April 2011
A few weeks ago I attended a seminar for ministers in their first year of ministry. We got to stay at the Unitarian Universalist Association headquarters buildings in Boston, got to meet with UUA President Peter Morales, and we shared stories of ministry gone well, and ministry that turned out to be challenging.
Yet, what stuck most with me was the insistent reminder by our seminar leaders that the purpose of church is NOT to make people happy. This does not mean that the purpose of church is to make people unhappy, but they kept emphasizing that happiness is a measure of the status quo. If you keep things the way they have always been that will make most
people happy most of the time.
Many ministers, myself included, like to please people. Most lay leaders in our churches like to please people. Yet we were warned that this predisposition could lead us into the “happiness trap.” We avoid living out our faith in order to make people happy.
People come to church to be transformed. Faith communities exist to transform the world. As Dan Hotchkiss puts it in his book Governance and Ministry: “A congregation’s mission is its unique answer to the question, ‘Whose lives do we intend to change and in what way?’ A congregation that limits its vision to pleasing its members falls short of its true purpose. Growth, expanding budgets, building programs, and such trappings of success matter only if they reflect positive transformation in
the lives of the people touched by the congregation’s work.”
Over the next six to nine months, I hope we will all engage each other in this central faith question: “Whose lives do we intend to change and in what way?” The more clarity we have around this question, the easier it will be to develop a mission statement that will reflect our purpose, our mission, in this world. And if we have moments of happiness along the way, so be it.
~ Rev. Michael Leuchtenberger
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