Seeds of a New Way: Nurturing Authentic and Diverse Religious Leadership

As congregations strive to live into the potential and joy of Beloved Community, these essays will inspire them to seed and nourish a new way.

What will it take for diverse leadership within Unitarian Universalism to truly thrive and contribute to a radiant and inclusive future? In Seeds of a New Way, editors Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Nancy McDonald Ladd and contributors explore how to foster and nourish diverse and authentic leadership within congregations.

Building on the foundations of the groundbreaking Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity, and Power in Ministry, this collection offers a glimpse into the forming edge of the shared journey happening right now to make diverse leadership, both lay and ordained, more survivable and vibrant. Rather than presenting one definitive pathway or roadmap, Seeds of a New Way recognizes that the specific context and relationships within any given setting will shape the journey and so brings together a diverse array of perspectives, experiences, and strategies to illustrate a range of considerations and possibilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skinner House Books
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781558969179

Book preview

Preface

The genesis of this text lies in months of heartfelt conversations between us, Manish and Nancy. Over time and with much trust, we shared with one another our experience of the ways in which the dominant culture asks leaders to perform a certain version of themselves in exchange for the relative safety of a steady job or place of belonging in Unitarian Universalism. On one hand, diverse leadership within our movement is valued, even placed on a pedestal, as a values-based commitment. However, living into the day-to-day presence of diversity at our leadership tables is another matter altogether.

Recognizing this is painful: the history of Unitarian Universalism is littered with the careers of diverse religious professionals who have had to step away for their own mental health and well-being or been forced out of their roles because of the very difference that they embody. As increasing numbers of BIPOC, queer, gender-nonconforming, disabled, and other diverse leaders enter our ranks, we know exactly what will happen if we fail to reinvent religious leadership on different terms. We know well who will bear the brunt. Which is why this project is so overdue.

As ministers who were serving in supervisory roles among multiracial and multicultural staff teams, we then began asking not only what our experience and identities led us to, but what our positional privilege demanded of us as well. Ultimately, we came to understand that the only way to support new forms of diverse religious leadership within our faith was to model a new form of religious leadership in this project. At the very outset, we committed to each other that we may well be coeditors of this project, but we would not at any juncture pretend to be experts.

As such, we set the intention that this text would not be a handy-dandy how-to guide for designing decolonized and anti-oppressive leadership models, nor would it lift either of us up as shiny examples of how to lead in these challenging and grace-filled times. Seriously, you don’t want to know the laundry list of leadership mistakes either of us have made in the past month or two, much less the prior years or decades. If you’re looking for experts and paragons of virtue, keep on shopping. But if you’re looking for a glimpse into the very real, human, forming edge of what it might take to make religious leadership more survivable and vibrant, the contributors to this volume have given you just that. Instead of showing you a specific new way that any contributor to this volume has built, the essays in this volume invite you to participate in an iterative process through which new ways of being together in community are taking shape.

Similarly, we know that any strategy that is effective in one community may not be the right one for some other community: the local, specific context matters. As such, we believe that the answers, such as they are, are being formed and tended in the context of thousands of honest relationships across the spectrum of this faith we share. This is a snapshot of that dialectic, which is actively in progress. We will not know what the new way we have seeded together fully entails until we can look back at it from the remove of some decades and ask if we have effectively kept each other safe, authentic, and employed long enough for the culture to shift around us.

To live into these commitments, we designed the process of arriving here—to an actual published text—quite intentionally. We started by laying out some key differences between our process and the traditional publishing model. Rather than centering the editorial vision of the folks at the helm, the coeditors, we chose to design a process that could help the wider wisdom of the whole emerge along the way.

We called that process the incubator project: a time for colleagues and possible contributors alike to come together for relationship building, resource sharing, collaborative design, and creativity.

Over the course of several months, the incubator participants met online to share our stories—the absurdities and heartbreaks of leadership. The would-you-believe-it experiences of identity, ignorance, and unlikely hope that weave together in our personal narratives. Through that listening, we started to get a handle on the glowing coal that lay at the heart of each of our messages. We laughed and cried together, sometimes surprisingly and sometimes because it was the only reasonable response.

When possible, we grouped or paired off incubator participants who seemed to have something deep to share with one another. Sometimes those pairings or groups flew off the screen into deep relational connection. Sometimes participants made those matches themselves, with old friends and new collaborators alike.

In those early creative stages, nobody was sitting in an office alone readying themselves to receive other people’s work with good critical judgment and an expert’s eye. Everybody was in the room, figuring it out together, admitting when it got awkward, and beginning again when the circumstances called for it.

Emerging from this process, you will find that the styles, approaches, ideas, and methodologies of the contributors to this volume are varied; not every contributor’s perspective necessarily aligns with the perspective of the essay just before or after it. You certainly will find that some of the analysis echoes your own thinking or heart-deep knowing, while other analysis pushes you to a place that might require deep consideration or faithful disagreement. All of that—the inquiry and the discourse, the variety of perspectives and voices—is designed not just to present a fully finished conversation, but to begin one—in your heart, in your community, and in our faith.

It is a conversation that began some years ago with the book Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity, and Power in Ministry. For us, Centering took the experiences of diverse UU leaders and invited us to hold those experiences centrally, in our hearts. In the words of editor Mitra Rahnema, to center the stories, analysis, and insight of people of color who are offering religious leadership. Evolving from there, a new and deeper yearning emerges: what might it take for diverse leadership, both lay and ordained, within Unitarian Universalism to truly thrive and contribute to a radiant future that includes us all?

In support of this goal, we invite you, this book’s readers, to engage with this offering as a shared exploration, a shared journey: one that contains many perspectives, many strategies, and many ideas. From there, we hope that you and the communities that you are connected to might engage in conversation and discourse, distilling from that discourse the next experiments you wish to try in service of creating leadership tables that are genuinely expansive, inclusive, and diverse. In the spirit of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda—the church that is always reformed and reforming—the Unitarian Universalism that our hearts long for is ours to nurture and to grow.

—Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Nancy McDonald Ladd

PART I

Seeds Cast on Rocky Ground

Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.

And he said, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

—Mark 4:3–9, English Standard Version (2001)

Beyond the Hustle

Nancy McDonald Ladd

I am not the smartest person in the room. I never have been, not even when anxiety led me to pretend it was so. I am occasionally the funniest person in the room. The one with readiest access to a vocabulary of long theological words, usually paired with extended anecdotes about the meaning of their Latin roots and possible application for contemporary life. I’m definitely that; I’ve always been that. But I am not the smartest person in the room.

Where I come from, one is never supposed to be too big for one’s britches. The tall poppy, they say, is the first one to get cut. I was acculturated to be a Martha, not a Mary, attending to the gathered company and their needs while never putting myself in the spotlight. My people are not prone to swagger or boasting. After all, someone has to do the dishes while all the glittery folks are talking in the other room.

Given this, there were some difficult surprises in store for me when I came into leadership within Unitarian Universalism nearly twenty years ago. Newly ensconced in our tradition, I found an entirely new and, to me, quite different manifestation of the norms and practices associated with leadership.

Far from the studied exercise in humility I had come to expect among leaders, I encountered pressure in the progressive church to perform a smarter, stronger, braver, and altogether more with-it version of myself than I had known before. As I set out to find a real job in congregational life, I experienced this set of expectations not as an artifact of the search and call process, but as a continuation of what I had learned about ministerial authority and the self-presentation of leadership in my seminary education itself.

During my studies, I absorbed the lesson that people won’t offer this thing called ministerial authority up on a platter. You need to lay some claim to it, preferably by showing up in such a powerful and commanding fashion that others could not dare to discount you. I learned that there was a declarative nature to the words I needed to say on Sunday morning, interwoven forcefully and undeniably with the poetry of worship. Among the best and most experienced of my colleagues, there was a surety of power that came with the role of minister, almost always worn with an assertive dignity I had yet to achieve. The best of us seemed to wear the mantle of ministry with clear eyes and more than a little bit of swagger. We really owned it back then—or at least we thought we did.

I remember the awkward but earnest ways I tried to claim my ministerial authority in those early days. There was the black crepe pantsuit I bought on sale at the Dress Barn, complete with great big shoulder pads and a dry-clean-only silk shirt that I could not afford to keep clean. There was the rather severe haircut that served to make me look like a mischievous middle schooler busily scheming something sneaky at the big kids’ party. There were all my aforementioned speeches about the Latin roots of theological terms, which almost always began with the phrase, according to Webster’s dictionary. (Side note to preachers: don’t ever begin your sermon with the words, according to Webster’s dictionary. Just—don’t.) And there was the anxiety I felt when reflecting on the gap between my authentic self and the version of leadership that parish ministry seemed to demand.

That version of leadership—visionary, assertive, sharp-eyed, commanding—felt exactly like my newly bought black crepe pantsuit: made for somebody else. Filled poorly by the human body that moved within it. Operating upon the norms of some other people, in some other place. The uniform of some empowered identity group that only very loosely could be construed to include me. Basically—it was awkward.

On some fundamental level, I came to see that both the swagger of ministerial authority and the shoulder-padded pantsuit were part of some larger hustle I was trying to get over on the world of Unitarian Universalist ministry. Neither was an expression of something deep within me. Both were