Ministerial Authority

What makes a minister?

In some faith traditions, for example our orthodox Christian friends, it takes a call from God. For our Jewish friends, it takes years of schooling, the same for our Muslim friends.

For the Universal Life Church, based here in Modesto, it takes an internet connection.

Believe me, I was as surprised as anybody to find the world headquarters of the Universal Life Church at 3rd and F when Denis and I were out looking at places to rent a year ago, in preparation for moving here.

Ministerial Authority rests, like a tri-pod, on three legs.

In Unitarian Universalism, there is a clearly spelled out way to become a minister. In order to reach the service of your ordination you must have completed a number of tasks. Being Unitarian Universalists, though, there is some variation in this path toward ministry, but in general one must:

Have a bachelor’s degree. It doesn’t matter the subject of your study. It can be a bachelor’s of science or art. It can be in English literature, astrophysics, elementary education, as long as you have one from an accredited college or university.

You then have to seminary.  There are two Unitarian Universalist seminaries in the United States. Starr King School for the Ministry, where Rev. Grace went, as did Bill Greer and Denis Paul.  There is Meadville Lombard Theological School, which as you likely know, is where I went. There are two in England. There is one in Manchester, and one at Oxford University.

A majority of our clergy though go to non-UU seminaries. In fact, only 30% of UU ministers graduated from a UU seminary, and the other 70% go to other schools. Harvard Divinity is one of these schools. Yes, it used to be a Unitarian seminary, but it went non-denominational several decades back.

This doesn’t mean that ministers who haven’t attended one of the four Unitarian Universalist seminaries don’t get exposed to things like UU history and polity. Part of the required study for each minister includes these subjects, and so people who study elsewhere than Starr King or Meadville Lombard will take these classes through these two seminaries.

So as you look for your next minister, I shouldn’t like you to worry about that.

So, after you decide to that you want to become a minister, you apply to seminary.

And then your journey gets complicated.

The Unitarian Universalist Association has requirements for ministry.

At any given time, there are several hundred students pursuing UU ministry. Last I checked it was somewhere around 530 in a year. There is one man, one community minister, the Rev. David Pettee, who is their shepherd.  It his job at the UUA to help guide student ministers through the UUA process.

There is also the requirements of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, who are part of the UU Minister’s Association. After four years in seminary, you appear before them, in Boston.

And of course, there are the requirements of your seminary. Which, are not standardized in anyway, and may or may not line up with some of the requirements you have to meet with the UUA or the Fellowship Committee.


Seminary is the only full-time, four-year master’s degree that I have ever heard of. This is not to disparage other master’s degrees, but in order to get an MDiv, a Master’s in Divinty, it requires some 36 credits. Which roughly translates to three years of full-time academic study and one year full-time as an intern minister.

In almost any other discipline, this would be equivalent to a doctorate.


While you are signing up for your classes, you have to keep one eye on your school’s requirements, one eye on the Fellowship Committee’s requirements, and one eye on the UUA’s requirements.

Yes, I know, you only have two eyes.  Me, too.


The UUA has every person who wishes to become a minister go through steps. First one must apply to be an aspirant minister. This requires you to get a congregation to sponsor you. After that, you go to see a committee, the Regional Sub Committee on Candidacy, or RSCC, a committee made up of lay and clergy folk, who approve you to go forward—at which point one becomes a Candidate for the Ministry. Or they ask you to go back to your process and address certain concerns they may have.

But before this step, it is recommended that you complete no more or no less than one year’s equivalent of seminary, a unit as a student chaplain in a medical setting and a career assessment.

A career assessment is a 2 and a half-day psychological exam. It involves a lot of writing in advance, a lot of test taking and group work. It costs close to $2,000.

The good news for you folks here, is that I passed my career assessment, and I have paper proof that even though I may be a little unorthodox, I’m not a danger to myself or society.

All kidding aside, though it’s a pain to get through, and requires 40 or more hours of preparation, on top of your school work and your job, I did get some valuable information about myself out of the deal.

One of the things the RSCC does is review this battery of tests and asks you what you learned about yourself from them.

After you pass the RSCC, you immediately make an appointment with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, because sometimes there is a two to three year back-log to see them.

And in the meantime, you take classes, you learn about theology, church systems, more theology, examine your place in the world, more classes, and most often, do your internship.

Applying for your internship means competing against about 100 other seminarians in a nation-wide search to work in a church. You’ve had interns here in the past, I know.

All this while reading 1 to 2 books a week, per class.

Two thick, books. With lots of new words you don’t know.

So by now our fictional Candidate for the Ministry has successfully complete their internship, most of their studies, and it’s time to appear before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, or MFC.


Recently, we started watching Downton Abbey, and there’s a seen in which Lady Mary, the eldest daughter, is warding off a suitor by telling the story of Andromeda at the dinner table.

Many a student minister feels like Andromeda when it comes to appearing before the MFC.


To even appear before the Fellowship Committee a candidate has to create their MFC packet which includes just about everything about them.

And you thought the principal was lying when they threatened you with a permanent record….

In this packet you include the report from the Career Assessment, your Chaplaincy papers, your grades, essays on 10 subjects, an 8-page checklist certifying that you’ve read these books, and you certify that can demonstrate competencies in 17 subject areas.

Yes, 17 subject areas.

And then you fly to Boston and spend the most nerve-wracking 45 minutes of your life, appearing before a panel of 9 people who will decide if you’ll be allowed into Fellowship. This is not a foregone conclusion. Some people are told that they must come back and appear again, some are given a list of tasks to complete, and some are just granted preliminary fellowship.

One has to be in Fellowship before one can be ordained.

And then one has to submit three progress reports before entering final fellowship.


These are just the steps, the mechanical, I can check them off my list steps, that it takes to be authorized to be ordained by a congregation in our faith.

This is one of the legs that ministerial authority rests upon: the training.


It is part of our polity, or how the way that our church is organized, that only a congregation has the authority to ordain a minister. It is only the individual church that can bestow the title of Reverend to a person.

On Apirl 14, 2011, my home church, the First Unitarian Society of Chicago, ordained me. Ordination, they stressed, is for a life-time. They had a special congregational meeting some weeks before the ordination to vote to ordain me. With that ordination, they gave me responsibilities.

Ordination is a very special event. Almost no minister can talk about their ordination without getting a little misty eyed.

When the congregation stood, as one body, and read the words, blessing me and naming me reverend, it was a holy rite. It was them, these people who knew me at my best and worst, affirming…announcing to the world, putting their own reputation on the line, that they stand behind and with me.

When my home minister extended to me the Right Hand of Fellowship, she was placing in a line of ministry that goes back to the dawn of time.

When the congregation gathered around me and laid their hands on me, my parents and Denis with me, they dedicated my life to the service of our faith and to the service of the larger humanity.

This is the second leg that ministerial authority rests upon: the ordination.



The final leg on which ministerial authority stands is that of Call.

This is the most personal of the three, and perhaps the hardest to define. For each individual minister, or each individual person living a religious life, their call is different.

You yourself have a calling, or else you wouldn’t be here with us.

Call is a deeply personal thing.

One aspect of my call is that I feel called by the love of those people who have loved and supported me to go out and love as widely and wildly as I can.

And this is, for me, a sometimes frightening thing.

But I remember my training, I remember my ordination and the church who stands with me, no matter where I travel, and I think about the call of Love, and I square my shoulders, and I do my best.

In balance, I do no better, and no worse than any of you.



In the middle of the twentieth century, there was a man who followed his call.

His name was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Though, speaking strictly as an historian, we are too close to his actual life to accurately predict this, I believe that Dr. King will prove to become one of the legends of humanity.

And speaking of ministerial authority, Dr. King had it. No question.

But without the people, he would have had nothing.

One can have training, and one can have call, but if a minister doesn’t have relationship, none of that matters.

Whether that ministry take place in a congregation or in a social service agency or in a hospital, without the people, ministerial authority is like one hand clapping.

And Martin had the people, didn’t he?

There is so much one can say about the ministry of Dr. King that it’s hard to find just one thing that speaks to you.

Perhaps you already knew this, and perhaps you didn’t, but Coretta Scott King, in an interview with the UU World some time back, said that she and Martin had considered converting to Unitarian Universalism. While he was in Boston University, the Kings attended services weekly at the Arlington Street church, which is on the Boston Commons.

In the end, though, they decided to stay with the Baptist church for two reasons. One was that they felt that in order for Martin to do his work, they would need the power and the energy of the black church behind them. The other was that the Kings felt that Unitarian Universalism lacked sufficient tools and conversation about Evil.

Evil just happens to be next month’s theological theme.

But they did find things in Unitarian Universalism that spoke to both of them. One of them was our tradition of non-violent, peaceful, and as Henry David Thoreau had written: Civil Disobedience.  Dr. King acknowledged that he was inspired by Gandhi as Gandhi used non-violence to free his people from the British Empire. Gandhi himself acknowledged that he was inspired, in part by the writings of Thoreau.  Gandhi worked with British Unitarian Minister, Rev. Margaret Barr, to establish schools in India that would teach religious values, but not be based in the divisiveness of religion, as the then established schools did.

As we take tomorrow to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us take time to consider the lives that he and Coretta lived. Think about the people who inspired the Kings.

Think about Dr. King’s call, and all that it accomplished.

And think about what might have happened if his call and leadership hadn’t ended that fateful, horrible day in Memphis, when he was only 39.


May each of us be inspired by the lives of our heroes, those known internationally, and those known only to us, to live lives that matter.

Go in peace,
Go in wisdom,
Go boldly into the world with love.

Amen.

© 2013 The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and delivered to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County

January 20, 2013