Forum of Unitarian Universalists Hong Kong

It is helpful and challenging to write a single-sentence "elevator speech" to introduce UUism to strangers in very limited time.



I have devised this:

UUism is a multi-faith religion for believers of all world religions (who want to maintain dialogue with believers of other religions) and for freethinkers such as atheists, agnostics, humanists, and naturalists.

如何在乘升降機的時間內以一句介紹 UU 主義？

我設計了以下的一句：

UU 主義是一個多信仰宗教；它歡迎（希望與其他宗教信徒保持對話的）世界宗教信徒及自由思想者 (freethinkers)，例如無神論者、不可知論者、人文主義者、及自然主義者等等。

I've come up with another one:


The uniqueness of UUism in one sentence:

Nowhere on earth can I find another religion in which there is a humanist group (HUUmanists), a naturalist group (UU Religious Naturalists), a Buddhist group (UU Buddhist Fellowship), a Taoist group (UU Taoist Study Group), a Christian group (UU Christian Fellowship), and more!

UU is a group that has religious elements but put out the signs that read "all are welcome" and "we believe in true equality".

Thanks, xox!


I have another one from here:

"We need new ways to talk about belief and unbelief. We need a realistic and loving liberal religion that even an Atheist can love."
---Rev Brian Covell, Third Unitarian Church, Chicago

我們需要以新的方式討論「信」與「不信」。我們需要一個務實、充滿慈愛、連無神論者也喜愛的自由宗教。
---Brian Covell牧師，第三Unitarian教會，芝加歌

Alex wrote:I have devised this:

A multi-faith religion for believers of all world religions (who want to maintain dialogue with believers of other religions) and for freethinkers such as atheists, agnostics, humanists, and naturalists.

Similar but shorter:

UU (Unitarian Universalism) is a liberal religion for all faiths, including atheism.

A UU sermon suggested by George Bishop of UU Singapore that should help everyone with their "elevator speech" when someone asks what is UU. Interestingly enough, UU Singapore is mentioned in the sermon!



Frequently Asked Questions
about Unitarian Universalism
A sermon preached at First Unitarian
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
meeting in Albuquerque, Edgewood, and Socorro, New Mexico
by the Rev. Christine Robinson
on January 11, 2009

FAQs and Facebook

These days, Web sites and other documents often have an FAQ section,
which means “frequently asked questions,” a quick, user-friendly way to get very
basic information about the product, service, group, or whatever. It’s short and
sweet, meant for the confused newcomer like you or me. FAQ is one of those new
terms that has been brought to us by new technology, and it’s turned out to be a
useful concept.

There are always new people among us, or people asking us questions
about what we believe and who we are, and it’s true that we’re a kind of out-ofthe-
box-thinking bunch, so here’s a user-friendly sermon about Unitarian
Universalism—answering FAQs. In it, I thought we’d cover quick answers to
some of those perennial questions we get asked about our faith, our history, our
congregations. And since I was feeling techy and with-it for using this new term,
FAQ, I decided to poll the members of the First Unitarian/Albuquerque Facebook
group to find out what their questions were.

Facebook is another new item on the Internet scene; it’s one of several
social networking Web sites, where people meet online, converse, share
information and pictures, play games, and keep up with each other’s lives. It’s all
free; you join up and then use the power of computers to connect with other
Facebook users whom you already know or who share similar interests. If you
joined Facebook and added to your information what your religious views were,
you’d be directed to other UUs, to the UU Service Committee, and to the UUA’s
Facebook pages, and you’d be able to find the sixty-five UU congregations that
have Facebook pages. If you listed your city, you’d be directed to other Facebook
users in your city and to other congregations and organizations that had
Facebook pages. From there you could make individual friends. High schools and
colleges, cities, and many other kinds of interest groups have pages. I
reconnected with my first college friend through Facebook. Facebook has about
140 million members, about five thousand of whom are UUs. There are other
social networking Web sites; MySpace specializes in teens, others are more used
in other parts of the world. Facebook seems to be the place for UUs.

Anyway, First Unitarian/Albuquerque has a Facebook page and ninetytwo
members. There’s a way to contact them all, and I did, asking them for their
questions for this sermon. They came up with a great assortment:
• “What is unique and distinctive about UUism? What can we say
when people ask us what kind of church this is, and could you go
over that ‘Universalist’ bit again?”
(Well that’s three questions, which could be three sermons, but these
are FAQs, short and to the point, so we have time for more.)
• “How can I share my UU values with my children, and can you
suggest any home rituals?”
• Then there was, “Are there foreign UUs?”
• And, “Are there Republican UUs?”
• And, “How does this church minister to mixed-faith couples and
those who want to maintain their Christian roots?”

That’s a lot, so hold on to your hats!

What is unique and distinctive about UUism?
Can you tell us what to say when people ask us, “What kind of a
church is that?”
Can you go over the “Universalist” bit again?

What is unique and distinctive about Unitarian Universalism? Here’s how
I answer a question like that: “This is a religiously diverse community. We’re
invited to grow in spirit here, to seek the special way that truth speaks to us, and
to practice that in our lives.”

Got it?

This is a religiously diverse community. We’re invited to grow in spirit
here, to seek the special way that truth speaks to us, and to practice that in our
lives.

There are a couple of unique things here. First is the religiously diverse
community. Most congregations attempt to be religiously similar; if you don’t
believe certain things, you’re not really welcome. We like our diversity.
Humanists, transcendentalists, Buddhists, pagans, questioners, liberal Christians
. . . we think that these differences enrich our conversation, help our search, give
us a variety of ways to think about truth. Like the blind men, each of whom only
could touch one part of an elephant? They needed to sit down and talk about
what they had experienced to come anywhere near the reality of the elephant that
none of them could see.

Secondly we’re invited to seek the special way that truth speaks to us. We
assume that truth comes to earth in many forms, and that’s OK with us. It
assumes that we can change our ideas during our lives. It assumes that we can
converse without getting bogged down in “right” and “wrong.”

Finally, the non-unique part of this statement: we’re invited to practice our
faith in our lives. Every religious community has this as a part of their mission.
Because we specialize in this open-minded diversity and freedom to believe what
seems right to us, our living out of our faith tends to be open-minded and
inclusive as well.

One writer commented that she had one of these little red cards, “What do
Unitarian Universalists believe?” with about 500 words, which the UUA prints
out as a brief introduction. The little red cards are handy; you’ll hear what they
say in the reading, but every UU needs a one-sentence, positive explanation of
their church. This is the one I like: “This is a religiously diverse community.
We’re invited to grow in spirit here, to seek the special way that truth speaks to
us, and to practice that in our lives.”

The little red cards say much the same thing, just with lots more words.
They are handy to give people who want more information. Pick one up on your
way out!

Now the idea of a religiously diverse congregation is an oxymoron to many
people, and they’ll ask, “But how can you worship together if you don’t all believe
the same?” Just say, “We have a lot to celebrate. You should come sometime!”

Because this really is a new idea, they’ll probably say, “But what do you
believe about the Bible? Or Jesus?” You say, “The Bible has a lot of wisdom in it.
So do lots of other books,” or “Jesus was a wise man. There have been many wise
people.” You get the idea.

What is unique about us is that we embrace spiritual and theological
diversity; we use it as a tool for conversation and a way to enrich our lives.

Now as to “Universalist,” here’s the quick answer. The Universalist Church
of America was formed in the eighteenth century by people who believed that
God loved everybody . . . no exceptions. That’s your bumper sticker: God Loves
Everybody: No Exceptions. Therefore, God wasn’t going to toss anybody in hell,
at least, not forever. The Universalists believed in Universal salvation. They didn’t
believe in creeds; they thought God loved everybody no matter what they believed
and assumed that they should try to do that, too. The Universalists were
especially strong in the second half of the nineteenth century, between the Civil
War and World War I. The Universalists merged with the Unitarians in the
1960s. Many congregations changed their name to reflect that merger; others
kept their historical names. All Unitarian and Universalist congregations, no
matter what their names, are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
the UUA.

Another question our Facebook UUs suggested was this:

One of my most burning questions as a recent UU parent has been,
how do I share UU values and have those values make an
impression on my daughter in our everyday lives? And how can
families best integrate UU values as a family ritual?

If we go back to that statement about what is unique about us, that this is a
religiously diverse community, growing in spirit together and living the truths we
find in our lives, how might that play out in a family with young children?

Firstly, in a UU family, there will be conversations about what everyone
believes, and it will be OK that people believe differently. Children will be asked
their opinions and will be listened to carefully. Families are religiously diverse
communities, too. That’s OK.

Secondly, we grow in spirit together. Our conversations are a part of that,
of course, but, especially when there are children in the family, family ritual is
important. I’m going to suggest one possibility: a bedtime prayer that honors our
diversity and our desire to grow in spirit.

When you tuck your children in, sit down with them. Ask them to tell you
something good that happened that day and something they wished hadn’t
happened that day. Let them reflect on those things. Let’s say that the good thing
was building a snowman and the bad thing was having a spat with their sibling.
You listen to what they have to say about that, then take their hands, close your
eyes, and say, “Spirit of life, we are thankful for snowmen and ask for the strength
to be patient when sisters are pesky. I am thankful for my thoughtful child. May
we all have a peaceful night. Amen.” That’s a prayer. Simple, very nurturing to the
child who feels listened to and who will listen carefully to the adult reframing of
the issue. It makes their day important, ties up the loose ends. Whether you or
they believe that the listener to that prayer is outside of you, or you believe that
the listener is simply your own open heart, it’s a lovely ritual.

If you start this with your preverbal babies and keep it up, you’ll be ready
for almost everything your nine-year-old will fling at you. Someday they’ll quit
letting you put them to bed, but they might still linger around the living room at
bedtime, letting you ask them, for old time’s sake, what their good and difficult
thing was that day, and letting you say, “Well, I’m thankful that you’ve got such
good ideas about how to manage.”

Finally, in your family, as in your church, everyone will be encouraged to
live out their values. The children’s affirmation—we are a people of faith who
have open minds, loving hearts, and helping hands—is a good guide for this. If
children know this affirmation, it can be continually reinforced. “Today we’re
going to shovel our neighbor’s snow because he’s not well. We’re going to put our
helping hands to work.” “I’ve never heard of that, but I’m keeping an open mind.”
“Let’s make some pictures for your grandma. That’s what it means to have a
loving heart.”

I hope that every family with children participates in the UUSC Guest at
Your Table program, which is our service committee’s program especially for
children. Of course, the major family ritual of UU families is going to church
together!

And another question:

Are there Republican UUs?

There most certainly have been, and probably are, but they are an
endangered species right now, which is unfortunate for us.

Religious liberalism and political liberalism are really two different things,
sort of like two circles that overlap in the middle. Religious liberalism focuses on
freedom of belief and the inherent worth and dignity of persons, which tends to
translate into equal access of persons to social goods. Political conservatism is
also very keen on freedom, and there are political conservatives who are drawn to
the freedom of belief side of Unitarian Universalism. However, political
conservatives tend to believe in a more hierarchical model of human relations;
they often believe that men should be heads of families, that heterosexuality is
the only right way to be human, and that differences in socioeconomic status are
the result of work ethic. So there is an overlapping of the purely religious
emphasis on freedom of belief between liberal religion and political conservatism,
but when it comes to how we should live out those beliefs, there’s a big clash of
values and ideas.

Through the 1980s, polls tended to show that about three-fourths of UUs
were politically liberal and one-fourth were conservative. This was sometimes
uncomfortable for the conservatives, who tended to be Republicans and
Libertarians, but not impossible. There was, if you can remember it, more respect
for political difference in those days. The polarization of politics in America,
especially in the past eight years, polarized our churches as well, and most of my
colleagues reported what I noticed, which was that the Republicans got tired of
being such a minority amidst such strong feelings and left. I hope that during the
next administration we’ll take our president’s broader attitude toward those we
disagree with and our congregations will become a little more politically diverse.
Perhaps we’ll find we have important things to learn from each other!

And by the way, through the 1980s polls tended to show that about threefourths
of religious conservatives were politically liberal, and that, too, changed
in the past two decades. Now there is a resurgence of politically liberal
evangelical Christians, who are learning to talk together in spite of their
differences. We should do so well.

Another question for the sermon:

I hear there are Unitarians in Africa! Is that true? Where else in
the world are there UUs?

The UUA is an association of congregations in the U.S.A. It’s closely
affiliated with the Canadian UUs, and maintains a strong tie with the
International Council of Unitarians and Universalists.

There are Unitarians in the rest of the world. There are small groups of
Unitarians all over Europe, especially in the British Isles. There are UUs in
Eastern Europe, in both northern and southern India, in South Africa and South
America, in Uganda, Nigeria, and Togo, and the Congo, in the Philippines,
Australia, and New Zealand, and in Europe. Also Japan, Singapore, Mexico, Sri
Lanka . . .

These folks came to Unitarianism in a variety of ways, but the basic thing
is that the world over, people have read their Bibles and said, “It seems to me that
most of this book says God is one, not three.” That’s how the oldest Unitarian
churches in the world got started, in Eastern Europe. There’s a particularly nice
story told about the Unitarians of the Khasi Hills, India. It seems that when the
British took over India, they discovered the indigenous people of the Khasi Hills
and assigned some Welsh Calvinists to be their missionaries and bring them to
Christ. Those missionaries did the work of learning the Khasi language and
translating the Bible and teaching the Khasi people to read. One of the Khasi
leaders, Mr. Kisson Singh, read his Bible and didn’t care for the message. He
liked Jesus and argued for a religion like Jesus’s religion, rather than the religion
about Jesus. The Welsh missionaries heard him out and then said, “No, no; that’s
Unitarianism. That’s a heresy!” And Singh said, “Really? And how might I contact
these Unitarians?” Eventually, he got a volume of the writings of William Ellery
Channing. This was 1887. That little tribal group of Unitarians has flourished
ever since. There are ten thousand Unitarians in thirty-two churches in the Khasi
Hills. The Khasi Unitarians, like the Transylvanian Unitarians and Philippine
Universalists, are mostly farmers.

African churches developed mostly in a similar way. The church in Cape
Town, South Africa, is a descendent of the British Unitarian churches, but most
of the other African churches sprang up in a way similar to the Khasi churches;
someone read their Bible and kept on looking.

The Philippine churches were started in the 1950s and affiliated with the
Universalist Church of America. These native people liked the Christianity that
the Catholic missionaries brought to their islands, except they couldn’t square the
idea of a loving God with the bit about burning forever in hell. They decided that
God’s love would embrace everyone and from there found the Universalists, and
the Universalists admitted them to membership in the days before the Unitarians
and Universalists merged.

There are more and more opportunities for communication with UUs all
over the world: travel opportunities, partner church pairings, and so on. Often
small groups in congregations become quite involved with one or more UU
groups abroad.

And a final question:

How do we minister to interfaith couples and to those who want to
maintain their Christian roots and beliefs?

The major way we minister to interfaith couples is to affirm and celebrate,
once again, that we really value religious diversity in our congregations and in
our homes. We are not a religion that decries marriage outside of the faith, and
we are not a religion that encourages adherents to pressure their spouse to agree
with them in matters of faith. It’s a huge universe out there. It’s OK with us if
people study and ponder and come to different understandings of the truth!

So we say, come as you are, believing as you do, with or without your
spouse. No pressure, no shame, no problem. And whether your spouse comes or
not, we hope you and the ones you love talk about how the truth speaks to you
and how you are living it out in your life. That’s what makes for a close
relationship, and it’s that kind of conversation that helps us grow.

Maintaining Christian roots and beliefs; that’s harder.

Now there are Christian Unitarian Universalists, whole churches full of
them. Many of those international Unitarian churches have a decidedly Christian
bent. They are non-creedal and they welcome diversity, but their programming is
Christian. There are a few such churches in the United States, almost all of which
are the historic New England UU churches that broke off from the faith of their7
Puritan builders in the early nineteenth century. Anybody can join and there is no
creed, but the sermons are biblically based, the prayers mention Jesus, and they
baptize babies—if that’s the wish of the parents—into their little liberal corner of
the Christian faith. They are Christians without the trinity—Unitarians—and,
usually, Christians without hell, adherents of universal salvation. These churches
maintain a group called the UU Christian Fellowship, the UUCF, which has a
Web site with lots of interesting information.

Most UUs who lean toward Christianity or who cherish their Christian
roots live outside of the few cities served by the Christian UU churches, and they
have to manage in UU congregations. Sometimes there is a chapter of the UUCF
or a study or prayer group; sometimes these folks just have to make do.
Oftentimes, our UU Christians are spouses of humanist and transcendentalist
UUs, who would really not be welcome in other churches.

Now the uncomfortable fact is that many UUs, perhaps even most, are not
just “not Christian.” They are “ex-Christian.” Christianity was the faith of their
childhood; it quit working for them, and they moved on. Sometimes they took
heat from family; I’ve even met UUs who were more or less tried for heresy and
thrown out of their churches. Even folks who don’t have that kind of burden of
pain often feel like they were somehow duped as children and still feel angry
about their Christian roots.

Part of what we do as UU churches is help people lay down those burdens
of pain and anger so that they can take the good from their religious upbringing
and leave the rest behind. But that takes time, and we don’t always succeed, and
our UU Christians often feel the brunt of this anger toward Christianity.
Sometimes they feel like they have to stay in the closet, with the Republicans.
Sometimes they get tired of being the invisible butt of jibes and jokes and
people’s anger and bad memories.

Now all this closet stuff, this is really, seriously, against our values. We do
not believe in closets! We believe in diversity of opinion; we understand that
people are different. Our view of truth is that it is too large for any one person to
have a handle on. Christian, Democrat, feminist, Libertarian, atheist—all these
handles are partial truths. We appreciate the possibility that people express
themselves with different words and have different kinds of religious experiences.
We think that a conversation between people who believe different things can
edge them both toward a larger truth. This is the no-closet congregation. Or it
should be, if we were really living out the values we espouse. That’s something to
think about.

Very brief introduction to UUism (though not quite "one-sentence").



友人問到甚麼是UU。我又要想一想如何以最簡短顯淺的文字介紹UU。以下是我的「產品」：

甚麼是UU？
約四百多年前，在基督教中，歐洲有一些教會開始提倡思想自由，質疑傳統教義（例如三位一體、不信者落地獄）。後來，這些教會更加開明，接納其他世界宗教（例如佛教）、科學的新發現（例如進化論）、及哲學的新思潮（包括人文主義及無神論），所以最後脫離基督教，成為一個新的開明宗教，它就是UU。UU在美國有超過一千間教會。世界地各地都有UU組織（未必是教會），香港也有，叫尋道會 www.uuhk.org 。


長版：

甚麼是UU？
約四百多年前，在基督教中，歐洲有一些教會開始提倡思想自由，質疑傳統教義。初時有兩批這類教會，一批質疑「三位一體」，教會英文名稱以「U」字開頭；另一批教會質疑「不信者落地獄」，剛巧英文名稱也是以「U」字開頭。後來，這兩批教會更加開明，接受其他世界宗教（例如佛教）、科學的新發現（例如進化論）、及哲學的新思潮（包括人文主義及無神論）。最後，由於開明思想相近，這兩批教會於一九六一年在美國合拼，自然地取名「UU」。UU由於接納世界宗教及無神論，所以脫離基督教，成為一個新的開明宗教。UU在美國有超過一千間教會。世界地各地都有UU組織（未必是教會），香港也有，叫尋道會 www.uuhk.org 。



此簡介特點：
1. 簡短
2. 淺易：盡量減少「神學」、「論」、「主義」、「派」等詞；以「質疑『 三位一體』」代替「一位論派」（Unitarians），以「質疑『不信者落地獄』」代替「普救論派」（Universalists）
3. 具歷史性：四百多年前、在基督教中、歐洲、教會、脫離基督教
4. 具體不空泛：佛教、進化論、人文主義、無神論
5. 在無須教會生活方式的地區（如香港），指出組織形式的開放性：未必是教會