As I enter the last few weeks of my term as Board president, and I consider where we are heading together as a congregation, I cannot help thinking about how TJMC has found itself in the spotlight this year in a number of ways, both bad and good. I learned this firsthand after the Ku Klux Klan rally last July, when we began receiving letters and cards from the presidents, members, and children of a number of congregations from around the country. I was reminded of it when I started corresponding with the staff of the UUA Southern Region, where our contact knew a heck of a lot about our church for someone responsible for working with over 200 congregations. And I was reminded of it yet again when our senior staff was recently invited to lecture at Harvard Divinity School about our progressive governance structure.

Just this week I was reading UU World magazine, and the anonymous racist note received by our Director of Administration and Finance was highlighted as one of the high profile conflicts in the denomination involving UU professionals of color. Part of the response from the Board of Trustees was quoted in the article. If you have not seen that important article yet, please check it out.

Twice this year I have been asked to speak outside of Charlottesville about the lessons we learned from last summer’s white nationalist rallies and counter-protests, and how they impact the larger national dialogue about white supremacy and white privilege. And I continue to hear about Charlottesville in the national news, and even outside the United States.

This attention adds gravity to the question of what kind of church we want to be. I am reminded of the poem “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” by feminist author Adrienne Rich:

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

As we stand at our door, and decide whether to go through, it seems clear to me that we cannot afford to be a church that does not fund outstanding programs. We cannot afford to be a church that does not plan for a robust future. We cannot think that it is okay to struggle because we see that the church down the street may also be struggling.

Our church needs to spend more than half a million dollars a year making the world a better place. It needs hundreds of volunteers throughout the week and weekend to educate our children, manage our charity giving, collaborate with other faith groups, promote social justice, and call for an end of systemic racism. It needs all 430 of us to say “What can I do?”

In a while, I will be presenting our program budget, and through that budget, I will paint a picture of one vision for TJMC.

We will have a chance to discuss and vote on that budget. For now, I want to share a few highlights of the church that we are today.

IMPACT
TJMC’s participation in our city’s interfaith IMPACT program was a powerful example this year of a group within our church taking the lead on a social justice initiative and changing the course of our involvement. At last year’s congregational meeting, we voted to eliminate the funding for our IMPACT membership in our budget. But then a group of congregants began working to restore that funding. They met with the Board several times, did a little fundraising for this year, and applied for IMPACT to become one of three organizations automatically included each year for one of our monthly social action collections. As a result of this work, we will be able to pay our membership dues for years to come.

There is actually one more step in this work. Although we did not formally withdraw as an IMPACT member, the group that has done all this work to re-energize us has suggested that given the change in the way we are funding IMPACT moving forward, it would be appropriate to ask the congregation for an affirmation of our IMPACT membership at this meeting. Since this is an affirmation and not a formal congregational vote, a motion is not required. What I am asking for is an acknowledgement of support for our participation in IMPACT, which will be recorded in the congregational meeting minutes.

And so, may I ask that all who choose to affirm our continuing membership as an IMPACT congregation please do so now with a round of applause.

Would the Secretary please have the minutes reflect that TJMC’s IMPACT membership has been affirmed by an overwhelming majority of those in attendance? Thank you.

Our Seventy-Fifth Anniversary
This Spring, TJMC celebrated its 75th birthday. There is a poster in the social hall of the ad placed in the Daily Progress in the early 1940s by a woman named Carrie Baker, who reached out to “any Unitarian or those interested in the faith.” She was discouraged from trying to start a fellowship here because it seemed unlikely that there would be enough interest. But she was not deterred, and a small group responded, launching what would become our congregation.

I hope you all came to the potluck party we had at the end of April. And in addition to sharing in the celebration, I hope you spend some time thinking about our next 75 years, and the role you want to play in our history. A history that does not flow uniformly like a river, but rather in fits and starts as people like Carrie Baker, and the folks who shepherded our IMPACT membership this year, step forward and add their energy to our movement in all sorts of small and large ways.

Work Around Congregational Trust
In late August last year, we hired a UU consultant to come to Charlottesville to help evaluate our congregation’s stewardship, and readiness for a possible upcoming capital campaign. What he found was a church with a lot of potential, but one that struggles with trust, conflict, and stewardship–particularly financial stewardship.

One recommendation was that we bring in someone who can help us with long-standing issues we have had around trust and conflict. We are just beginning this work with Paula Cole Jones, who this weekend is making her second trip down to work with us, and is joining us today for worship and this congregational meeting. Paula, would you please wave or stand to let anyone who has not met you yet see who you are? Thank you.

In addition, the Board and I have been in regular contact with the staff of the UUA Southern Region, who have committed to supporting us as we move forward.

We have a lot of work to do, and we will be organizing next steps in the coming weeks. I suggest that you do not let it overwhelm you, but rather move into it and see where it takes us. The important thing is that we do this work together.

TJMC Staff
As some of you know, the Board president is the direct supervisor of our senior staff. As such, I would like to give you a short report about my experience working with them this year.

A key message I would like to share is that our senior staff does very good work. They work hard, they are respected by their peers, and they have a broad base of experience that they bring to their work.

Reverend Wik regularly balances what is best for this church with what we want from him. These are not always the same thing. it is a delicate balance, and he walks that line bravely, thoughtfully, and with our best interest in mind.

Our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, manages the day to day business of the church, which is regularly messy, frenetic, and beset with high expectations. In the midst of all this, she has been a leader within our faith. She is Board Secretary of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and is a creator of the White Supremacy Teach-In, which has been embraced by hundreds of our UU congregations.

Our Director of Faith Development, Leia Durland-Jones, celebrated her 25th anniversary with us this year. She has touched thousands of youth and adult lives within our walls, and religious education is one of the consistently strongly-recognized assets of our church. Within a few years, children of the generation she has nurtured to adulthood will be sending their own children to participate in TJMC’s RE program.

My second message regarding our staff is that they are not perfect, nor do I expect them to be. I would like Rev. Wik to write shorter emails, and answer them faster. I would like Chris to delegate more administrative tasks to her staff. And sometimes I wish Leia was a little more comfortable taking a few more risks. And that is okay. I am sure they would like me to be more organized, less forgetful, and quit throwing them curve balls! A good manager appreciates that everyone brings their own set of strengths and weaknesses, and success comes from learning to work with each person’s unique toolkit. When we cannot talk openly about strengths and weaknesses, interactions can become emotionally-charged and unproductive.

I bring this up because I get a lot more feedback from the congregation about staff performance than I believe is given to the staff directly, and it does at times seem emotionally-charged. I think this is an area where the Board has not always modeled good practices. As a Board, we have not been great at talking openly with senior staff about our expectations, and where those expectations diverge from staff priorities, which has led to some anxiety among professional and lay leadership.

Moving forward I would like to see the Board engage in more direct discussion with the senior staff about priorities, with an eye toward normalizing those interactions. Job feedback is not intended to be a referendum on someone’s overall value as an employee or a person, and should not be treated as such by either the giver or recipient of that feedback.

Racial Justice Work
I want to talk a bit about how the national conversation around racism and white supremacy has shaped our church this year.

Two years ago, we passed our statement of public witness affirming that the lives of black and brown people matter to us, and that we will do what needs to be done in the name of equity and justice. There is urgency to this work, as the wealth gap between white people and people of color has grown, and we continue to have a terrible racial bias in our educational system and criminal justice system. White privilege infuses our hiring and employment practices. It underpins our government and our policies and our holidays and our commerce and our social interactions. And our religions.

We have used the phrase: “trying to see everything we do through a lens of racial justice.” Let me give you an example of what that means:

A few years ago, a subscription to a food magazine started appearing at our house, for reasons I still cannot figure out. We enjoy the subscription, and when it arrives I look through it to see what recipes I want to try that month. I leaf through every single page, every single month, and it took me close to a year to realize that there are virtually no people of color depicted in the articles. Granted, I am reading it for the recipes, but a year.

The reason we are putting the conversation about dominant white culture front and center is that we are developing an appreciation for how long it takes if you are part of that culture to learn to look through a lens of anti-racism.

We are called to make our society a better place, and when it comes to anti-racism, it is just not happening fast enough. Remember that TJMC did not start out 75 years ago with its statement of public witness. We watched the massive resistance to school desegregation in the 1950s, and did not decide to put anti-racism front and center like we are doing today. We watched the protests against the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, and still we did not put anti-racism front and center. We let the already large wealth gap and income gap between white Americans and people of color grow larger beginning in the 1970s. In the early 1990s, Unitarian Universalists threw the Thomas Jefferson Ball at General Assembly, and suggested that our black and brown brothers and sisters attend this “celebration” in period dress. And we have reflected on what it means for our church to be named after someone who enslaved human beings, and still, still, we did not put anti-racism front and center.

We come to this issue late. Our statement of public witness is not progressive; we are very much still playing catch-up if we want to live our UU principles and realize the promise that they make to the world. We are seeing some change, in ourselves, in others, but those changes continue to coming painstakingly slow. That is why it feels like so much is happening around anti-racism here recently. Many of us are doubling down on our commitment. We are trying to wake ourselves up in a way that ensures that people of color do not have to wait for each new generation of white Unitarian Universalists to wake ourselves up all over again.

In the meantime, if you worry that some sermons from our lead minister on white supremacy, and an active racial justice committee, and a committed board, will squeeze out other social justice work here at TJMC, you have nothing to fear.

• We annually engage with other area faith groups to solve local problems through IMPACT.
• Our soup kitchen continues to feed people in need.
• We help house homeless people through the winter through PACEM.
• There is an active effort underway right now to make sure TJMC has a presence at this year’s Pride Festival.
• PAUN–Peace Action United Nations–continues to be active.
• And we are doing meaningful work around gun control and ending gerrymandering.

I believe that concern about being singularly focused on racial justice is a narrative that belies our anxiety around what the world might look like if it is not controlled by the culture we are used to. But looking at our church’s work through a lens of racial justice does not prevent us from engaging in other social justice work that we are inspired to engage in. If anything, it reminds us of our Seventh Principle’s message that everything we do is connected to everything else.

Proposed Deficit Budget
One of the issues you will be confronting in a bit is the fact that the Board has submitted a second year of a fairly substantial deficit budget, where we are planning to spend more than we expect to bring in this year as we work to grow our stewardship. And you may be asking yourself why we are taking this approach, when we have had balanced budgets in the past. I can tell you that for my part, even those balanced budget have told a story of scarcity. We have had years where we have balanced our budget by neglecting our reserve fund, by short changing our contribution to the UUA, and by inadequately compensating our staff. But when I look at this congregation, I continue to see the potential for abundance that consultant Mark Ewert reported when he was here last August during our Next Steps weekend. This budget is built on an assumption of abundance that many of us are committed to nurturing.

In her poem “To Be of Use,” Marge Piercy wrote:

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,
the sleek black heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well-done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Micah 6:8
Many of you know that I spent part of last year as a candidate for the House of Representatives. I was motivated to run, to a large degree, because of my conviction that we need our UU values modeled by more people in more places to fix the things that are broken in the world.

And while I was running, I told nearly every group I met with, everywhere I went, that if people of faith, and justice-minded people of conscience, would only heed the call from the book of Micah in the Hebrew Bible to do justice, and love mercy, and humbly engage in the holy work that we are called to do, we can change everything.

What kind of UU would I be not to bring that same message to my own church? Do justice. Love mercy. Humbly engage in this holy work together.

May we be that strong.