Sharing our Good News! (One of those banned "religious" terms we now use.)

You may have seen it in a film, but if we went back say two centuries it was common for a town would hire a crier to walk around the streets giving the news of the day. "Hear ye! Hear ye! The Ship has come in from London, with mail and tea and spices galore!"

This way of getting the news out, a loud voice yelling for all to hear has ancient roots. In the ancient Roman empire, the criers wouldn't say "hear ye" but rather would announce their tidings with the phrase "euangelion" (latinized version of Greek phrase) which roughly meant good news.  I am sure that sometimes the good news turned out to be not so good news, for these were government employees, and they were spinning the news.  In our imagination we can hear them now;  "good news, Caesar has announced new taxes on incense.  Good news, the fifth legion needs porters to carry their swords." Somethings never change.

Well the early Christians went announcing their message chose this culturally familiar idiom as the title for writings that told their version of the Jesus story.  So we have Mark's good news, and Matthew's, and several others we know about from the Christian Bible, and some that were kept out.

So we have a concept, sharing our good news.  And there have been several good posts on the weblogs of Unitarian Universalists recently sharing various versions of the good news of religious liberalism.  And that in itself is good news, because our ideal of ourselves envisions  us creating communities of caring people who enable each other to express their own theological understandings of what is good and meaningful with each other, for the mutual enrichment of all.  And that is my good news statement for today.  A good news statement might be more vision than a reflection of present practice, but without a vision the people perish, so let us hope for the best.

Trouble is the idea of sharing "good news" has bad connotations for many people, because of that original Christian way of using "euangelion",  we know that announcing good news is to evangelize, and of course somewhere, at some coffee hours sometime it was decided that Unitarians don't evangelize.  And that was that!

The word "evangelical" went down on list of Unitarian "do not does" long before the merger with the much more evangelical Universalists, but the Unitarians culture of self censorship prevailed and it was considered bad form to brag about the virtues of Unitarian Universalism.  So we refrained from sharing our faith, a faith that for many people was a liberating, empowering religion, and  a faith that "saved lives!"

Over the last ten years we experienced a change, people are no longer shunned at coffee hour for announcing their good news, for confessing that they are Unitarian Universalist evangelists.  And that is good news.  We can thank a born and raised Universalist and witnessing religious humanist, the Reverend Scott Alexander for carrying the ball on this.  He edited and promoted Salted with Fire: Unitarian Universalist Strategies for Sharing Faith and Growing Congregations in 1994, and we haven't been the same since.


Unitarian Universalist being able to share our "good news" is part of the whole "vocabulary" of reverence discussion, and part of our  Association wide renewal of theological thinking effort that the Commission on Appraisal is suggesting is so vital for our future.  The idea isn't that by using Christian words we will attract Christians that ought to be pew sitters in a hipper UCC, rather that we free ourselves to express ideas by using the words that best express our ideas.  For some of us, we might be alluding to an idea that we learned in Baptist Sunday School, and for others we might be saying 'Blessed Be."