An Idea: A Just and Sustainable Campus Ministry?

A proposal for a pet project of mine:


Dear Starr King friends and allies,

Please note this is just an idea. An idea that hopefully will evolve
over time. Sorry to interrupt your winter break and or holiday
festivities. I have just returned from the Young Adult Ministry
Workshop in Livermore given by the UUA's Co-director of Young Adult Ministries, Nacy DiGiovanni.

What I took away from the workshop is that it takes a community-wide effort to build a Campus Ministry, and thus reap the rewards of retaining our UU Youth as they bridge out of their home congregations, not to mention the rewards of offering a place for non-UUs to thrive with all their wonderful multiplicities of identity (too often oppressed) by accepting them into our larger UU community of the world.

What does this have to do with Starr King?

Well, you may be interested to know that just two blocks south of our Campus is a thriving University that once had a thriving Unitarian Campus Ministry some 50 years back. For a variety of reasons which run the gamut of McCarthyism (refusing to sign the California Loyalty Oath), eminent domain, and normal church politics the Anchor Congregation hand to leave it's Bancroft Address (now the UC Berkeley Dance Studio). With major support from the Anchor Congregation literally run out of town and the UUA's decision to dismantle it's own nation-wide campus ministry program in the 1960s, the Berkeley Campus Ministry withered and died.

Anyway, since we are the closest UUs in the neighborhood and we have covenanted together to counter oppression and build just and sustainable communities, I think it's appropriate that start we start with our own house and build a bridge to reclaiming some of what we as UUs losto Power which feared our more cooperative tendencies.

Okay, we as UUs were wronged way back in the past, why should it matter now?

For the last 10 years the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley (in Kensington) has been struggling to grow a campus ministry on Cal. Their efforts which include Star King Seminarians as campus leaders have for the most part failed to create a sustainable presence on the Cal Campus.

Concurrently, in North Carolina, the Community Church of Chapel Hill has for the last 11 years endeavored to create a sustainable campus presence at the University of North Carolina. For the first five years, Out of town Seminarians were used to lead the ministry. A Campus Leader rotated out every year and despite their collective knowledge and energy, the Seminarian leadership failed to gather the student numbers needed in order to maintain a sustainable campus presence also know as critical mass. In the sixth year of the Campus Campaign, the Church took ownership of the ministry and started sending it's Director of Religious Education (DRE) to every meeting while actively referring students that wandered into their church on Sundays to the DRE and the campus ministry. Within two to three years critical mass was reached and then surpassed. As a result the campus ministry is now thriving.

Why should we care about a campus ministry in North Carolina, I
thought this was about Berkeley?

Good question. Why? Well other than helping people realize their full potential as happy, active citizens of the world, Campus Ministries creates leaders. For past three years the Chapel Campus Ministry has sent one graduating senior into the wider UU World.

2006: Mary Ellen Giess to Harvard Divinity School and later the
Interfaith Core in Chicago (Yes, that Interfaith Core).
2007: Lisa Swanson to the UU Legislative Ministry's in Washington, D.C. (Not raised UU)
2008: Sean Honea (hi) to Starr King School for the Ministry (Not raised UU)

So, if we as UUs are committed to building just and sustainable communities, we might as well look for some help from the next generation while we as Starr Kinger's are so close to the Cal Campus.

Awesome! What can I do to help?

I'm glad you asked. While the problem of campus leadership relying on fickle seminarians support still exists and may not change in the near future, we can tackle the other side of the equation by actively helping to advocate for the Berkeley Campus Ministry as we go about our regular worship activities.

I am not asking you to staff a table on campus (although that would be nice), come the meetings (also nice), make random phone calls, knock on doors, or even help with hosting an event.

All I am asking is that for anyone that attends a regular worship service either weekly or monthly (to include Starr King Chapel) to step forward and identify yourself to your religious leaders and
congregation as person willing to be a first point of contact for Cal students or those college bound that happen to walk into your regular worship service.

All you would have to do, is answer the normal questions of about UUism for those new the faith, greet the veterans warmly, and let both know that there is a place for them on the Cal Campus.

If you want to add to this idea feel free to join the conversation in the Starr King Student Forum.

http://tinyurl.com/68br8j

Please contact me off-list if you would like to become a Campus Ministry Advocate or have a better idea.

in faith,

Sean


--
Sean Honea, 1st Year M. Div
Co-Campus Leader
Unitarian Universalist Campus Ministry at Cal.
Starr King School for the Ministry
2441 Le Conte Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94709
http://stonesoupuu.blogspot.com/

Paper I wrote for a class

Sean Honea
SPRS 4024
Dorsey Blake
December 10, 2008

Countering Oppression and Religious Leadership: My Path

How my call will manifest itself from that small inward tug in my heart and into reality is still up in the air for me. Like Gandhi, I too consider myself an “explorer” and “tinkerer” in search of the underlying truth (Gandhi x). I believe I am called to minister to youth, young adults and or those in crisis. I see a religious leader as a person that speaks truths that need to be heard, and who like Cesar Chavez live by a “faith...[built] on the dignity and worth of every person” (Chavez 98). I believe where ever I choose to serve truth-telling will always been needed; I need only open my eyes to it.

I agree with Dr King’s stance that all people of a society have a stake in injustices perpetrated against a group of people within a particular community that exist within that society. King refers to the phenomenon as the “...inescapable network of mutuality...[in which,] whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” (King 290). I have a similar view which I call the power of inspiration in which every just and unjust action of a group or individual has and continues to have a lasting effect on the word both positively and negatively. Thus, I affirm Dr. King's statement: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (King 290). However, I hope I can overcome the privileged view that unlike King has allowed me to “sit idly by” while injustice that does not directly oppress me, oppresses another (King 290). I agree with Thomas Aquinas: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust” (King 293). However, I still need help in learning how to live it.

Currently, I am feeling my call most strongly leading me back into the Armed Services. Although, the fellowship and camaraderie I shared with a campus ministry in North Carolina is what initially inspired me take up my call to the ministry. I wanted to create a sanctuary of love and acceptance to catch young UUs and others in free-fall over issues of belonging and identity in order to give back a portion of the love that campus ministry gave to me. However, at the moment, I feel that I need to give back first to the people in the military who like me served with conflicted conscious, treading water, trying to use the structure and discipline of the military to dig themselves out of the mental and spiritual hole of having to live life with an oppressed mind, body, and or spirit.

I am a believer in the power of shared community to inspire and lift up people to action, healing and also to dream. However, like Gandhi, I strive for a “practical idealis[m]:” a way towards finding those underlying truths that will unite us as humans in common cause. A sentiment, I am elated to find that has resonance in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s own thoughts concerning theology: “...liberalism was too optimistic concerning human nature, neo-orthodoxy was too pessimistic” (King 36). However, I currently have no strict spiritual practice such as Gandhi’s daily prayers from the Bhagavad Gita or a well thought theology such as King’s agape love -- “a willingness to go to any length to restore community” -- to act as continual refuge and reference for the oppressions and pain I encounter in life (Gandhi xii, King 20). Yet, I take some inspiration from the work of Dorothy Day. She immerses herself in humanity to be closer to the Divine, using work itself to as Gandhi would say to make herself “zero” (Day 161; Gandhi xvii).

I too hope to strive to turn away in part from the desires of the self in order to help catch those caught up in western materialism, which I believe plays a great part in keeping the oppressions of White Privilege alive in the world. As Day relates, when referring to an artistic couple caught up in materialism: “They reflect the grim and hopeless chaos of the minds of their occupants, the disorder of people who do not appreciate the material even while seeking in it all their pleasures” (Day 161). Likewise, I concur with Ceasar Chavez’s conclusion that “[t]he affluence in this country is our biggest trap, because we can’t change anything if we want to hold on to a good job, a good way of life, and avoid sacrifice” (Chavez 101). Thus, I too believe that the majority of western people are caught up in meeting their own needs and desires such that they will never find time to devote to the making their communities more whole and livable.

Community is where Day sees the needs of the spirit can be met if only we minister to the basic needs of the body: food, shelter, and acceptance in which, “[t]he agnostic sings with the Catholic, because it is a communal act and he loves his brother” (Day 221). I believe this sensibility will serve me well when striving to build communal bridges in a multi-faith environment. If I go into the Armed Services as a chaplain, it is expected that I would minister to the needs of those that do not subscribe to my particular faith. For the most part, food and shelter, not to mention socialized medicine and child care are already provided by the members of the Armed Services and their families. However, I know from first hand experience (I was a Staff Sergeant in the Army on active duty form 1997 to 2005) that “acceptance” of all peoples as individuals of whole human worth and dignity is lacking. The Armed Services are made of a cross-section of the United States in which people of multiple faiths, creeds, ideologies, ethnicities, economic status, sex, and yes, sexual orientation hold a kind of shaky truce with each other despite past and current prejudices in order to serve their country, meet a family obligation, and or get a leg up in life.

Due to there only being a handful of UU chaplains service wide and my belief in the relative inclusive nature of Unitarian Universalism, I can foresee the possibility of referrals from chaplains who encounter service members outside of the predominately Protestant Christian Chaplain Corp. I hope to make myself a beacon to those serving under emotional and spiritual duress; to give back to the people serving their still-as-of-yet unequal country with conflicted conscious. I hope to affirm and help heal their oppressed minds, bodies, and or spirits if only by acknowledging that they as human being of worth and dignity are there, and I am here to listen. I once heard a UU hospital chaplain preach a sermon that spoke to a similar experience. If I do serve in this fashion, then I would like to minister explicitly to those serving in the Armed Forces that have been oppressed by the culture of White Privilege, which taking into consideration of social and economic class would probably be the majority of the force.

* * *

Works Cited

Dalton, Frederick J. The Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2003.

Day, Dorothy. Loaves and Fishes. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1963.

Gandhi, Mahatma. The Essential Gandhi. Ed. Louis Fischer. New York: Vintage Books, 1962.

King, Martin L. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King JR. Ed. James Washington. New York: HarpersSanFrancisco, 1986.

This is Not a Drill!

Phone call to Navy Recruiter:

"Hello, I'm interested in becoming a Navy Chaplain."

Tone of Recruiter -- Cordial, maybe a bit bored.

"Oh, and did I mention there is only one other Chaplain in the entire Navy Chaplain Corp that prescribes to my particular faith."

Tone of Recruiter -- OMG! Alert! Alert! This is not a drill, this is not a drill, we have live a one, here!