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

Defining Our Terms

In the month of January, in keeping with the project of exploring one theme each month, we are going to explore “Religious Authority.”

Religious Authority might, at first glance, seem sort of an odd thing for a group of Unitarian Universalists to be discussing, because, really, what does authority have to do with our religious beliefs anyway?

Aren’t we the church were you can believe anything you want to?


We are in fact, not the church where you can believe anything you want to.

In fact, I would submit to you that we are the church were you believe that which you must. We are called to believe that which calls to us from deep within ourselves. And since we are many, so are the truthes that call to us.

And any one of us will be negotiating between two or more ideas about what truth is, at any given time.

So, no, this is not the church of you can believe anything.

The expression of our faith is NOT passed down from one person, whether she or he stands behind a pulpit or not.

Here each of us is called to reach deep within our sense of the religious and bring forth a guidance, which we must believe.

Not what we’d like to believe.

But what we must believe.

Even if those beliefs can sometimes be profoundly inconvenient.


Often when people first consider ministry, their ministers, or a minister who knows them, will tell them “If there is anything else you can do, you must do that thing. You can only go into the ministry if you can go into nothing else.”

This may sound like a funny thing. You can only go into the ministry if you can do nothing else…

In two weeks I’ll be preaching about ministerial authority, and we’ll talk some more about things people to say to seminarians, but for now I wanted to place that phrase “if you can do nothing else” in front of you.

We believe what we believe because we can believe no-thing other than that.

For some of us, embracing that we cannot not embrace, what we must embrace, comes at the end of a long, difficult journey and that often begins with a crisis of faith.

Along this journey, or really any religious journey worth embarking on, some words, terms and concepts must be encountered, wrestled with, knocked to the ground, dusted off, and sometimes even formerly rejected terms, for full, deep healing to take place, some ideas must be re-embraced, even if means having a different relationship with these deeply important things.

Since your worship associate for the month, Janice Goodloe, and I sat down and gave this sermon it’s title of “Defining Our Terms,” perhaps it’s time to talk a little bit about the definition of the two words “Religious,” and “Authority.”


This week I went down to the Main Branch of the Stanislaus County Library to find the Oxford English Dictionary. The big one. With all the etymology of words and examples of that particular definitions earliest written example.

As you might be able to tell, doing this kind of research is sort of a guilty pleasure.

The first word I looked up was “Religious.”

Religious
a. Adj. Imbued with religion; exhibiting the spiritual or practical effects of religion; pious, godly, god-fearing, devout.
b. Most religious; used as an epithet of royalty
c. C. Holy, sacred
d. Of persons bound by monastic vows; belonging to a religious order, esp. in the Church of Rome.

Okay, so there wasn’t anything really surprising in this definition. But there was an additional note, and this, my friends, is why I love the OED.

The note says: Religion etymology. By Cicero connected with relegere to read over again, but by later authors with relagare to be bind. The latter view has usually been favored by modern writers in explaining the force of the word by its supposed etymological meaning.

I am familiar with the, according to the OED, more modern idea of where the word religion comes from. To bind up, together.

It’s a very sweet meaning, isn’t it? It leads one to the idea that we are journeying together, attached to each other by our shared beliefs.

It’s very poetic, too, deep with imagery and the possibility of poetry.

But I am actually more interested in the lessor known concept of the origin of religion; relegere, to read over again.

Cicero’s meaning is more about the practice of religion, the constant practice of the art of belief.

I’d like to share a story with you. It’s from a book entitled A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path, written by Gil Frondal

An engineer had been a regular and devoted visitor to the monastery for many years. The meditation practice taught at the monastery was the only thing that made sense to him. In fact, the pragmatic logic of the meditation teachings gave him hope that he could overcome his chronic unhappiness and deeply felt pain. He tried all the meditation practices that the Abbess taught him. He began each practice technique with enthusiasm only to have each end with the same frustration. He would encounter a wall he couldn’t pass. The closer he came to the wall the more he would recoil back into trying to think his way out of his pain.
Offering him much support, the Abbess encouraged him to relax, trust the practice, and simply feel his inner pain without reacting to it. After many years the Abbess decided a different approach was needed.
During his next visit to the monastery the Abbess told him that if he wanted to continue being her student and to be able to return to the monastery he would have to take on a special practice.  Once he had completed the assignment he could then return for deeper teachings. Once more feeling hope, the engineer quickly agreed.
The Abbess said, “For two years I want to you volunteer ten hours a week at the maternity ward at the local hospital. The hospital needs people to hold babies who are born pre-maturely. If they don’t receive enough physical contact, the babies will not grow healthily. When you have finished these two years, please come back to see me.”

The man was quite perplexed by this instruction. But because of his trust in the Abbess and his failure to find any relief elsewhere, he plunged into volunteering in the maternity ward. He was surprised at how small and fragile the babies were that he held. He would hold them ever so carefully. He would watch their every breath because they all seemed in danger of stopping breathing. He spent a lot of time thinking about how he could more effectively care for the babies he held. But there was nothing more effective than simply holding them against his chest.
After about six months he started feeling something quite new. He started to feel a little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his being. Since this was a foreign experience that didn’t fit any of the ways he thought about himself, he ignored it.
Ignoring it was the best thing he could have done because it prevented him from interfering with the warmth by thinking about it too much. Over the following months this tender spot grew until it pervaded his body. As it did, the cold, dark wall around his heart slowly relaxed, thawed and dissolved.

When he had completed his two years of volunteering in the maternity ward, the engineer returned to the monastery. The abbess saw immediately that he was a changed man. He was no longer desperate and he was no longer trying to fit everything he experienced into a conceptual framework. Now he wanted to learn what else the Abbess had to teach.

Giving him a new instruction, the Abbess said to him, “When you meditate, don’t think about what is happening. Rather, let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your body. If you do this, any meditation practice you do will be fruitful”

The man found this to be true.



This is Cicero’s meaning. It is in the re-doing, the practice, the mastery, this is where the word religion has its greatest meaning.

It is true that we come together, that we, as the signer of the Declaration of Independence did, we affix our names to paper, to be bound together. By so doing, we are engaging in relegare, being bound together.

It is in the relegere that we manifest our beliefs.


As to the definition of Authority, the Abbess in our story is an example, albeit a very gentle example, of the most common view of authority.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Authority thusly:

I. Power to enforce obedience
1a. Power or right to enforce obedience; more al or legal supremacy; the right to command, or give an ultimate decision
1b. In authority; in a position of power; in possession of power over others
II. Derived or delegated power;
2a. Derived or delegated power; conferred right or title; authorization.
2b. With inference. Conferred right to do something.
1569. Bp. Scott in Strype Ann Ref. I App. Vii 13 By commission from him, prestes hathe aucthoryte to forgyve sin.
III. Those in authority.
3b. Power to influence action, opinion or belief.
IV. Power to influence the conduct and actions of others; personal or practical influence.
V. Power over or title to influence, the opinions of others; authoritative opinion; weight of judgment or opinion, intellectual influence.
VI. Power to inspire belief, title to be believed; authoritative statement; weight of testimony, sometimes weakened to Authorship, testimony.

If you listen closely, one hears the word “power” a lot in that definition.

What I’d like to focus our attention on, though is the 2nd definition. Derived or delegated power, conferred right to do something.

Accompanying the second definition are the following examples: Derived or delegate power: from a sermon by John Wycliff from 1375 “[He] reproved him sharpli bi autorite of God.”

And, from 1569 the sentence “By commission from him, prestes hathe the aucthrotyte to forgyve sin,” is the example for the subdefinition “conferred right to do something.


These two definitions of authority, dating back to the 14th century, are for our purposes, the most interesting and relevant definitions.

Religious Authority, especially as practiced in our faith of Unitarian Universalism, is based not on divine or legal will, but rather any religious authority is granted by delegation, and conferred.

The engineer in the story could’ve easily walked away, any number of times from the Abbess and the monastery. He could’ve found her assignment too onerous to be bothered with. But instead, he delegated authority to the Abbess, trusting her.

I am the interim minster of this congregation. For a year now, I have been the minister of this gathering of people. Inherent in that is some authority.

But it is authority granted me by the people who I serve.

It is not absolute, it is not eternal.

I am entrusted with it.


And when you call your next minister, you will also be granting them this same source of authority.

We invest each other, here, with religious authority. We entrust each other with our deep wounds, and our brilliant joys. Here we gather, week after week, to hear about how the people we’ve come to love here are doing in their lives.

We are fellow travelers, each finding our own way from journey’s beginning to journey’s end. The more we can invest in each other, the richer our journey shall surely be.




Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
January 6, 2013
© Rev. Joseph M Cherry