In yesterday's posting I discussed my notion of the Church as being gathered when ever two or more are joined for healing in a broken world.
What is the Unitarian Universalist congregation? The theology of gathered congregation springs to mind, but that notion of a people committed and living a covenant does not describe most of real and existing congregations.
I have found the old Puritan distinction between Church and Parish helpful here, the Parish constituted all the people served by a particular congregation. While there was a Parish roll (membership list) of those who paid the Parish levees, the Parish was larger than those who supported the congregation and its ministries financially. The Church for the Puritans was those who had had a original experience of transformation (in the deformed variation of Puritanism known as Evangelical Christianity they refer to the "saved." The members of the church were the inner core of the Parish, and its assumed leaders. Like all institutional arrangements in human history this Church and Parish distinction became corrupt and politicized, and that corruption could not stand the stress of the Unitarian Controversy, let alone the Great Awakening. But that is a longer story.
But I like the idea of the Church being those members who were spiritually motivated and committed, and there being a clear understanding that the purpose of the congregation was to minister to a much larger group. I think that such a distinction, if creatively applied would help religiously pluralistic Unitarian Universalist congregations as they seek to clarify the meaning of covenant and mission, as well as governance and ministry.
But there are people who do ministry free of such complications. (They have their own complications but not the headache of political power over ministry being exercised by people of no discernible religion.)
Yes I love chaplains, who constitute the Church of healing and witness over and over and over again in the most unlikely places with out the divisions of denominationalism. Most of the chaplains in our military services, hospitals, prisons and other institutional settings have a denomination endorsement, but the ministry they do is without regard to sectarian divisions.
While I have felt called to congregational ministry, and I maintain the distinction between Church and Parish, I find the politics of the parishioners (as distinct from the spiritually motivated congregants) a test of my always very nascent sainthood.
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