Our Congregation

Back in the sixties, when we had just thirty members meeting in a small house with no place to park, a quarrel broke out in the church over something nobody remembers anymore. Words were exchanged and tempers lost and feelings hurt, and before it was over, half the members had left and taken their half of the budget with them. At the last Sunday service before the summer recess there were six people including the speaker. It looked like the church was about to close down not just for the summer but forever.
     It's not hard to imagine how those six people felt. It would have been so easy to give up. But they didn't. They persevered. In several years they had the membership back up where it was before, and a decade later they borrowed the money to put up a building with a parking lot, and today we have over 150 members and a new sanctuary and a second parking lot and a house for the youth and a backyard for picnics.
     We made it. We're here for good. Spartanburg has a liberal religious option and a nonconservative political alternative. And some of us, maybe for the first time in our lives, have something to believe in and somewhere to come every week and somebody to eat lunch with after the Sunday service.

Our lives started out in a lot of different places before they came together here and met and merged and mingled like panes of color in a kaleidoscope. Some of us were born in Estonia and India and Panama and California and Colorado and Chicago, and some of us are from Moncks Corner and Jonesville and Joanna. One of us was the daughter of missionaries in Pakistan and one was a child in a refugee camp after World War II. Some of us grew up eating bagels and New York style pizza and Philly cheese steak and never heard of Spartanburg. And some of us ate grits and Frogmore stew and Beacon barbecue and the only journey we had to make to get here was in our minds.
     Some of us came to this church with high ideals and lofty purpose and serious intentions. We knew that Unitarians were civil rights activists and feminists and environmentalists and members of Amnesty International. We wanted to change the world and we needed somewhere to do it from. And some of us came here by accident. Maybe we were looking in the phone book for the Unity Church and this was the closest thing we could find. Or we didn't like being at home on Sunday morning because that's when the Jehovah's Witnesses came around. Or we thought it would be a better place to meet people than a singles bar.
     It doesn't matter. The point is we got here. Whether it took five days or five years, we finally gathered up the courage to come to this place and see if we'd be acceptable to this particular group of people. We came wearing jeans and Reeboks, or clogs and crystals and tasteful tattoos, or regular Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. We brought everything we had of talent and need, and strength and weakness, and doubt and belief, and hope and despair. And we found that our talents could be used and our needs could be met and our doubts could be answered and our beliefs could be shared. We were accepted just as we were. We belonged somewhere.

We don't all have the same doubts or the same needs, and our talents and strengths are different. Some of us are brave and adventurous and ride motorcycles and go hiking and tubing and scuba diving - and some of us hardly ever get to the other side of town. Some of us travel all over the world in the summer and come to the Fall Ingathering with water from the Thames or the Jordan or the Mediterranean or the China Sea - and some of us bring a jar filled at the kitchen sink because that's the only place we've been. Some of us have lived all over the world with the military or the Peace Corps and some of us are city sophisticates from the Pacific Rim and one of us never saw a paved road until he was ten.
     Some of us are vastly talented and creative and imaginative. We’re writers and painters and dancers and jazz singers and story-tellers. Our music director is a wonderful pianist and one of our choir members is a school chorus director with a four-octave range. We’re guitarists and folk singers who write our own songs and perform once a month at our coffeehouse. One of us teaches ballet at the cultural center and another teaches ballroom dancing, and others dance in musicals at the local theaters. And some of us hide our faces in the hymnbook so nobody can hear us and some of us never could figure out which way to move when we sang "'Weave."
     Some of us are college professors and high school teachers and some have taught their children at home. One of us just published an academic textbook on global issues and another sells educational children’s books and donates profits to the church. Some are statisticians and engineers and foreign language teachers and psychologists and have Ph.D.'s. and others are doctors and therapists and technicians and computer wizards. One of us is fluent in Spanish and does interpreting and translating. Some of us read huge manuals on HTML and some read Matthew Fox and Bishop Spong and some watch Netflix movies and some never miss a Braves game. We’re carpenters and craftsmen and sound engineers and electricians and we build furniture and shelves for the church and fix anything that goes wrong. Some of us are vegetarians and raw-food eaters and gardeners who grow tomatoes and peppers and organic squash and bring them for the rest of us to take home. Some are good cooks and contribute wonderful exotic dinners for twelve to the November auction - and some of us had to learn how to make coffee before we could help out on Sunday morning.
     One of us has pet ferrets and another trains horses and dogs and another is a bird-watcher who goes all over the country taking photographs of birds and butterflies. We’re interested in ham radio and soap-making and nature photography and genealogy and calligraphy and model railroads and even in something called geocaching. We go fishing and camping and golfing and do needlework and knitting and yoga and play computer games and have our own websites. And some of us are enjoying our retirement and keeping our grandchildren and traveling to the places we always wanted to see.
     One of us is a government veterinarian who spent two years in Iraq at the start of the Gulf War. Two of us are serious competitive surfers and one of us grew up on a houseboat. One of us runs four miles every morning and one of us rides his bicycle through all the little towns in the county, and some of us never get out of the office chair. We're secretaries and librarians and book editors and students and journalists and photographers and sign makers and investment counselors and people who own their own businesses. One of us owns a dam and two of us own boarding kennels. We’re nutritionists and holistic medical practitioners and genealogists and fund-raisers and soccer moms and real estate agents and personnel managers and social workers and retired law enforcement officers and ministers of spiritual science. We live on farms and lakes and golf courses and in apartments and mobile homes and in vacation homes we designed ourselves.

Some of us put down roots like trees and we'll be here as long as the oaks outside our windows. And some have died and left great gaping holes where their lives used to be. Others have moved on. Sometimes they keep in touch and make trips back to visit us from Oregon or Florida and sometimes they vanish like ground mist when the sun comes up, and we don't know why they left. Some are travelers and seekers and cosmic dancers and they move through our lives like comets and leave a trail of light behind them for the rest of us to see by, and some of us are the rocks that any church can be built on. Some of us are warm and caring and comforting and we don't have any trouble telling people we love them. We're nurses and midwives and chiropractors and teachers and parents and massage therapists and we serve on the Care Committee and we're the first to send a get-well card or pay a hospital visit. And some of us live in our heads and our feelings are a little rusty from disuse, and we show our love by the careful attention we pay to the tasks we do around the church.
     Most of us are workers and volunteers and contributors. We serve on committees and cut the grass and paint the classrooms and get out the bulletin and maintain the website and help clean up the kitchen. We teach the children to make masks and mandalas and bead necklaces and spend all night at the lock-ins and cook for the covered dish dinners. We donate handmade jewelry to fundraisers and knit shawls and scarves for the homeless. We give money and keep the books and take the minutes and preside over the meetings and come up here at night to see why the alarm went off. We plan the services and decorate the bulletin boards and do elegant flower arrangements and provide the food for elegant receptions. Some of us sell drinks at community events and donate items and services to the Auction and drive the cars to Mount Mitchell. And some of us serve on Cluster committees and belong to Chalice Lighters and one of us is a retired UUA trustee and none of us mind giving up vacation time to go to Leadership School or General Assembly or the UU Musicians Network.
     We visit the sick and volunteer at schools and libraries and hospitals and do tutoring and go on medical missions and take part in charity bike rides and deliver Mobile Meals. We’re Big Brothers and mentors for young women and docents at the Cultural Center. We work with DHEC and Girls Scouts and Guardian ad Litem and community health education. We work for gay rights and environmental protection and donate to worthy causes and write letters to the editor and we stand up for our principles even against the City Council. We belong to the Rotary Club and the League of Women Voters and the Men’s Garden Club and Critter Connection and Band Boosters and Partners for Active Living and Altrusa and the Humane Society and Americans for the Separation of Church and State.
     Some have purpose and dedication and focus and energy to spare. You could fill up pages with the causes they've supported and the worthwhile organizations they belong to and the good deeds they've done and the ways they've made the world a better place. One of us is a civic leader who heads up political campaigns, and serves on boards of community organizations, and has chaired every committee and held every office in the church. One of us takes college students to the South American countryside every year. Some of us give blood and walk in the Pride March and volunteer at the free medical clinic and collect food for TOTAL ministries and always show up for Spruce-Up Saturday.
     And some of us don't. Some of us have about as much as we can handle to get through the day. We have to get up and go to work or get the kids off to school in spite of the depression or the bad back or the job we hate. Or we have to cope with the disintegrating marriage or the discovery that Social Security lost our records for the last six years or the fact that our job has been eliminated and we don’t know if we’ll find another one. Or we hear that somebody in this church that everybody loves has died in the middle of the night without any kind of warning.
     Some of us have had heart-wrenching tragedies in our lives and that's when we find out just how much this church means to us. We need somebody with us when we have to make the hard decision about turning off the life-support systems, or when we're waiting for the news from the biopsy or the blood test or the EKG. Sometimes the news is good, and the symptoms that might be leukemia turn out to be caused by a bad gall bladder. Or we have the surgery in time and the chemotherapy works or the bone-marrow transplant takes. But sometimes the news is the worst it could be, and we have to face the pain and the grief that's like a mortal wound and the fear that's like a knife in the heart and the loss of everything we ever thought mattered. And if we face it with any kind of hope and courage and peace of mind and grace under pressure, it may be partly or even mostly because this church is here.

I want this church to be here always. Sometimes I look out over the congregation from the back where I always sit, and I think how dear and wonderful and humorous and bright and honorable and generous these people are and how lucky I was to find them. And how easily I might have missed it.
     I think the best thing we can do is just be here. I know we have a wonderful mission statement and a bright vision of the future and that we bear witness to justice and religious freedom in a hundred ways. But I think our most important mission is to keep our doors open. To keep on being a place where you can come if you don’t belong anywhere else. To find the people who haven’t found us yet. To get the word out that every week we have a come-as-you-are party and everybody’s invited. That you can find a home here and you don’t have to be on the outside any more.
     I want this church to thrive and prosper in this part of the country that so desperately needs it. I want other people to have the same experience I had - of falling in love with a place to be on Sunday morning and finding out that my Significant Other is a whole group of people.
                              I want us to be here forever.
                                                                I know I will.

MHC 1997, 2000, 2010