Erika Sanders, Beloved Community Staff Team

As Unity’s antiracist multicultural work has grown and become more complex, opportunities for congregants to be involved have sprouted in nearly every part of church life. Individually and in community, congregation members are engaging with the Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracist Multiculturalism and becoming deeply intentional about their spiritual practices. 
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To discuss this further, I interviewed Mike Funck who recently completed a three-year term as a Teaching Associate. I wanted to know how Mike had experienced antiracist multiculturalism as an embedded part of his church life.

Erika: Tell me about what you learned as a Teaching Associate, and how it shaped your understanding of the relationships between religion and multiculturalism.

Mike: We began with a deep dive into the history of liberal theology, which was both fascinating and challenging. I had a profound “a-ha” moment, a realization about the vast interconnectedness of things we do at Unity Church, and how all our work can be connected to the process of faith formation and antiracist multicultural work. Monthly worship themes, Chalice Circles, Open Page Writing Sessions, everything I had been a part of, all began to feel like a spiritually connected whole. 

Erika: As a Teaching Associate, did you work with the Double Helix Model? 

Mike: Yes, I did. People say the Double Helix is a good example of why we have a bumper sticker at Unity that reads, “It’s Complicated!” And I understand that — it’s not simple. But at the same time, it makes sense to me. The Double Helix Model helps me pull disparate ideas together and I use the model as a road map. Grappling with the model was a good way for me to understand both what had existed in my life before, and what I can do differently in the future. The graphic elements of the model and the mural-like graphic that was created at a Team Dynamics event help me look at the whole, but also to enter into the work one piece at a time. The videos created for the Team Dynamics event were very helpful to me, too.

Erika: Have you changed your ways of interacting with the world as a result? Or have you developed new practices?

Mike: The process has reinforced two key things: the importance of listening, and of speaking for myself alone. These practices resonate across everything I do and have helped me be more intentional about interacting across differences that may be cultural. On the surface, many interactions and differences may not seem to be about race or culture but in fact are, and present opportunities to learn and become better. As part of the Teaching Associate experience, we write up “case studies,” which are concise descriptions of a situation we experienced or observed in which cultural or racial differences were handled less than ideally, and how deeply that affected peoples’ lives. In each case study, we talked about what happened and explored what could have happened instead. 

The process opened my eyes to the multiplicity of ways we could respond to cross-cultural situations. This not only helped me to develop skills related to intercultural competency, but also enriched my spiritual practices and understanding of faith. This is something we do continually because we experience life and change continually. It’s a lifetime learning project.

Erika: How has this changed your world outside of Unity Church?

Mike: In our sometimes-contentious society, it’s not unusual to run across people with perspectives that I find offensive or wrong. It’s difficult to know what to do when someone says something objectionable. That’s when I re-engage in the power of listening. If I then share my own views, it’s not in the spirit of telling someone else what to say or think, it’s simply sharing my perspective which may be different than their perspective. Even with that intellectualization, it’s still hard to do. That’s why it’s a practice.

Erika: What has led you to be a spiritually curious person?

Mike: I’ve always been curious and loved to learn. In my profession as a technical writer, I loved to approach projects with the goal of understanding their complexity and connectedness, asking “how does this all fit together?” It’s similar to the way I’ve learned about antiracism and multiculturalism as part of my journey at Unity. It’s one thing to be generally aware and curious about things, but another to crack the book open a bit more, learn more about ourselves and understand that race is a component of our lives, even when we don’t see it. It requires understanding the systemic racism that is baked in and, for many white people, not apparent at the surface level. It’s necessary to pull it apart. Dismantling anything like systemic racism generates pushback. Thankfully, my experience with groups at Unity is one of growing with fellow pilgrims. We may or may not think and feel the same, but we have a commonality of spirit. When we share trust and vulnerability in a group or “go deep fast,” our capacity to grow is profound.

by finn schneider
 
In the spaces and communities that contextualize my being and doing, the proliferation of rainbow flags and symbols during the month of June has become a familiar ritual, the marking of a season of sorts. Pride month, in my experience, is a season of paradox; ripe with contradiction and characterized by tension if we are willing to dig just a bit below the shiny surface.
 
Designating June in this regard invites the learning of LGBTQ+ history, a practice which is important not just for those of us who are queer and/or trans. Many of us associate Pride Month as commemorating the Stonewall riot, a collective uprising against police violence in New York that culminated from a series of protests led by BIPOC drag queens and transwomen. This courageous act of resistance is often understood as the start of the LGBTQ+ movement, and yet it is one of countless such efforts to interrupt state violence directed at queer and trans people. How does uplifting a singular (and often white-washed) story of resistance contribute to the consolidation of an extraordinarily diverse and diasporic grouping of people and histories?

I was well into my 20s and exploring my identity as a trans person when I learned about Compton’s Cafeteria riot, an uprising led by trans women and sex workers in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco who were being targeted by police violence. Compton’s Cafeteria riot predated Stonewall by three years and yet remains largely unknown in mainstream understandings of LGBTQ+ history in the U.S.
 
What happens when we become attached to a particular historical narrative as representing an entire grouping of people marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality, and perhaps even feel proud of ourselves for being aware of that particular narrative? Whose histories are lost, or intentionally invisibilized? How does designating a particular month as the time within which we reflect on particular histories set us up to believe that such reflection and learning ought not be an ongoing practice?
 
Pride month asks us to become educated about and commemorate stories of struggle and resistance and resilience; this is important work. At the same time, this call to gain knowledge paradoxically contributes both to the flattening of complex, varied histories, as well as to the belief that we can and ought to be able to know and understand “the Other” on our own terms and through our own frameworks.
 
Pride month invites celebration of difference and designates time and space for joy, revelry, community, and solidarity among LGBTQ+ people and those who love and affirm us. To me, as a queer and trans UU, these are practices of faith and expressions of covenant rooted in our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part. In other words, the season of Pride invites life-giving and community-building practice. Herein lies another paradox. While collectively enacted, Pride month is imagined through configurations of individual identity and individual rights frameworks.
 
What opportunities and challenges come with imagining gender and sexuality primarily through the framework of personal identity? As an expression of our faith, we must and will continue fighting for the rights of self-expression, futures free from violence based on real or perceived identity, and equitable access to societal resources and institutions.
 
At the same time, there is sacrifice inherent in centering and leveraging individual, identity-based, rights-focused approaches to working toward transformational justice. Visibility, for example, is often equated with progress in relation to LGBTQ+ people and issues. Undoubtedly, increased visibility has played a significant role in shifting hearts and minds toward greater societal acceptance in recent decades. Visibility, however, is not harmless; nor is it accessible to or desired by all LGBTQ+ people symmetrically.
 
The focus on personal identity at the heart of Pride month and central to mainstream change-making efforts has resulted in meaningful societal progress for many LGBTQ+ people and groups; it has also come with a cost. As a practice of faith formation, how might we complicate our engagement with gender and sexuality by thinking critically, collectively, and generatively about the ways that our UU tradition both limits and expands our thinking, doing, and being?
 
Pride month, and the abundance of rainbow flags that mark its arrival in my corner of St. Paul, is layered and complex for me. One of the many things I appreciate about queer frameworks and ways of being is their capacity for engaging paradox productively. Many moments of my life are characterized by navigating in-between spaces, never quite fitting in easefully. Even while such navigation brings with it exhaustion and sometimes hurt, I do not seek easy resolution. Engaging paradox has grown my capacity to see the world and other beings with complexity and expanded the ways in which I feel connected to holy mystery. It is my hope that we, as members of Unity Church, will deepen our covenantal commitment and collective faith formation practices through exploring and engaging contradiction and paradox.     

The Welcome Team — otherwise known as greeters or ushers — is reinventing itself at Unity Church. It might not seem obvious. We still hand out orders of service, pass collection plates, and clean up the pews after service. The transformation is happening in our hearts and we hope you will notice in your heart. 

The shift is rooted in the church’s desire to become more antiracist and multicultural, to create the Beloved Community, moving the emphasis away from the tactical to the relational to fulfill the Welcome Team’s new mission, “Nurturing Mutual Belonging.” 

“Welcome Team work is a spiritual practice and part of our covenant to provide a continuum of care here at Unity,” says Madeline Summers, team coordinator. “Nurturing mutual belonging starts with us as individuals — our own sense of belonging, knowing who we are, what we’re passionate about, and how we might be perceived by others. Then, it extends to our practice among team members.” 

Each team now meets 30 minutes before the service to check in, sometimes with a reading or reflection, so members can be grounded and know each other more deeply. By nurturing belonging within each team, we can better nurture belonging beyond to congregants. 

More focus is being given to interacting with people, so Welcome Team members aren’t going to be found behind tables anymore. Rather, we are circulating in the Parish Hall engaging in conversation. 

That’s not always easy, says Welcome Team member Barb Cederberg, a self-proclaimed introvert. “We want to do things right. We may not do it right, so it inhibits us from trying. How do we have the courage to try and live with the discomfort? Unity Church members have so much generosity, if mistakes are made, we can overcome.” 

Barb is passionate about the work. “I can feel where I belong and I can feel where I don’t belong,” says Barb. “Being respected and being treated well are not the same as having a feeling of belonging. I worked in corporate America for many years. I did not acknowledge my spouse, Judy, or that we had children. Nurturing belonging is a feeling of acceptance of self and others. At Unity, I can be myself. How do I encourage others to be themselves?” 

“Mutual belonging is more complicated than passing the collection plate or picking up Kleenex boxes,” says Jim Oberly, another Welcome Team member. “I’m an old white guy. I’m conscious of that. You know the images of deacons in the old churches — conveying an air of authority as if to say, ‘your money is safe with us.’ I used to wear a coat and tie. I dress differently now — a sweater and slacks.” 

Continues Jim, “When people enter the church, we greeters are likely to make misinformed judgments based on how someone looks. We need to stay open and curious. I do my best to help visitors figure us out — what might be expected during a service, where things are located, how to get more information — and I try to share something of myself in hopes they will share something of themselves with me.” 

Nurturing mutual belonging isn’t just for visitors. “It is a good direction for all the groups we have at church,” says Barb. “We should increase our awareness of how the interactions are among us. If someone is standing alone in the Parish Hall, start up a conversation.” She recalls when she was standing in line to greet the ministers and the woman ahead of her looked very sad. “I asked her if she was OK. She had just lost her husband two years earlier – about the time I lost Judy – so we got talking and now we’re good friends.” 

Jim has seen the value of mutual belonging in other aspects of his church volunteer work. In recent months, he and his wife have been escorting elderly women to church on Sundays. “As so many people came up to greet and fuss over them, I saw the elders come alive! It made them so happy. How many friends and admirers they have!” 

I guess that’s proof that whether we’re on a Welcome Team or not, all congregants are part of nurturing mutual belonging. If you are interested in joining the Welcome Team, contact Madeline Summers. 
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All church members, including Welcome Team members, are encouraged to take the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a tool to help build our self-knowledge so we can develop our personal and congregational capacity for welcoming all. Further, as we move forward in the spirit of transformation, Welcome Teams will be engaging with the Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracist Multicultural Work to deepen our practice of welcome.