UU Essays

Hello, as part of wading through the unbelievably long and drawn out process of becoming a UU Minister, I write a lot of personal essays. Here's two of them:

What is your vision of your work two years after fellowship?

I envision myself after fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist Youth and Young Adult Minister. I also have an interest in promoting and strengthening College Campus Ministries. The fellowship and camaraderie I shared with a campus ministry in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is what initially inspired me take up my call to ministry. My ministry would seek to create a sanctuary of love and acceptance to catch youth, young adults, and others in free-fall over issues of belonging, identity, as well as the general transition from youth to adulthood. I also feel a call to help create this sanctuary for veterans of the military who like myself served with conflicted conscious. Members who tread 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. To that end, I will actively seek out veterans that like myself sought out Unitarian Universalism as a means to find direction in life after their service in the military.

I believe the college campus community is a separate and distinct ministerial opportunity, and that meeting the spiritual and existential needs of this community is an worthy end and of itself. However, only a small minority of UU ministers chooses to specialize in this ministry. Moreover, I have yet to meet a Fellowshipped UU minister that leads a UU campus community as the main portion of their life-long ministry. Typically the campus ministries I have encountered are lay-led, student run, and or intern-led on a part time basis.

In my experience, the ministers that do pursue campus ministry do it as an “add on” or an “addition too” another ministry such as Parish, Hospital Chaplaincy, as part of their retirement, or they serve as an interfaith minister to a larger campus community. Realizing this, I hope to expand my ministry to include both youth and young adults both inside and outside of the college campus community.

I believe that how we minister to our youth and young adults in our congregations directly effects the efficacy of our efforts to ministers to youth and young adults that our outside of our walls: both those that have left UU and those that are only peripherally aware of UU. Thus, I believe that my real work must start within the congregation. I am still discerning, how this realization of congregational work will manifest itself. Until then, I consider all options open to exploration.


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How do you hope to serve the UU movement?

The congregation is the heart of the Unitarian Universalist Movement, and my ministry intentionally seeks to educate my fellow UU parish ministers, lay leaders, and congregants of the needs of UU Youth transitioning to Young Adulthood. My future ministry would seek to spread and retain Unitarian Universalism values in this population that has historically chosen to leave our faith. I have read that only about 10-percent of UU High School youth choose to remain in our congregations once they graduate (Channing-Murray UU Denominational Growth Report 2005). I believe that my individual ministry could serve to help stem this exodus of our UU youth, by offering youth and young adults more opportunities for engaging in deeper worship experiences and personal development in the context of religious community.

I discovered Unitarian Universalism as a college undergraduate after military service, when a fellow college student, Heather, unhappy with her Southern Baptist upbringing decided to join me in a search for a new religious home. I too was raised Southern Baptist and could sympathize with her progressive ideals clashing with her conservative faith. We started going church shopping together with other students both on and off campus. A few of the options we tried included an evangelical non-denomination church, and various campus options such as Intervarsity and Campus Crusade for Christ.

At this point in my life I did not consider myself a Christian, I was and am an Agnostic, yet, I was still open to the exploration of religion. One day, Heather asked me what I thought about “Unitarians.” I had no idea, because I had never met a Unitarian. Later that day, I happened to ask a former Army roommate of mine, Anthony, about them. As luck would have it, he had only a few months ago become a UU himself.

Anthony was raised a Catholic prior to his military service, and his wife was raised in the Jewish tradition. He and his wife found Unitarian Universalism because they were looking for a program for their children, and they happened to find one in the form of an emerging UU congregation in of all places Fayetteville, North Carolina; home of Fort Bragg, the most populous military community in the United States.

Through Anthony’s guidance, Heather and I visited a local UU congregation in Chapel Hill, NC, and the Director of Religious Education (DRE) personally invited me to visit the UU Campus Ministry. Heather ultimately decided there wasn’t enough “Jesus” in the UU worship and opting to become a Methodist instead. However, I continued to go to the meetings because I had finally found a group of people that shared my progressive values and were accepting of me as a person. Ironically, the DRE that referred me to the campus ministry (and facilitates it) considers herself a UU-Christian, but does not advertise it openly. I wonder if Heather had known this, she might have been more willing to consider Unitarian Universalism.

In short, I found Unitarian Universalism not from an ad campaign, but through personal relationships with people that were searching for and or had found a congregational connection that served their needs as young adults. I have not quite discerned my full path yet, but intuitively, I feel that I wish to serve Unitarian Universalism in this way, by providing for this younger populations needs, which if we do it right will as a by product spread the values of Unitarian Universalism, if we are in fact serving the needs and gifts of those who wonder into our congregations.