious Education that will take the first hit. How moral or just is it to carry signs, sing songs, pray and willingly spend the night in jail for Social Justice issues that we ask the government to provide to workers and children when we are not willing to provide for our own church employees and our own children? Can we ask our Ministers and Church leaders to fix the matters of inequity within our own churches instead of applauding them for getting arrested protesting social issues we are guilty of ourselves? Rant over. Your comments are welcome.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:30:43 +0000